I went to a small house-party with Jessica and Amy for New Years. It was a surprisingly good time, and I was happy to be with great friends! So just thought I’d say… it’s been one hell of a year.

Things I learned about design this year:
- use drop shadows in moderation
- how to make transparent gradients in illustrator
- command D for “place” in indesign
- command “,” and “.” for text in illustrator
- justified text sucks most of the time
- dafont fonts are no longer “so cool”
- tightly kerned helvetica light doesn’t mean you’re a designer
- indesign over illustrator for lots of text
- using san-serif for body copy in print is generally a no
- how to save a pdf so it’s not huge
- pictures and textures add a lot to a design
- i don’t really like making logos that much
- i work great under pressure
- coffee and 5 hour energy helps

My Resolutions:
1. continue to grow as a designer, never stay put where I am
2. read more books, learn more words
3. get inspired by everyday life and act upon that inspiration
4. stop caring what other people think, about anything
5. take a more active role in being healthy
6. paint and draw more
7. live for myself, rely on myself, still have great friends
8. be a little more understanding of others
9. be a girl, don’t be afraid to give someone a hug or paint their nails
10. continue to make more friends, connections, and bonds

So I just got home from my 4-hour drive back to Northern Virginia and decided to take a look at some of the pictures from this past week.  I found some good ones from our night at the Cellar last Thursday…  and thought I would waste some more time by photoshoping them to look “old school” (which constitutes pretty much anything slightly unsaturated w/ minimal contrast and awkward blurring in this instance.)

As usual, the VCD crowd couldn’t think of much better to do than draw ridiculous pictures on dirty napkins when we went out on Thursday night. I somehow always manage to save them in my purse for a few days before I decide they should definitely be posted all over the internet for everyone to see… I’m sure I’ll regret this later, but for now it’s highly amusing. Lets just say I left out some of the truly disturbing ones.

Anyway, the artists for this set include: Jessica Harllee, Richard Miller, Kim Nguyen, Alex Sailer, Charles Wood, and myself. My favorite is the typography one - true skillz.

Along with some pretty outrageous napkin-art, the AIGA social last thursday night was host to a few awesome pictures and good times. It started with free pizza in VCD, moved to Rivermill, then Big Al’s, and ended at 2am in a clown car packed with 7 people (Richard was kind enough to be DD, thanks boy.) Apparently at one point in the night we decided all the cool kids wear black-rimmed glasses… take a look at Blacksburg’s 2008 design-whores:

Charlie just moved into a new place back in the boonies of Tom’s Creek and he’s trying to make it more homey. So, last night I told him I’d help paint his office if he bought me a beer and played bad music full blast. What really ended up happening was buying me a Mike’s Hard Lemonade (I know, I know) and us listening to VH1’s top 100 songs of the 90’s full blast. Anyway, it’s a work in progress, but his blood-red room is starting to take shape, or should I say color? Next stop: living room.