Month: March 2023

Who are you?
Olivia Grace Chasse
Birth name is Hyeun Lim.
Korean American adoptee, with a knack for creativity and visual based hobbies.

The rest I’m taking my time to figure out.

What is it that you want to do?
I want to help fund comfort/travel for my family 
I want to have a really nice kitchen, and as an extension I want one of the fancy rice cookers that sing to you when its done cooking.
I want to see the world 
I want to create with longevity 
I want to have a job and life that can provide fulfillment
I want to fiinally figure out how to balance work and life 

Why?
People talk a lot about how money doesnt equal happiness. 

Which is true. 

But having enough pocket change lifts so much stress and it frees up so much time, energy, and mental space because you dont have to constantly worry about making rent, feeding you family, affording your medications– 

All that freedom allows you to pursue the things that make life worth living. 

So In regards to my monetary wants, I dont need an insane amount of pointless luxury, but I would like to have what lucy liu calls ‘fuck you money’ which is a semi-aggressive version of having an abundance-first outlook on money and mindset. It’s about always having enough so you don’t feel obligated to say yes to every single project thats presented to you. Yes thats a part of the early career grind, but its not a system built for creative longevity. 

I know what it’s like to always be worrying about money, 
I know what it’s like to have to help out on rent when you’re still a kid, 
I know what it’s like to watch someone stay in a job they hate just because it pays the bills. 

Due to tight budgets my parents havent seen much of the world despite having the immense appetite to. I would love to go to South Korea with my mom, dad, and sister (on separate occasions because all of them at once would make me mental) and I would love to do it before they’re too old to properly enjoy walkable cities. 

Where do you want to go?
Everywhere. 
I can appreciate the grind of people who stay rooted in a single city for their entire life but the world is so big and theres so much to see and do, and so many people to meet, love, and hate. My family has known since i was 12 that theyd probably lose me to another country or continent. 
I have a hard time framing these questions in a career sense just due to my inexperience and ever persistent importer syndrom regarding my work. I dont know if i know what I want. In my mind every question and it’s accompanying answer feels so concrete, like if i say it, that has to be my future. Which i know is kind of blasphemous. But eh. I have time to figure it all out. And I believe in my ability to be okay.

What would you want to say?
I am a great friend 
I am a supportive sister 
I am a great daughter. 
I stand by my work.
I deserve the space I occupy. 
I love the life im building and appreciate what ive already built.

I think my design persona is still in the works, and I don’t have some great manifesto the world needs to know about. But who knows. Maybe I’ll have my own creative propaganda one of these days.

Proficiency in Adobe suite:
Im a digital native so i’ve been privileged to afford the opportunity to use these in my high school experience, and the current education i’ve received and am to receive allows me broad and in depth use of their creative cloud.

Strong written and verbal communication:
throughout my experience in receiving education through the lens of COVID-19, I learned a lesson on communication because at that time my access to support systems and physical spaces were cut down considerably. Teachers no longer had the point of connection to where they could see you struggle and reach out to help, they had to trust you to reach out to them, and you had to trust them to help you when you asked for it. Many didn’t. Within this struggle my ability to reach out for help and see it as a strength rather than a weakness allowed me to hone in on finding my pain points, and asking for help in a way that has specificity and allowed for my instructors to give me directed help

Proficiency in Figma that i can translate into basic level understanding of html/css
This skill ties back in with the previous as it allows for greater conversation with developers and helps the task flow of designing to have the end goal of developing. In laymans terms I understand the basics of research to understand the usability, and can design set up that can more clearly communicate a vision with a team that arent all designers.

Empathy:
In terms of actual design, you need to consider the broad range of people who could be interacting with it, and the current standard has many gaps that marginalized communities fall through. As an Asian woman I know what it’s like to not be seen, not be heard, and not have your concerns taken seriously and due to that I believe in design with empathy because design is something that doesn’t exist without people. Empathy belongs in the creation aspect of design too. When it comes to critiquing and collaboration nitpicking without offering a way to fix is unhelpful and tears down the process of the designer, critiques should offer more than just personal opinions.

Adaptability and positivity (combined): 

I have a lifetime of moving. 
Literally in where i live, 
Metaphorically in navigating through month after month of “unprecedented times” and those months being the contents of my life. My ability to adapt comes from having the confidence that i will be okay no matter where i am or what i do. Because everything is a learnable moment and anything is a teachable moment.

