stephanieNY

NYU's Bobst Library today:

Philip Johnson

The next assignment for my graphic design class is to design four icons. i.e. the symbols we all know of mens and womens restrooms and the no-smoking symbol. Yesterday in class, we looked at the icons used for the Olympic Games.

Mexico City, 1968: On top of the awesome type, the two dimensional icons are so simple and clear.  

Munich, 1972:  Ah-mazing.  Torsos and limbs are all oriented in 45 degree increments.  Love it.  Look at the soccer player!  Amazing how it captures the movement even with the strict geometric rules they set up.

London, 2012:  Really?  Where do I even start?  I think the most offensive part about these is that they've completely abandoned the two dimensions by adding perspective (i.e. the mountain biker half-way down on the left).  The colors, the non-sensical construction lines shooting out at random points.  None of these things make them any more clear and definitely not more beautiful.  

I'm so happy to be in here and not out there right now.

Gross wet snow is bogging down the city right now, along with my life it feels like.  Ugh.  I just ran into this image on Google street view in my neighborhood.  People on the streets are wearing light jackets, if any.  And there are tulips....ahhhhh, tulips. 

Someone sent me this quiz a few weeks ago.  Based on what it deemed my personality to be (emotional, assertive, progressive, and disciplined, as noted on the pad of paper below), I am Architype Van Doesburg, designed by the Dutch architect himself. "Strength of form and firmness of purpose"  Mmmmm.  I'm pleased with it.

I'd be even more pleased if I could get my hands on this and have a custom typeface based on my face.  Fun, right?!  

It probably sounds a lot more fun than it actually is.  I'd still like to see it though. 

Some more pics from my new camera....in the neighborhood.

For a few reasons:

• I discovered last night that the laundry room in the basement of my building is out of order.
• The laundromat was closed by the time I made the discovery.
• Doing laundry at a laundromat is so time consuming...time that I don't have today or tomorrow or the next day.

Sooooo, today while I'm at school working all day, a nice lady at the laundromat is cleaning my clothes for me. Weird, right? I've never done drop-off/pick-up service before.  Even though I'm kind of weirded out by it, I was left with no choice today.  I never wanted to be the kind of person that doesn't have time to do their own laundry.  Great.

Gmail automatically set me (and everyone else) up with Google Buzz the other day. Presumptuous, yes, but I didn't really care either way.  It's sort of Facebook meets Twitter but requires less involvement because it's right there in your Gmail window and just automatically links you to people in your contacts.  You get buzzed every time someone changes their status, posts a link, or uploads pictures, etc.  Fine, right?  Nope. This afternoon I got two new buzzes. They were the personal IMs of someone in my contacts to other people. (For example: at 2:15 Sally sent Jimmy an IM: Hi Jimmy, wanna get lunch?)  Whaaaaaaat?!  That's a personal message from one person to another, and now it's in my Inbox?!  Minutes earlier, I had sent an IM out and then realized that all the people that were "following" me on Buzz got notified about it! Really, Google? Really?

And to boot, they make it nearly impossible to get out of it.  To disable it, you have to individually unfollow and block each and every one of your contacts that they had automatically set you up with, and then shut it off.  

There's a whole long list of other sketchy privacy infringements, and they're getting a lot of flak for them.  It looks like they're admitting fault and are going to make some changes.  But still...not cool Google, not cool at all.

My new camera came this week.  I took it for its first spin today around my neighborhood.  I'm getting the hang of it in automatic mode, but there's a lot of big technology and complex interfaces in there that I need to figure out before I attempt manual.

It's hard to take a picture of a camera with the camera, so here we are in the mirror.

I go out and see places for my photography class, when I'd otherwise be stuck in Avery Hall working.  This is a good thing.

Queensboro Bridge on Tuesday.

Railroad tracks along the Hudson in the Bronx on Sunday.