May 2013
6 posts
If Tumblr sells to Yahoo, I'm going to Medium
It’s a better platform anyway for the type of long-form blogging that I prefer. I’ve found myself composing long emails and posts in very sparse and clean Medium post interface and then porting them over when I’m finished.
I’ve used Tumblr since high school (that is a long time!) and have tolerated what I personally see as a list of increasingly annoying attempts to...
Having one of those “how did I end up here, again?” moments.
"10 more minutes"
i love it!
The theme of this week has definitely been amazing design talks, which I normally find boring but found exceptionally inspirational this week. Great hearing from Ash, Alexa, Elle, Adam, and Edward Tufte.
Tonight's talk at Designer Fund
Amazing amazing AMAZING talk from Elle Luna tonight at Designer Fund’s beautiful new space. I’m grateful that I stayed for it; I was literally about to walk out the door because the event was running over, etc. before Darian (another designer at Dropbox) convinced me to stay. 20 or so really talented designers in the room, and it felt like a really, really safe place.
Here are my...
April 2013
13 posts
“And on the slope he say old Samuel against the sky, his white hair shining with...”
instant improvement
when I have a crappy day I just remember that at least I’m not still in college, more specifically at least I’m not a sophomore at Wharton, and curl up on the couch to read East of Eden. day instantly brightened, somewhat.
What is beauty? Glamour and more.
I never explicitly wrote about this here, but this month (May issue*) I was featured in Glamour Magazine as one of their top 10 college women in 2013. They flew us out to NYC twice, first for an awesome photoshoot (I literally checked in to my hotel, did my shoot, and flew home) and second for an awards ceremony / speaker series.
It was a really incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience. The most...
Love
I love this quote so much: “we accept the love we think we deserve.”
Sometimes you can’t control the exact circumstances in your life especially if you’re only beginning financial independence - we might be forced accept that slightly leaky sublet as our first apartment out of school or subsist on subpar, inexpensive junk food during college to get by - but love is...
Origins: Women in Design
I always love it when I’m able to sneak some type work into design projects. I’m very excited because I just placed a letterpress order for our thank you cards for the event and they are gonna look sick!
But you should come to this - we’re celebrating women in design and hearing from two designers (Ash Huang of Pinterest and Alexa of Foodspotting) and their origin stories in...
art, man
I think I’d be pretty lost without art. This was a great weekend for art.
“the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams”
– eleanor roosevelt (thanks, lean in!)
I love this quote so much.
go.
there are choices of love and choices of fear.
make the choices of love.
I feel like I’ve reached a crazy point in my life where there are too few hours in the day to do everything that I really want to. It’s pretty weird - just a few months ago I was somewhat stagnated in school, unsure of how to improve but knowing that I had to somehow; now I feel like if I could just have a...
having one of those so super inspired by work nights
today was a great art day. got unblocked on something I’ve been creatively blocked on for about three weeks. can’t wait to share it with everyone (though it’s not anywhere near close to something I’d want to share out yet :))
Taking numbers
“Just find a freaking way around it. When I was starting out I would sometimes get beat out by other actresses and now when I look around - she’s gone! She’s quit! So it’s really all about… it’s all about -
You mean like endurance?
Yeah, endurance! Be the last woman standing. That’s what it’s all about. Take numbers, follow up, and be the last...
PTFO
It’s like 6 PM PST and I’m about to PTFO.
Amazing day. Been a great couple of weeks. Good work, great company. Feel like tons of inspiration has been heaped upon me everyday, stuff that motivates me to create!
More more more later.
March 2013
21 posts
<3!
“I’ve closed enough windows to know you can never look back”
“Please just try to be less of an idiot. Thanks!”
Benjy Weinberger: Men, It's On Us Now →
benjyweinberger:
Whatever mistakes you think she’s made, Adria Richards belongs to the sane, productive side of tech, and we should be circling the wagons around her, not cutting her loose.
Women in the tech industry are getting the message loud and clear: if you step out of line (or even if you do nothing at all) the trollosphere will destroy you at will, and your company will abandon you to...
me: Yeah I have this weird thing where I get super starstruck and I can’t talk to people who I idolize within the first few hours of meeting them because they’re way too cool for me. maybe I should get over that-
h: [laughs] yes that would be a good skill to develop in general.
yellow
Look at the stars
Look how they shine for you
And everything you do
Yeah they were all yellow
—
Listening to this song, while drawing on Cinderella (aka what I named the Cintiq), and eating strawberries, has got me rather weepy.
