Infographic of the Day

One of the many reasons that Fast Company is my new favorite magazine is a little thing I discovered on their website last night called the "Infographic of the Day". Being a designer, and loving infographics, I was pretty stoked.

This infographic in particular, designed by Colin Pinegar, stood out to me. It's a 3-D infographic displaying the designer's relationships to his facebook friends.

He represented each of his "friends" with a model of his bust, changing the color of the bust to represent how close the friendship is in real life.  Purple represents his closest friends, tinting to pink the farther the connection is. Seeing hundreds of facebook friends displayed like this really makes you realize who your true friends are. 

Superbowl Infographic!

Here's an awesome infographic displaying how much renewable energy was used for the Superbowl last night.  Very clean and well done by greenmountain.com:

Computer Arts Magazine

I've officially fallen in love... with Computer Arts magazine.

I noticed this gem of a publication a few months ago at the Barnes & Noble in Ellicott City (who I must say, has the best newsstand out of all the B&N's in and surrounding Baltimore). It's a UK publication that not only gives designers inspiration and business advice, but also has excellent how-to articles for various design programs and projects.  The other day I learned how to make an ipad app for a magazine! Now I just need the necessary programs to create it...

To all my fellow designers, I highly suggest checking out this publication.  The Brits really do it up right here.

We've come so far...

Last Thursday marked the first day of my last semester in the UB Pub. Design program.  In a way, I felt like it was the first day of the rest of my life as I'm about to receive an important degree, and make a lot of important and life-changing decisions in the coming months.  Anyone who knows me well knows that I get incredibly excited about states of transition so of course, I couldn't be happier right now! We'll see what happens. 

As for right now, I just started working on assembling my final portfolio to be presented at the end of the semester.  The way the process works is you weed out all the work that you've done that can't be used in a professional portfolio (i.e. obvious student work such as typographic exercises, design boards, stuff that's just bad etc.), take what is now your best work or not-so-great work, and re-do/refine it as necessary.  Basically for most assignments, you take away all the qualifications of the assignment and make it look as professional and "good" as possible. 


In a nutshell: you all are going to get to see a lot of before and afters! Starting now!

This is a freelance project I worked on during my very first semester.  It was a brand identity for a local framing shop named "Mat About You Framing and Gallery".  This is the final version of what I came up with for the client:

With a little editing and finessing, this is what I came up with today for use in my portfolio (pending critique):

Personally, I think it's way more clean and concise and grabs attention better.  What do you all think?