Your mindset is important when you’re writing and publishing.
Back in October, I moved away from an apartment that I really thought would be my last rental for several years. I really bonded with the area and that place, so it was one of the harder moves I’ve done. It was a space I picked out thinking it’d be my creative sanctuary. I thought I’d write several books in the space before leaving.
It’s a small thing, but it made me think about how I often don’t quite reach the milestones I reach for with writing. …
I think I’m really starting to grow as a designer.
I’m actually really excited to unveil these final deliverables from this design project I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. This was my first time trying to take a design and adapt it to many different formats; a poster, program spreads, and a symposium website.
Here’s how the story of this design has unfolded so far.
I found myself really enjoying the process of refining the poster.
Here are few thoughts on games you can play on Zoom and managing your time artfully.
“. . . when I talk to people I really like to talk to them, and not just exchange pleasantries and wonder which of us is going to try to get away first.”
― Edward Gorey
Though I’m documenting my online socializing as a part of exploring Social VR, I have not donned my headset nearly often enough recently! While I want to remedy that in the near future, I’ve had my hands full with different projects. I didn’t stray beyond Zoom last week, but I did take part in a delightfully coordinated social event.
Though having a headset is fun, there are some reasons why everyone doesn’t have one yet.
I got my first headset late in 2019. I was really excited about it after having tried a demo of a headset at Micro Center a year prior. When the Oculus started becoming widely available at a price that wasn’t too wallet-shattering, I was excited to give it a try.
Though I definitely enjoy a good round of Beat Saber every once in a while, when I look at the VR market, it doesn’t seem like it’s changed all that much since late 2019. …
In any creative endeavor, getting critique can be a game-changer.
As a writer by trade, I learned pretty early in my education journey that workshop feedback can be transformative. When I took writing workshops as an undergrad, I was sometimes shocked to find a weakness in my writing that I didn’t have the slightest inclination that it was there.
In more recent endeavors, I’ve taken part in startup bootcamps and accelerators that emphasize the importance of customer discovery and asking the right questions to figure out how you need to change and sharpen your idea. …
Making a literal shared dream calls for quite a few assets to create the illusion of dream hopping.
I’ve got a project up my sleeves. The Dream Clinic is a literal shared dream where people can explore the clinic in VR and see the disparities of modern medicine in a fictionalized setting. I’ve been building this idea up over the past few weeks and documenting each step of the way.
Before I start prototyping, I wanted to organize my ideas a bit more.
I grabbed my iPad and did a very messy digital sketch to convey the layout. I made some rough sketches on paper previously, but it was more just rough ideas of what things would look like. …
Now that I’m past the initial mockups, it’s time to perfect this project in the drafts.
So far, I’ve been trying to tackle this comprehensive poster, article spread, and web landing page with a thoughtful approach. At first, since this was my first time working with grid systems, I was quite determined to stick to the grid very stringently. I made each of my design decisions with the grid in mind.
For these new drafts, I changed the way I thought about the design. After critique and some general advice, I decided to approach the grids as a way to help me with my design. …
Since my personal and professional lives still exist exclusively on Zoom, I’m looking for ways to keep it interesting.
In many ways, I feel like we’ve come full circle with socializing on Zoom. At first, starved of face-to-face interaction, we were all desperate to make the most of interactions on Zoom. I remember my partner commenting on how he was connecting with his friends more than he had in years in the first few months of the pandemic.
It’s been over a year since then and things have changed. For me personally, my volume of meetings has increased dramatically in the last six months, which makes it a bit harder to enjoy socializing on Zoom. …
I’m casting aside all my self-imposed limits for these concepts.
Making a comprehensive, integrated design across different types of media is the essence of establishing a visual identity for an event, business, or anything else. After moving past initial sketches, I decided that I wanted to make the design choices very universal across each different mockup for the design systems project I’m working on. I had two guiding concepts that I wanted to work with.
First:
Since the article I plan to use is Marjane Satrapi and the Graphic Novels From and About the Middle East, I wanted to pull visuals from Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis.
Second:
I wanted to use a…
To continue ideation and research for my Dream Clinic project, I set out to dig a little deeper into the technology that might someday exist around this topic.
There’s a lot of conceptual overlap between VR, social VR, dreams, shared dreams, and programmable dreams. In a way, diving into any VR setting is a bit like stepping into an otherworld of a dream. For me personally, building things and experiencing things in VR is the closest I’ve ever come to lucid dreaming.
One of the big ideas I’m exploring in my near future sci-fi novel Mandatory Kindness is the therapeutic use of programmable dreams for treating people with mental illnesses. …
Leigh Fisher
Writer and poet from Neptune. Instructional designer in NYC. Grad student at @NYUTandon studying Integrated Digital Media.
