Business Cards: Make them unique!

If you’ve ever been to a job fair, you probably see people all over the place trying to hand out resumes and business cards. And what about those business cards? They are all generic: usually white paper, small typography, maybe a little logo. Similar to my post about being a superstar, you’ve got to be able to up your style a little more. Here, we see Steve Wozniak’s (co-founder of Apple) business card. It’s made of metal, shiny, thick, and has interesting holes in it. It’s pretty fucking sweet. Any person I’m sure will do a double take on his card if they’re shuffling through a stack. So if you’ve got a business card, take a good look at it and ask yourself if there’s anything unique, be it texture, color, design, etc. If there isn’t, REDESIGN! And this not only goes for business cards, but also resumes. Can you format it in a different way or make use of color and different typography to emphasize certain skills? Just think how a human resources guy or recruiter perceives any resume, and think how refreshing it would be for that guy to receive something that isn’t lines and lines of Times New Roman or Ariel font on a standard piece of printer paper.

ALERT: Nerd factor! Video game inspiration!

There’s always at least a little nerd in all of us. The image shows two models I built during my 2nd year in college. One is based on Metal Gear Ray from Metal Gear Solid 2, and the other is some futuristic weapon that looks like it belongs in the Ratchet & Clank universe. Why video games? Because they are some of the most creative pieces of art/design in the world. I still think that much of the older generation has a distorted perception of what they are: mindless shooting games where some guy goes around blasting shit with gore everywhere. It’s mostly the media (in particular FOX news) that tries to suppress video games. But hey! Games have come a long way. I mean series like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid incorporate such a detailed plot and immersive experience that they become films in a sense. Very long 40+ hours films. And the composers behind those games, Nobuo Uematsu (“To Zanarkand”) and Harry Gregson-Williams (“Debriefing”), inject such a powerful score that the games’ soundtracks trump that of most artists today. The production values on some games are insane now.

But the problem is that in academia, you will never be told to look at video games for any kind of creative inspiration. I certainly never heard it from any of my architecture professors. And yet, despite being fictional, there is plenty of architecture in video games. Ever played ICO for PS2? Or Devil May Cry? Or Morrowind? Just a few off the top of my mind that have beautiful architecture in them.

Labeling / Figures in Architectural Drawings

Here’s a couple of things that I like to do when drawing details. The image on the left are my tectonic detail drawings for the Dubai Planetarium in Studio 402. Sometimes (and you have to judge for yourself on your own drawings) labeling with words directly on the drawings may become too much of a distraction or too cluttered. So instead, I label them with letters and then have a text column on the right side. Also, because it’s a tectonic drawing, a lot of it is self-explanatory, so excessive labeling may be unnecessary. Also notice that I tried to align vertically as much of the lettered circles as possible. It gives a more cleaner look. Finally, don’t just put in one or two figures for scale. Put a ton of them in there, especially if it’s a building designed to hold a lot of people! Ideally, the people’s positioning and gesturing will also make sense. For example, on the drawing to the right, there’s a man pointing outward over the railing.

Concrete=cardboard, Metal=wood

I present, the greatest architectural model I’ve ever built. It was for my studio 400 class with Sharon Sutton. It’s an entrance detail for a fire station design. I spent fucking forever making this, but it was well worth it. Craftsmanship is my best, as well as the detailing. But I want to suggest people who want to abstractly represent concrete and metal to use thin cardboard and wood pieces respectively. For extra detail, score out expansion lines and rebar holes into the cardboard.

Worst thing you can do is try to emulate the texture and color of the real thing in a realistic way, and even worse if you try to paint it. It just all becomes a mess. Abstraction is best. Many of my classmates that tried making it overly realistic regretted it. Paint was everywhere and unevenly distributed.

Imogen Heap is officially my favorite artist for the past year.

Yup. Fucking amazing! I first heard her while seeing the film Garden State. She is best known as one-half of the duo Frou Frou, but her solo work is just as amazing. Too many great songs. Let Go, Shh, Breathe In, It’s Good To Be In Love, Speeding Cars, Goodnight & Go, Clear the Area, Hide & Seek, etc… Absolutely brilliant and ethereal in sound. Do yourself a favor, head on over to youtube, and listen/watch her.

So you wanna be a rock superstar?

Of course you do. We all do! Maybe not literally rock superstars, but stars in our own field. So why the picture on the left? They’re Danny Devito, Jeff Goldblum, and Ellen Page. What do they have in common with each other? NOTHING. What do they have in common with other celebrities? NOTHING. That’s the fucking point when it comes to branding yourself as an individual. These three actors aren’t just assimilated into the masses of look-a-likes and talk-a-likes. Danny is known for being 5′0″ and stumpy, Jeff is known for his awkward mannerisms and speaking patterns, and Ellen Page is known for her wit and babyface youth. But Miley Cyrus pretty much blends in with Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff, Mandy Moore, etc. And there’s all kinds of Brad Pitts everywhere you look, and there’s plenty of Megan Foxes and Jessica Albas too. Ever been on a college campus? Thought so.