Right out of the gate, I do not enjoy the majority of Cut’s content. I think much of it relies on a more shallow and material, shock value(in this case, lineup and redbutton). Which isnt to say they dont fulfill someones idea of what great content is, it just doesnt fulfill mine. A lot of their work is meant to inspire you to be curious on what the prompts are and have you get to know something about the stranger on your screen youll never see again. That energy of them not having any real connection or agenda in your life allows for a type of vulnerability most people fear. Because for one second someone genuinely asks you a question, you know they want to hear an answer, and you know they have no stake within your personal life to blow up or haunt you with. The series i did enjoy was the keep it 100, the ones that had more merit to them that had people talk about their fears, their skeletons, and the shadows that follow them. I think it helps a greater number of people feel less alone in their struggles and brings up different stories of intersectionality that bring forth greater empathy. 

For the video idea, the aspect of anonymity is very much lost if we keep the participation within scca due to the lockstep nature of the program. For the most part we know everyone, and we all have a stake in each others lives even beyond this program. I cant say my idea is super new or super fresh but i was thinking about a three part series, using the same participants for all three and having the video be based on their answers to specific questions, much like keeping it 100. 

1. Who was your first love? (how did you meet and why did you fall for them)
2. What would you say to a child version of yourself?
3. Do you fear death? 

Memory lane, love, reflection, and acceptance of the life you’ve lived and are living are the driving ideas behind these questions. A moment to pause and really think about how you’ve gone through this world. The ideal participants are strangers of all ages. Because love in every stage of life is so beautiful and reflects how you know how to love at that point of time.

The Event I attended was the “Crazy Golf Leaderboard” it was (i believe, not entirely sure) a new development within and already realized/created environment. The event itself was a minigolf expansion.

Upon entering the world, you’re brought to a welcome area thats soccer themed which is kind of a disorienting experience when youre expecting golf, and one of the npc’s sends you on a wildgoose chase of events and shirt collecting around the stadium, i got incredibly sidetracked by that and forgot i was even there for minigolf. Eventually i did figure out where the map was and how to get to the minigolf area. But there was very little instruction that the map, was a map, and that it could transport you to where you need to go. As far as useability it’s incredibly low. You move at a snails pace through the area and it will make a laptop hot enough to fry an egg. It will take you five minutes to move from one space to another. The controls are a much much much worse version of minecraft, and the graphics are somehow worse too. Given my scope of people at this time, it’s a no on advertising ability. Unless you have a really nice pc, the longevity to exist in the world space is very low and due to the low rendering quality the execution of “transporting someone to a space right from their home” is a huge stretch at this point in time. In its current stage it doesnt fulfill an aspect of life4 or marketplace that doesn’t already exit and do it better. So with that said I dont think the metaverse has found a voice enough to be on radar at this time.

Every kid has some sort of dream that follows them around as they grow up. 

Astronaut, veterinarian, butterfly fairy princess if you’re my sister.

For me, I wanted to be a chef.

I grew up watching the food network more than disney, and would sneak downstairs to watch iron chef at 10pm from the hallway behind the living room dreaming of the day I could wear the chefs jacket. I loved this dream so much that my 10th birthday party was a private chef teaching me and a couple friends how to cook korean food, I’d taken classes at PCC and Hot Stove Society (meeting tom douglas and marcus samuelson in the process too).

But as I got older it eventually turned into more of an avid hobby as I realized that the chef lifestyle isn’t for me, so I just consume food content from social media, and I sit in book stores leafing through all their cookbooks. But within the cooking process and the recipe creation stage, much like in design, i’m willing to push around pixels to achieve the perfect harmony. 

So for that reason, my personal project would be to design and layout my own cookbook. 

The bulk of the work is split into 3 parts :

Writing

Editing and auditing content (writing and/or recipe testing)

Designing (layout and photography)

Of these, writing will take up about a year. At least according to google the turnaround time for commercial cookbook writing is that short, but if im wanting to change the trajectory of cooking or something crazy like that i can spend a decade compiling and rewriting within my niche. But despite that, the goal is to gather your recipes and ideas and give them a structure and story. Almost every cookbook will have blurbs and excerpts explaining ingredients or stories about how certain dishes have impacted their life. Tone of the writing will also be dictated by your target audience. Which for me is my friends and family/people like my friends and family. I worry about a lot of their abilities to feed themselves.

For editing and designing, google is saying it’ll take another year. To check the writing, the recipes as well as photographing all the content, laying it out, and all those other flourishing touches before being sent off to print. 

