Sho mo nai!

Onward to Kyushu!

As I begin to type this it is about ten thirty at night on Friday. I am at Brian and Christine's place, and tomorrow we are headed off to Kyushu. Also in the car will be Julie who lives and teaches in Naruto, and Lorraine, B&C's friend from university. We are getting up at four in the morning tomorrow, so at this rate I am already not getting a full six hours of sleep. So maybe for once I should just stop here and not type anymore, and just go to sleep. But it still doesn't feel like we'll be travelling tomorrow.

Today I went by Colin and Jenny's to show Colin my what I had come up with for my entry into the "design a new logo for the JET programme" competition. Colin had some good feedback, and with his help I was able to tighten the design up quite a bit. Colin is not a designer, but both he and Jenny are entering the contest, and have been in the zone. Also, he might just be that sort of person, who knows enough what he is looking for to be able to intelligently give feedback.

And the overall design I have now is much the better for it. I sat and played as we talked, and the kinds of things he asked made me realise what things I had yet to try with it, and I saw solutions that I would never have thought of otherwise. I am being intentionally vague and not posting my design yet because the competition deadline is still about two weeks away. I'll have to get it all ready to mail out on that first morning back at school a week from Monday. And then the day after the deadline I'll post what I've done. Because you can never tell just who might come across it and make my work all for naught. The prize, by the way is monetary enough to get me off of my butt and actually do the design. Otherwise, I would not have used my last three evenings in so worthy a manner.

Because I have always used Macromedia Freehand, but now all I have is Adobe Illustrator, I found myself getting very frustrated, because the tools do not work the way I am accustomed to, the program doesn't think about objects in quite the same way, and all the things I was looking for were in totally different places, or not there at all as far as I could tell. So while the transition from Quark to InDesign has yet to cause angst, I've had enough angst for a few days. Even so, I am going on vacation.

And as we all know, vacations are trips away from the angst that has become all to familiar to enjoy some frustrations you have never encountered. Such as the other people in the car who you drive nuts and are, in turn, eventually driven nuts by.
And that's what makes them fun.

See you all in ten days!

posted by Fletcher @ 6:36 a.m.