Olivia Chasse

Guest Speaker :: Mara Stokke, Experiential Designer

I chose the front left nook when you first enter the fifth floor,

no shade but I remember my first day and walking into the minimal modern floor making me sad, it’s a floor full of creatives yet few of their influences were present upon greeting.

the medium I used is procreate and within said program, two brush settings, the round one and the flat paint brush. I originally wanted to make a very comforting forest scape. Cottage core has been a term popular over the last couple years and I was intending that but then hated it as my ideas started being vomited out. And while mulling over my bad ideas the demon slayer opening started playing while I was illustrating and I thought of the wisteria scenes.

so I chose to lean into the more whimsical fantasy nature of it and create a more finished scenery piece. The wall would have the pond aspect be flat with the fish raised from it to create visual texture. And post installation, the next graduation class would have each member fold a paper crane to be strung together and suspended with the wisteria (which is a 3D suspended element of)

Group topic :: Seattle Parks

Members :: Shane, Olivia (me), AJ, Preston

We settled into our topic the day is was introduced,

named our channel parks-n-wrecked and it was relatively smooth sailing from that point. I suggested our color palette– black and white and each of us chooses an accent color, Shane suggested the items we have on the panels (i.e amenities, phone numbers, points of interest) and provided some simple icons to have our panels family together beyond just the topic.

I chose Hing Hay Park simply out of familiarity,

I can’t define myself as a park person, or someone particularly nature savvy, so Hing Hay was one of the few I find myself walking through on a regular basis. I’ve always been fond of the art implemented throughout it, and also how it serves as the heart for so many asian festivals and celebrations in Seattle.

It’s proximity to great food and cafes adds brownie points too.

Shane was the first one to build out his in eye jack, so I modeled the layout after his. It followed the basic tri-fold from the whale video and our added titles on the top.

I used a mixture of gif and png’s to construct mine, I sourced my gif right from googles images– elders doing tai chi, qi gong, or just walks in the area when it’s sunny is common so I wanted to have a friendly very animated looking gif for that.

I added red lantern details to frame the gif within the panels, mainly for funsies since I already had them ready on procreate, all I had to do was re color and give it a transparent background, the red of the lanterns was used to reinforce my chosen accent color.

Overall the process for creation wasn’t too rough,

I chose pocky/pepero day due to my ongoing obsession with kdramas and manhwas, it’s a cute capitalist holiday where you buy and share pocky on 11/11. (11/11 due to how they look like the little biscuits)

it’s seen as kind of a young love holiday as well, hence the use of flowers and brighter colors 🙂

with the images below, I had the specific problem of trying to source all of them at once, without checking for the file type… all of these were jpegs 😀

One of the issues that came up during tutorial was people not being able to figure out how to get their folders to disappear in the beginning of the preview. The solution was as simple as hiding the folder from view in the layers panel before interacting with it.

I forgot completely about it

and proceeded to approach the situation with a new type of frustration and eventual doneness

I did in fact figure it out later.

If I’m being completely honest —

I haven’t learned too much about the visual media program…

And I don’t really know what it does.

I understand that I’ve been quietly consuming it on a daily basis, it’s one of those things that have come about in the wake of capitalism like many other things, graphic design included. However, I’m not able to clearly pinpoint it. I don’t really know how it does or doesn’t differ from the design program as we haven’t had very many opportunities to talk to others in the program separate from ours (added excuse is that my new media module is majority design students). 

But, from my mostly guessing hypothesis, visual media is image and video based which focuses on proper execution of concepts through fluency in production means (i.e technology, lighting, etc). Technically both graphic design and visual media are meant to be forms of communication, but the difference is that graphic design uses… graphics… (shapes, color and typography) with computer based rendering and creation while visual media uses mainly images and physical world items(?) 

I heard that the visual media program has gone under a rebranding of sorts to be more broadly applicable, but it used to be a photography program (I have a family friend Cassandra who went through the program and that’s what it was when she attended) which is where i’m pulling this blog out of nowhere from.

So my scope of the program is probably very narrow.  

However, I do know that people often mix up our respective fields,

Trying to google the difference isn’t going super well for me at this moment.

Online communities can’t seem to agree where a line is drawn, which makes me think that there is a slight overlap in our content and/or we usually end up working closely together in various professional settings. Both of them just seem harmonious and like we can fill in the gaps of what the other can’t or doesn’t want to do. 

In the syllabus week, some of the instructors were talking about future projects and recommended us (design students) sourcing content from people in the visual media program. 

For example, I could make something for packaging design but need to be able to properly show it off in something like a presentation or a portfolio or share it in a digital format– which is something I don’t have a ton of experience in.