These are all assuming that you have an agent, an editor, and a photographer. 

Of which I don’t necessarily have. 

At all. 

But that’s half the fun, no?

I’ve dabbled in writing and food photography and i’m heavy handed dabbling in design as a student at the moment, so all of this can be created 

But this is a passion project, one that I’m not staking complete monetary gain in so I can chip away at little by little. Now that I think about it, it can be my prompt for next year’s personal project. I could enlist a new media student to help shoot if they want to build up their portfolio. 

If i were to create this passion project over the course of second years, special interest class. It affords 3 quarters time to hammer out the work and have access to instructors to work out the finer details. In that time I’d need to do research on how to even write for a cookbook, find someone willing to help edit, enlist a new media student to help with photography, i could make illustrations for it as well. By the time I even getty to laying out my book i’d have taken jasons id class and had experience with jills magazine class. So i’ll be well versed in the programs needed. As far as pricing goes, 

I have zero idea on how pricing would work as everything is relative to the final design, and all price estimate articles online are assuming its for absolute profit print and hands off publishing after the manuscript stage (which adds thousands to the final total)

$240 for adobe suite (that much is how much it costs within a year at student discount)

Im taking care of writing, design, layout 

Possible hire/exchange with nm photographer

Printing will depends on the ratio of b&w : color pages, as well as binding.

but honestly I’m not looking to be releasing this all into the world, so I could find a small artist to bind my book, or try a single sample from a printer.

In general i’ve always been the “plan and then scrap the plan” kind of organizer when it comes to a creative process. No particular reason, I just find that my best ideas are at 2am when i was sleeping, instead of conscious and actively trying. This time was a touch more agonizing as I had actually reached the end of a project… thought I saved it properly as i’d never had a problem with my typical saving technique. 

But I didnt 

and the file broke, never to be properly opened again. 

It was Jason’s first project of winter quarter, the animal typography illustration. I made dozens of brushes all different colors, sizes, and letters. And I layered them to make a realistic, glowy, ethereal leafy seadragon that has so many object brushes that it slowed down every single program on my laptop as well as add an intense lag when painting more brushstrokes in illustrator.

the patience needed to complete the project was as close to meditations and spiritual work as I’ve ever been.

Ive had plenty of adobe files crash on me.

Just from general stupidity when it comes to using the program as an ill trained high school newspaper editor. Specifically in indesign. But due to the multiple file failures and 3am bloodshot eyes throughout high school i’d luckily already learned to save progression files of my documents as I start to reach the end of the project. I had all my brain storming, and brushes documented as well as a slightly lower fidelity pdf version of my final thanks to the adobe creative cloud, so Jason took mercy on my soul thanks to my proof of documentation and project completion. I’m still devastated on how the highest fidelity version has been lost but im so grateful to past me for having documentation. Overall my desperate pdf of the lower fidelity one still garnered a great response from both jason and my classmates from both cohorts, it’s a unique situation as each person who saw it knows the pain of making it so they knew just ho wmuch effort it took to even reach the point i turned in, but having completed this process i’ve realized the importance of understanding/keeping track of file size, as well as allowing more time in saving due to said file size.

Up until about a month before I took this photo I had only ever used my really terrible, honestly awful, hanging on by a thread LG phone. Every photo was blurry and desaturated, and took a millennium or so to focus the camera onto quite literally anything. 

To be fair it was 6 years old. 

But low and behold my high school graduation gift came about. 

Brand new, sparkling, with not a finger print in sight–

I was inducted to the ipad kid club.

(Complete with a sage green case and new gen apple pencil)

The camera quality blew my mind. I could see all the dandruff on my black cat with this capitalist rectangle’s camera. 

So I got to cooking.

While cooking and eating are my favorite parts of the process, making food beautiful is close in third. Ive always loved playing with colors and putting a useless amount of micro greens on a plate just to tie together the color palette. It’s just fun for me. 

I made a five spice beetroot pasta, topped with thai basil pesto, chili oil, and a korean mayak egg. I did put this photo in the portfolio, but that one was only edited with my ipads native color treatments, for this one i familiarized myself with adobe lightroom. I havent touched lightroom in about 4-5 years so things have certainly changed, and my retention of vocabulary made googling specific tasks difficult. But i did it! The deep beet color is so striking but the yellow/orange of the yolk adds brightness and richness, whilst the green adds a refreshing look you can practically taste.

image quality and colors got a little muddy but nonetheless I love her.