And this is precisely the problem with so many people trying to break into an arena that is so overcrowded. Yes, you could be an extremely attractive woman, but if you’re not distinctly unique in some way, your chances are astronomically low. You have got to be different or unique or innovative in some way. But also, GOOD too. I mean I could design some computer mouse that weighs 10 pounds. You better believe that I’m doing something different, but it’s not going to sell shit because only the hulk could move that mouse with ease across a table.

In the architectural arena, THE shining example of this is Frank Gehry. Now you may be thinking: What the fuck? That guy’s buildings are shit. Well, that may be true, but there’s ENOUGH people out there who love his buildings. And is he original? Well, have you seen any other building by any other architect look like THIS.

Steve Jobs, my lord and savior!

Listen up! If you’re going to listen to any piece of inspirational advice in your life, make it Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech. I shit you not when I tell you this is the best 15 minutes of inspiration I’ve ever heard.

So that means, not only is this guy the founder of Apple and Pixar, but he’s also an excellent commencement speaker. No wonder he’s called the iGod. God bless you Steve, and your black mock turtleneck, blue Levis, and New Balance shoes. I’ll buy anything you try to sell me!

How I digged myself out of an academic shithole…

So I went to the University of Washington in Seattle for my undergraduate degree in Architectural Studies. For those who are not familiar with how architecture schooling works…we have a main course called our studio class in which we slave away day after day, attempting to perfect a building design. It gets extremely grueling and near finals, many if not all of us have to pull all-nighters in order to finish our final drawings and models. It fucking sucks. And sometimes I would get pretty damn insane and starting laughing for no apparent reason. And your hygiene goes to shit too.

So now that you know how it works, I had 6 studio classes during the latter couple years at UW. And here were my grades in studio 300, 301, 302, 400, 401, and 402, respectively:

3.5, 3.3, 2.8, 3.9, 3.6, 4.0

Check out that insane decline! But then my comeback during the last year! So how did I manage to dig myself out of that grut and not only earn a 1.1 improvement, but raised all my studio grades in the last year above any of my grades in the first year? Here’s what I went through:

1) ADMIT THAT YOU SUCKED

Seriously, there are so many people who blame their professors for giving them a bad grade, as if the professor hated you and had some personal vendetta against you. Well let me tell you, there is a 99% chance that you are wrong! I never blamed my two professors for giving me a 2.8. If anything, it kinda matched with how I thought I did. I kept changing my design concept week after week until it was too late to ever develop a decent design because by that time I only had 3 weeks left to develop a concept and render the drawings and build a final model. And so not surprisingly, the final presentation and quality of design sucked, and the final critique by the guest judges confirmed that further. I felt like complete shit just standing up there and taking a verbal ass-raping. But I deserved it. My design sucked! SUCKED SUCKED SUCKED!

2) DISCOVER WHY

OK, so now I knew my design sucked and I had completely bombed that studio. Well now, I had better figure out why by the time summer passes, or else I’ll be in a continued downward spiral. My problem was simple: I took far too long to decide on a building concept.

3) DON’T LOSE CONFIDENCE

As soon as this happens, all hope is lost.  If you think you’re worthless at something, you will most certainly be absolutely worthless at that thing. And to make matters worse, it’ll seep into other areas of your life as well and make you lose all-around confidence in everything you do. Don’t be a bitch and cry.

4) DON’T FUCKING DO IT AGAIN

Plain fucking simple. Learn from your damn mistakes. As Edison once said, “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.”

So there you have it. 4 easy steps to dig yourself out of a shithole. I’m so fucking proud of myself!

Oh BTW, you can view my portfolio (including my studio projects) at my deviantART page.

The beauty of emptiness…

Take a look at that image. It’s my Windows XP desktop. Boring huh? Too plain? Is it supposed to be some suggestion of loneliness? No, not really. Over the many years that I’ve used computers, I still cannot find a better way to style my desktop than to use a solid plain background with a nice thin Windows Classic taskbar. I’ve always found desktop icons to be extremely distracting and tacky (and the same goes for any sort of wall decoration that a person might have hanging around; just leave the architecture alone, it’s already beautiful). I’ve also hated any sort of wallpaper because I find that: 1) I tend to stare at my wallpaper from time to time and get distracted from productivity and work, and 2) most of the time I have a window maximized anyways, so the wallpaper is hidden from view. As for why I like Windows Classic, it’s because it uses less resources and also the taskbar is slightly thinner, thus allowing for more vertical viewing space, and that’s especially important with web browsing.

So there you have it. To many it’s the most boring desktop they’re ever seen. To me, less is more, as is the case with so many things in the vast arena of design.