Not sure why I'm up and chipper and 7:30am on a Saturday morning, but ain't nothin wrong with starting the day with a run, a cup of coffee, and a post

The creative world can sometimes be a cruel mistress. You gotta draw the line between trying to please the public and staying true to your art. While I am not an artist myself (except when I'm trying to stay awake during a lecture), I do get attached to work that a group member produces. I always have ideas, but the physical display of the idea isn't my strong suit. Luckily for minds like me, there are artists in the world. To give a little background, we have a project in my Creative Industries class where we have to design the t-shirt for DIS (our study abroad program). It has to say DIS on it somewhere and has to be symbolic of Copenhagen. We got lucky and got a very talented photoshop guy in our group, and through a little brain storm sesh this is the design that came out in the end. Pretty sick, right? Jeff (the artist) did an awesome job on the design if you ask me. Got the hip, urban hat on the very contemporary portrayal of a Danish elephant with a Danish flag (elephants are big here, not sure why but they are everywhere). But we had a focus group anyway to discuss our design to see if we could make any tweaks to make it better. To put it bluntly, we got roasted in this group. They all hated the design. The hat is dumb, the elephant looks stupid, why would you make a black t-shirt, rabblerabblerabble. There wasn't much positive feedback on our work. We talked about improving it for awhile afterwards, and we came to the conclusion that we can make a few adjustments to make it more popular, but we are sticking with what design we like and not selling out our design because a small sample size didn't like it. Outside of the focus group, we have gotten nothing but positive feedback for the design, and we feel pretty confident that our design is going to win just because it's so cool (in my ever so humble opinion). I'm not sure if this strategy is going to pay off, but we are going to take the Punk Royal route here and stick with what we think is best. Hopefully this doesn't crash and burn like that route sometimes tends to do, and maybe the mistress will be kind this time.

If anyone has any feedback on the design, I would love to hear it. We still have a few days before it has to be finalized. Afterwards I need to find another project I can work on that will keep me working, since as you can imagine, a study abroad workload isn't really enough to keep me busy. I'll take any suggestions. Otherwise I'm going to spend the next two weeks applying for internships and writing an incessant amount of cover letters, and that doesn't sound quite as much fun.

On a completely unrelated note, I have wasted approximately an entire week (give or take) listening to Stuff You Should Know podcasts. "Wasted" probably isn't the best word to use, but I feel like "spent" wasn't strong enough. There's gotta be a middle ground between there. But I can proudly say I know everything there is to know about the Underground Railroad, Amelia Earhart, memory, parallel evolution, quantum suicide, Ponzi schemes, moonshine, Friday the 13th, scientists who use themselves as guinea pigs, microloans, and Jack the Ripper. What better way to spend your time than learning? Besides learning about things that are actually relevant, I mean. I highly recommend checking it out, it's got my stamp of approval.



If you don't like being sad, don't click this link. The state of popular music is depressing.



When shuffle treats you right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOXG8wtxx_w. Thank you, iTunes.


That is all.