In this case, I could enlist someone in visual media, who has knowledge in photography and lighting and they could do much better at shooting the product than I ever could. 

We all have the specialties we want to pursue or eventually will fall into but I also understand that knowing each other’s subject will allow all of us to have better in-depth conversations with each other in professional settings later down the line as we know where each other will be coming from. All in all I’m excited to get to know the people of the fifth floor better as the year and program progresses 🙂

Guest Speaker: Jessica Aceti

If theres anything to be understand about asthma and how it effects the respiratory system, your day is decided by a graph, and your decisions decide where you fall on said graph on that day.

x-axis: fuck around

y-axis: find out

simple enough to understand right?

I’ve had exercise induced asthma for as long as i remember, you know you’re and og asthma victim when u have one of those baby adapters for your albuterol– so imagine my surprise when my middle school best friends with full knowledge of this said, lets all sign up for track and field, and run the relay together! I would also like you to keep in mind i was infamous for passing out running the half miles in PE classes

but they said it with such enthusiasm I had to say yes.

weeks go by and we stay late after school, running to build stamina and practicing passing to baton so we don’t fumble when it really matters. We each agreed to do only one event and I dont speak sports, so even though I participated in it i cant remember the exact distance, but whatever it is, there were 4 of us and we each had to run a full lap around the track in the relay.

fast forward, its game day

we all suit up in our ugly lil bright yellow uniforms that probably havent seen soap in at least a decade and proceed to sit on the school field thats always a little bit suspiciously soggy.

hours go by, but its finally our event. and for whatever reason I’m the first runner.

1/4 track? i simply am speed

1/2 way point on track. slowing down, but manageable from training

3/4 big yikes for my lungs

in the last quarter of the track i dont remember anything other than handing the baton and then a head rush and blacking out.

when I woke up again my friends were around me and in their sweaty, middle school grip, was a second place ribbon. we were elated! None of us were particularly athletic so this was a big surpise. Podium!! The main moral was that we tried. it was something we put in work to achieve and we were able to see the results of our efforts! Its only through trying that we all figured out to never sign up for track and field again.

And my favorite part about telling this story is that its completely optional to say that there was only one other team we were running against.

Guest speakers : Joe Hallock, Ethel Xu, Rui Wu

Thus far my knowledge on these topics or the work they’d entail is limited so my thoughts on this specific topic may be a touch lacking.

When it comes to design, I’ve only heard from people who fall somewhere on the left side x axis of the board. 

My friend’s dad makes airport signs for SeaTac, and I have a family friend who has done their time in Microsoft and now has a pretty high spot in adobe— 

I’ve given a little thought, but not much that can truly guide me quite yet.

I’ve always enjoyed food related content as well as consuming fashion content, to me it’s where there is more creativity, and it deeply interacts with niches of people which is something I find rather interesting. However, I’ve never had any passion or confidence on entering those fields, so I’ve imagined myself ending up in one of the larger companies like Microsoft or Google upon graduation. They speak to broad groups of people and varying informational specificity depending on the product. And for that purpose I’ve been looking at the left side of the graph (places like these serve as open doors for honing professional abilities and fundamental skills before finding possible niches).

In Gabriel’s class we’ve begun the discussion of thinking about ethical design and the question of how we do that when we fall into lines of work that perpetuate capitalism.

As a designer I would like to learn how to do the least amount of harm. 

So places like Amazon that are aggressive in marketing and profit tracking because all they do is sell and sell and sell don’t interest me as much. Ideally I would like to contribute to services that help people, but realistically I would like somewhere that can provide stability.  All in all I have no really specific passion that I’ve figured out a way to funnel into a design byproduct or project, I’m not like neuroscientists who know what they’ve wanted to do that since they were two.
At this moment I’m just absorbing information as it comes and piecing things together

Guest speaker : Paolo Tossolini

First blog post!

How terrible exciting.

Hello! My name is Olivia Chasse (she/her), lovely to make your acquaintance.

I’m a typical high-school-graduate-during-pandemic story.

It sucked every ounce of motivation for learning out of my soul and then some. So while this program has given me a whole new sense and experience of anxiety, workload, bad posture, and has doubled my caffeine intake— at the same time, there’s a type of fulfillment in the content I am learning and I’m excited for the new challenges it proposes.

During Paolo’s presentation he brought up a specific 3D scanning program that he applied to multiple projects and made fit into all these different circumstances. So in all honestly my composition is a complete amalgamation of miscellaneous things and projects I am already in possession of. I’m learning to value my time and clumsily figuring out how to streamline the creation process, and I asked myself “why on earth would I make something completely from scratch when I already have all the pieces?”

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