Flight of the bumblebee

I'm nearing my tenth hour of homework today, very productive though, I knocked out two projects! First I finished my presentation that I am giving on Monday about the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, though I am still trying to figure exactly how to pronounce his name. Then I moved on to some creative work. Ahn is giving us  a little more room for creativity in our work, this weekend we had to design a conceptual pair of goggles. I feel kind of in the zone right now and really like how these bumblebee eyes turned out.....

Mighty mousetraps!

Wednesday was the first annual mousetrap race car competition at the University of Washington School of Art. It was a showdown between the Junior and Senior Industrial Design classes in three categories, speed, distance and style. One of our instructors, Magnus Feil proposed the challenge and mentioned that there would be press there to cover the event. I think most of us were thinking it would be the school newspaper, maybe the photography club, etc. We were all a little surprised when the two major seattle newspapers showed up and one of the local television stations! It really added to the excitement of the event and I have to hand it to Magnus for arranging this great publicity for our up and coming Industrial Design program. It's no secret that Western Washington University has had the better program in the state but I believe their days on top are numbered thanks to our outstanding faculty and the pure energy given by my fellow classmates who are pouring their heart and soul into every detail of every project.

First, a couple photos of my trapster, I was trying for speed:

 

Here's the article from the Seattle PI:

And finally, I just found this today, here is a little video compilation from the Seattle Times, watch for my car at about 0:39, it was a very close race, but I lost...

late nights...

I just finished up another long photoshop session. The assignments have become significantly more involved than the simple 3D shapes I posted here earlier this month. Tonight I was working on a rendering of a glue gun. It is past 3 AM now and I am totally exhausted. Just thought I would throw up a couple pictures of my recent work for anyone who wants to  know what I'm up to, cuz this is it....school school school! Today was also our Trapster races where we had to build and race a dragster powered only by mousetraps. I'll post photos of my car later after I pull the images off my camera....

I have to leave for school in five hours.... time to get some shut-eye!

Blogs with cool names

I stumbled on these two blogs today and thought they were fitting to be on my blogroll, turns out blogroll was severely hacked not too long ago and they are not allowing any users to access their accounts anymore, so here are the links anyway, I particularly enjoy the "mild" one, some very nice photography happening there:

A mild case of wanderlust

Severe case of wanderlust

Baby steps...

Back in school, this quarter is already shaping up to be a fine one. I have an Intermediate Industrial Design studio, a course on presentation for I.D. and a 3 credit seminar on Roman art and archaeology. I just finished up an assignment for the presentations class. We are going to learn how to create renderings of our products using Photoshop and illustrator. It is an interesting leap to make after spending last quarter concentrating on hand-renderings. This was a simple exercise but it opened my eyes to some of the capabilities of Photoshop that I just haven't gotten around to learning yet...