David’s Ramblings

Last week was finals week, which is perhaps the worst time of any college student’s life next to cleaning day for their dorm room. Some students spend countless hours studying for their finals. The rest of us tell our parents we are while actually playing video games and trying to forget that we have those pesky things called tests.

I, for one, wasn’t extremely worried about my finals week. I had four classes this semester. Of those, one class had the final a week early, and one allowed us to drop the final grade if we were okay with our other test grades in the class. That left me with only two tests. One of those tests was Japanese, which past performance indicated would be very easy. So, I was in fact left with only one real test Ñ Proofs.

In case you have been lucky enough to be spared of my complaints about this test before, I’m going to let you know right here: Proofs class is like having a limb cut off and being forced to eat it, or worse. However, the first few days of the week were finals free for me, which left me with plenty of time to study for that impending doom of a test. Ha, just kidding. I played Counter-Strike for hours on end.

Tuesday night, the night before my Japanese final, I really did mean to get just a tiny bit of studying done for the Japanese test. I even put together a bit of a study guide (you can download that here if you’re curious, though I don’t know why you would or why I uploaded it for you). However, that study plan changed when the power went out around 8 PM and didn’t come back on. Nothing better than a power outage to make a bunch of teenage guys run around screaming like little school girls.

So, in place of actual studying, I just walked into my Japanese class the next morning, used the five minutes beforehand to check my study guide, and aced the test. Wednesday night and Thursday wasn’t a great time for getting any studying done (nor any ÒstudyingÓ), since we actually spent the whole time moving our (read Tom’s) junk out of our room. Not that we really wanted to study for that test anyway. It was bad enough to have to take the test, why bother straining ourselves beforehand trying to understand it?

We woke up the next morning a bit early so that I could take a drug test for my future employer. The lady doing it was quite pleasant considering she carries urine around in her bag all day. We decided on the way home to get some IHOP to help us pass the Proofs test. I’m sure a good breakfast was much more effective than actually studying.

Unfortunately, as much as we tried to delay it, the hour of reckoning did eventually approach and we took our death march toward the Proofs classroom. After walking in, assumed the position and let the Proofs test have its way with us. After two hours of that, I decided I couldn’t take any more and gave up. The test was about as awful as I suspected. I was quite glad I hadn’t prolonged the torture by studying for it beforehand.

After getting out of our dorm room that night, the week was finally over and I took a short respite at Tom’s grandmother’s house before being picked up for my father for my next adventure Ñ my summer job.

The other day I rearranged my side of the dorm room. It’s a little embarrassing, but I find there’s something satisfying about changing the room up a bit. It’s like a secret desire to be an interior designer or something.

Of course, moving furniture around doesn’t make me an interior decorator by any means, but I still think it is somewhat interesting. It’s almost like an art, except instead of nice little paint brushes to work with you get big, ugly pieces of furniture given you by the housing department.

Starting the whole process requires the part us college guys try to avoid altogether Ñ cleaning the room. Those massive piles of books and useless papers have to be removed from the desk, lest you disturb their balance while moving and cause them to fall, killing you instantly. Clothes have to actually go in the hamper. And, you even might want to sweep up, considering you actually walk barefoot on the floor.

After doing all of those tasks for the first time ever, it comes down to the fun part. Finding a configuration that works in such a freaking small room. You can’t get rid of furniture, so everything needs some place to go. It’s sorta like a puzzle without a correct solution.You just have to try to force the pieces together and pretend it works.

However, there are good ways to force the pieces together. This new layout has several advantages to the old one: more room around the TV… and, well, what else is important really? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch some interior design shows.

This is a notice to whoever in the hell has control of the AC in my dorm: it has not been cold enough to warrant heat since January 3rd. This on/off crap switching between air conditioning and heat in the middle of the night and leaving me in a pool of my own sweat when I wake up is not cool.

When it’s nearly 70¼ outside you can safely decide that AC is the correct choice. If people don’t like it, they have the option to turn it off. On the other hand, we do not have the option to turn off the heat if the room is already super hot.

