Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Part Time, Design Slices & Glow

Weekly Update 2017-27: Grooving to 80s glam rock-inspired synth pop from Part Time, passionate slices of design, and GLOW, the 80s wrestling-inspired show that demands your attention.

Music: Part Time
What began as a side project alongside David Speck's many other musical gigs in Austin, soon picked up speed with its lo-fi synth pop vocals and cheap Casio beats. Its slightly off-kilter rhythms with a dash of 80s carried me on a cloud through the streets of Portland last week.

Check out Pussy of my Dreams, Night Drive, and Useless Information.


Accomplishment:
As promised last week, I have created somewhat of a long-term plan for landing a design job in Portland. I've outlined individual steps down to a matter of days each, which will hopefully be a small enough chunk-size to keep me motivated. I should reward myself with something small at the end of every completion as well.

Goal:
This week I'll be focusing on creating a case study project out of my work on the EventMobi Check In app. Now that the project is in a completed state, including the Medium article reflection on the process, I thought it might be time to think of it as a part of my collection of work. Furthermore if I am really ambitious for the future, it might be a fun project to learn a coding language like React and see if I can build the app myself. I don't think it's too complicated from a logic perspective; its value is in its user experience.

In terms of costing, I'd like to set concrete, achievable goals for this week, taking into account activities that will take away from my free time to work. I foresee about three hours of free time this week, only because Sunday has the bulk of it and I need to devote that time to what I'll be doing for FriendCanoe. So in that three hours of time, I hope to write out an introduction and explanation of the problem, as well as refine the competitor research I did into something workable. If I get really ambitious, my stretch goal is to recode my website in a new orientation I've been thinking about.

Random Thought:
Now that I've reflected fully on all of the events that happened in Portland, I've been able to step back and do some proper thinking about my next steps (as mentioned above). One thing I know for sure is that I want to find the slice of design that I feel most passionate about. While I love user experience design, I am having a few doubts that product design is the right channel for my brain to expel its love of UX. I really like the idea of users being fully immersed in the work that I do, so much that they want to focus only on it, with no distraction. I haven't decided if that's a clue to the next direction to try, or just a vocalized emotion that everyone wishes for; to be taken notice of.

Inspiration: GLOW
In the world in which we now find ourselves, I feel more and more confused each day about people's different interpretations of feminism and the judgement that happens between women more often than it should. I know this sounds really strange but I feel like Netflix's new series GLOW actually helps in unpacking what it means to be a minority, cleverly drawing parallels between what it is to be a woman/person of colour/non-human spirit in the United States in the present day and the time in which the show is set, the early 1980s.


GLOW stands for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (no, I'm not joking) and the premise involves the making of a wrestling show featuring women in the 80s, which is actually based on a true story. Alison Brie of Mad Men and Community fame stars in a role both genuinely witty and profoundly sad, depending on the episode.

If not for the storyline, at least watch it for the beautiful costumes and hair styling. I love period pieces.

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