[W19+20] Boundaries are getting blurry

Painting clothes 🖌️ + video making 📷 + brain tickle 🧠👌

🐝 What I worked on

Painting my sweater

It’s getting darker and more depressingly cold in New York, so I decide I’ll wear the least amount of black clothes as possible. Unfortunately, as a tech bro, I have way too many comfy black sweaters and hoodies. So to cope, I paint on them instead.

Here’s the ideation round.

What uncle fashun sense is this?

Then I landed on the Koi fish idea.

Created a demo to see if I liked it.

I think it looks dope af and it’s giving “I was born in a gangster city my neighbor sells guns don’t mess with me, but I’m cute and gentle.”

And one sleeve is done!!

“An hour a day” video

I’ve been scripting the video documenting my process for an hour a day of creative work for a while now. I iterated so much and am now coming closer to the final round. Ivana told me that she could imagine the voice of the narration, which is a good sign for a project. I took her out to a cafe to teach me how to use the camera properly, for she is a brilliant photographer. It took us forever to go on a 10-minute route because the sun was out and the street was gorgeous. So we just took long stops and filmed little things on the way. It was one of the most lively learning experiences I’ve had.

Here are “Ivana living in a flower vase” and “Ivana discovered 1948 self-help book Getting The Most Out Of Life”

Re-design the stop symbol

In the chapter Gestalt of the book “A New Program to Graphic Design,” David Reinfurt gave an assignment to re-think the stop symbol. He said to not think of a metal sign with vinyl, but more about how a symbol can support a brain function - in this case, telling the brain “Stop.” I spent an afternoon with my friends Yufei and Ellie on the most useless exercise ever, but it was so fun I felt like my brain got tickled.

Once we start designing, many interesting questions come up. Do we want to tell people to stop? or describe the process of stopping?

Left: Telling people to stop - something so jarring it makes the brain shock, or the traffic light but only the stop light. Right: the process of stopping - the dot ending a sentence, or something ceasing to exist.

If we want to tell people to stop, we can use fear or scary things. E.g.: Your mom getting angry at you, a dead person, a gun.

How about beautiful things that make you want to stop? A leaf that’s unique, or a sign of free food, or a tree in the middle of the road?

Do you stop because you are constrained? Yufei used that to illustrate a Chinese song

You go because you’re the river
I stay because I’m soil

How long do you want to tell people to stop? What do you want people to stop doing?

Design is such a fascinating process.

🥡 Takeaways

Lately, these one-hour-a-day has been seeping outside of its “creative work” boundary into the way I live. Like, before I would think of spending time with friends as talking or grabbing food together. Now, we re-design the stop signs as we talk about the leaves that are so beautiful they make us stand still. Or we talk about the desire to be unique as an artist as we learn how to operate a new camera. Or how we say “Yoga” instead of “cheese” in front of the camera. Just little tweaks to make each day more new.

I don’t know if it’s helpful though, because as the definition of “being creative” just keeps getting more and more blurry, orienting my energy is getting more difficult. Like, how am I supposed to build a career out of a blurry definition? I don’t know, but for sure I’ve been enjoying myself a lot more lately. In this new mode of being I allow the moment to speak for itself.

🧐 Question of the week

• How can I allow myself to follow creative impulse/ curiosity, while also being focused enough to actually develop my skills?

  • Or should I even focus on developing skills specifically because execution will give more insight and naturally help me improve? aka, not giving a 💩 about where I’m at, just enjoying the process?

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This is the week #19-20 update of my daily creative challenge, as outlined in the Re-manifesto of this blog. I’m inspired by MỞ - Mơ và Hỏi’s course, Writing On The Net 2 (#wotn2), and all my friends who write and create consistently!