This is the problem when all of the systems in the building run off of one thermostat that you have to automatically agree to whether you like it or not. When it becomes insanely hot, our only other option is to open the window and hope we get some circulation (which it doesn’t).

Of course, opening the window toward the street that passes by our dorm makes it insanely hard to sleep. It’s pretty much a no-win situation for those of us who get screwed by your stupid choices to leave it on heat, so freakin’ stop already.

And that is what really grinds my gears.

I was talking to someone the other day and I brought up the fact that I had been reading a design book. After it was established that design does not refer to intelligent design but graphic design, my friend made a point that he didn’t really see why I’d need a book about that.

He reasoned that perhaps he was just artistic enough to not need one. At the time, I must admit I took it as arrogance. He seemed a bit smug about it. (But I know the internet doesn’t always convey intention as well as it should, and this was probably one of those times.)

After thinking, I’ve decided it was actually more likely na•vety than arrogance. Hopefully I haven’t seriously offended this person by bringing all this up, as he’s one of the three readers of this site, but I’m going to explain why I feel that way and why I think every good designer (or even one who just wants to mess around sometimes) can and should try to learn from books.

The first major point for reading from books applies just as well to taking design classes or something like that Ñ learning the vocabulary. It doesn’t seem important, but it’s tremendously powerful. One designer’s work I read recently, The NonÐDesigner’s Design Book (Robin Williams), explained it best with a story.

ÒMany years ago I received a tree identification book for Christmas. [...] The first tree in the book was the Joshua tree because it only took two clues to identify it. Now the Joshua tree is a really weirdÐlooking tree and I looked at that picture and said to myself, ‘Oh, we don’t have that kind of tree in Northern California.’

Ò[...] So I took my book and went outside. Four of those homes had Joshua trees in the front yard. I had lived in that house for thirteen years, and I had never seen a Joshua tree.Ó

She goes on to explain that if you can name it, you can control it, especially in design. And she’s not just blowing hot air either. In the last three weeks since reading that book I’ve become a noticeably more confident and able designer, mainly because I can now look and say stuff like, ÒOh, that’s missing a strong alignment to really tie the piece together.Ó

Now, I’m not saying you can’t be artistic without knowing terms, I’m saying that if you know the terms it can help you be even more artistic. It can help you stop playing the Òhit and miss until you get it to look rightÓ game. Why do you think art class often has large portions devoted to looking at different periods and styles of art? This is one of the major reasons I recommend looking into a design book or two if you want to put together anything that could benefit.

The other major reason why I believe it never hurts to pick up a design book is that it’s just a huge collection of (hopefully) great work to get inspired by. Even if you are somehow born with a complete ability to innately know every design principle and apply it, you’re still likely to be inspired by other people’s work.

If you’re going to try to tell me you don’t need design principles or inspiration, I’m going to have to call bullshit. There’s no way any artist could go through life without inspiration and a good sense of how to compose their art pieces (often derived by studying others’ work). So Ñ if you want to design a school newsletter, a multiÐmillion dollar print campaign, or anything in between Ñ pick up a book, if you haven’t already, and it will be of some help.

Out of boredom, I decided to check my web stats. I noticed a surprising trend. More people are visiting my site today than there were six months ago. ThatÕs right third viewer: whoever you are, give yourself a pat on the back.

Seriously though, IÕm getting at least double the hits I had back in November when I tried to post every day, and sometimes now I donÕt post for weeks at a time. I donÕt think this trend can be entirely accounted for just by the people I know checking my site twice as much as they used to. Maybe they do this, but I canÕt imagine why, or what kind of psychiatric help they would require.

Apparently I have discovered the secret to making my blog successful Ñ donÕt post very often, if at all. After all, who comes here to hear me talking about myself? Using this knowledge, and current trends, I constructed this graph:

So now I play the waiting game. No more posts from me. You can’t argue with my logic. I have a graph.