Despite hav­ing spent a week with­out my right hand (pro­nounced ‘Mac­Book’), I still man­aged to have a fairly pro­duc­tive week. In fact, this goes out the door tomor­row morning:

How ’bout you guys? What have you been up to lately, dear read­ers? What did I miss?

You know, women work­ers can be sur­pris­ingly good pro­duc­ers.…

And remem­ber, this all boils down to four things:

• 1) Don’t mix plea­sure with business
• 2) Women can be awfully jeal­ous of one another
• 3) Avoid undue familiarity
• 4) Women are more sen­si­tive than men

This gives me flash­backs to Oakland…

Off to a day of meetings…

Last month, Smash­ing Mag­a­zine ran a post that chal­lenged its read­ers to design some­thing every­day. Today, I came across the author’s a follow-up post on Design Informer and wanted to pass on the chal­lenge to you, dear readers.

I dare you all to cre­ate some­thing every­day for the next year, regard­less of your skill sets, day jobs or per­sonal pas­sions. I chal­lenge you to take fif­teen or twenty min­utes every­day to make some­thing unique and mean­ing­ful every­day for the next three hun­dred and sixty-five days.

The author behind the orig­i­nal post, Jad Lim­caco, will be post­ing his results on a new sec­tion of his site called Daily 365. Oth­ers are join­ing in on the chal­lenge and blog­ging about it too; here are a few of those folks:

• 365 Logo Project
• Daily Type Play
• Design it Daily
• Face Meets Wall
• Odd­mo­tion– A daily video
• Pray or Panic

My own semi-daily por­trait exer­cise from last year will con­tinue through­out this year’s chal­lenge but I hope Jad’s chal­lenge will encour­age me to do still more daily exer­cises. If you want to post your own chal­lenge results online, use the #daily365 tag so other chal­lenge takes can fol­low your progress and cheer you along.

I’m not one to make new year’s res­o­lu­tions, gen­er­ally, but this year it just seemed right. This year, I aim to:

Draw More
I’d really like to try and make more of a habit of sketch­ing dur­ing my trav­els and off time.

Be Happy
I’ve learned a lot dur­ing the last few years, I’ve done some pretty excit­ing things and I’ve done some work of which I can be proud. But hap­pi­ness and joy have not been at the core of my daily life, at least not as much as I would like.. so in 2010, I want to work on that.

Write more let­ters
When I was ten, I had a teacher who gave us an assign­ment to write a let­ter to some­one every week for a year. It was an excel­lent habit and one I’ve not main­tained duti­fully over the last twenty years or so as I’d like to say. Want a let­ter or to be added to my post­card list for when I’m on the road? Send me an e-mail and I’ll add you to the snail mail list

Be more active
Over the last few months, I’ve spent too much time in my work­space (or com­mut­ing to it). As a result though, I’ve got­ten less active and miss the pace I tend to main­tain when liv­ing in a more urban envi­ron­ment. This year, I want to be bet­ter about mak­ing a habit of being phys­i­cally active since it feels so good.

Make more art and per­haps sell some too.
If I don’t make things, I don’t feel good; it’s as sim­ple as that. When I don’t make things, my skills get rusty. This year, it’s time to make time for art no mat­ter what. And to start lis­ten­ing to the peo­ple who have been ask­ing and telling me to sell my work for years.

What are your res­o­lu­tions this year, dear read­ers? Need help with yours? Here’s a handy res­o­lu­tion generator.

A lot hap­pened this year… much of which you, dear read­ers, and my loved ones missed out on.. so here’s what every­one missed:

Jan­u­ary

Feb­ru­ary

March

April

May

William Kentridge’s Five Themes at SFMoMA

June

Even when I’m out run­ning errands, I end up work­ing. See?

Work­ing while try­ing to take a break isn’t really such a ter­ri­ble thing, mind you…

Do you have a hard time turn­ing off your work brain, dear readers?

This morn­ing, I was not feel­ing ter­ri­bly moti­vated– it has been a bit­terly cold, WINDY win­ter day in Charm City and my inner bear just wants to hiber­nate this time of year. But I’ve kept my favorite mug full of fresh cof­fee and even went so far as to pull together a playlist to keep myself moti­vated. If your moti­va­tion is wan­ing or you just need some new music, you can find most of my playlist avail­able through iTunes as an iMix here.

How do you stay moti­vated and pro­duc­tive at work, dear readers?

Lately, I’ve been going through my hard drive and sort­ing files and have found hun­dreds if not thou­sands of old pho­tos. Some of which have been fun to redis­cover, oth­ers con­tain­ing idea seeds for future work yet to be explored, and still oth­ers that have a sort of arche­o­log­i­cal qual­ity to them in hav­ing doc­u­mented my past homes or work spaces. Since I have been reflect­ing a lot lately on the ideal work­space yet to be cre­ated, I thought I’d share a few of my desks from the last few years:

First year grad school desk

First home office in Gothen­burg

Close-up–Home office in Gothen­burg

Last home office in Gothen­burg

Short-lived ‘home’ desk in the U.S.

Home office, August 2006

Work desk 2006–2008

Work desk 2009

Home office, Novem­ber 2009

How has your work­space changed over the years, readers?

A col­league of mine likes a but­ton on one of the jack­ets I wear too often at work. She just moved into a new office space and needs to per­son­al­ize her space; this is for her:

It’s my adult equiv­a­lent of col­or­ing on my lunch break and giv­ing her some­thing to put on an imag­i­nary refrig­er­a­tor. Yes, I’m THAT co-worker…

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This week in bulletpoints:

• Worked Pres­i­dents Day– no free hol­i­days ’til Memo­r­ial Day >_<
• Cover art­work for V’s halfway PhD thesis
• False start on way way over­due tat­too art­work for a friend
• Brand guide­lines book­let reached 32 pages (self-cover)
• 2 AIGA events in one week (out of the 4 that were on)
• Com­pletely re-mixed the brand site w/ the web designer — 4 hours mak­ing an unholy mess of paper and tape in the photo stu­dio — non-CS mem­bers wan­der­ing in mar­veled at the fact that we still did work by hand (got the same reac­tion when i sliced my fin­ger doing *gasp* a mock-up by hand)
• Final­ized new uni­ver­sal sta­tionery sys­tem to be used applied to the whole institution
• Pre­sen­ta­tion boards and mate­ri­als for the Director’s meet­ing next Mon­day — ~350 pages of print outs
• Break­fasted, took care of kitty needs and gussied-up for work in 20 min­utes or less every­day this week (read: i couldn’t bring myself to leave bed til 7:58 or there­abouts)
• Met a guy from Chi­huahua who needs brand guid­ance for his skate­board com­pany.. prospect?
• Bailed on drinks w/ the AIGA crew so I could go home and sleep on Fri­day night (yeah, I’m so rock n’ roll)
• Renewed my habit of read­ing the NYT on my lunchbreak

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