In a good way.
this song is just full of love.
KICK ASS!
Drew this this afternoon. Just a reminder to us all. I’m going to get it printed and framed for my room.
So easy to fall into complacency. Fortunately for me (unfortunately for my ego I suppose), I work with a team of designers who are all far more talented and smarter than me (seriously not fishing here - just being real). So just being amongst them pushes me forward.
It’s...
the mission
change the world
do great work
be kind, be real
be great
sdfdf
letters are my therapy.
I’m not very good at them yet but hope that I will one day be.
I’m also not sure what about lettering appeals to me so much. Is it because words and writing are such an integral part of my life and way of thinking? Is it because it’s message between the words, subterfuge to the spoken limits to our constructs of language?
this was my very first...
I don't really know what this is
If happy little bluebirds fly, why can't I?
“every brilliant shade of happy”
elation
love
delight
joy
content
inspiration
and “every somber shade of sad”
depression
heartbreak
small
death
alone
fear
—
how is this possible? if I were to explain existence to a neutral third party (aliens?) I would slowly begin to think that none of this were possible. how people (granted, sample size = 1) can be so...
Nov. 11, 2008
Is there a God? Truly? I don’t know. But, if You are there, and it was You all along. Thanks. Love, Alice.
BEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE
context: sharka was my typography professor junior year at Penn. her taste is excellent and her humor a blend of dryness and dark sarcasm. she’s russian and grew up in the era of clean, sharp Swiss design.
she also rode me, hard, for my semi-shoddy participation in class. at one point I was failing because I had missed too many classes so she made me give a...
“We only have one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending...”
– I just remembered my password to my old blog from high school and found hundreds and hundreds of old posts, most of which I’d since made private.
Very interesting to read back and reflect on who you are. Who am I? Both happy and sad.
“Cruelty to others is too commonly a manifestation of self-hatred.”
– LC
Not Lauren Conrad
last night
was super fun.
I revise my previous statements on friendship. Maybe friendship isn’t where you necessarily grow in the same direction, together, with similar values and outlook (though proximity aid this). This is important, but not all-defining. At the root of friendship is consistency and acceptance. It’s loyalty when you grow in diverging directions, embark on tangential paths, and...
how bad do you want to be successful? “I want to be successful as bad as I want to breathe.”
we just do our best work and it’s usually never nearly enough but when my head hits my pillow I am smiling the kind of smile you only come by after a day of hard work.
the only time that one can “work hard play hard” the hardest is when work = play and we just want to do...
February 2013
15 posts
Feeling super lucky to be in a place where people are really talented but also just as importantly really compassionate and awesome.
Yup. :)
/teenagegirlpost
this weekend is gonna be so ~aweso0o0o0o0oOoOoOomeeee but I can’t write about it so ZIP that’s my lips being sealed
Some quick thoughts
I almost wonder if I was placed in certain work experiences in the past - starting from freshman year, that initial sense of hopelessness and is-this-the-future dread while building out financial models, to feeling like a non-technical outsider the next year - to make the first few days working as a full-time(!) designer all the sweeter. Of course I was. Connecting the dots backwards, right?
My...
Notes: Move-in
As part of moving in to my new apartment, I had a TaskRabbit lined up a week in advance. As a backup I also put in an Exec request, but given that they assign on-demand 30 minutes prior to the actual task scheduled, I figured it would be less of a sure thing.
TaskRabbit ended up bailing, which would have totally screwed me over, but Exec saved the day and came on time.
“我们会永远的爱你”
anecdoche
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening—each telling stories of their grandparents, their funny dog story, their embarrassing high school memory—together overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say.
...
Observations before I pass out on this bed
Here’s my first observation: I haven’t used Twitter for the last month and Facebook for the last two weeks, and have observed a clear improvement in my personal quality of life. I’m less concerned with “creating” and “capturing” moments - just the moment itself. The flip from living to recording has been a very subtle one that started in high school when...
Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others... →
psychotherapy:
excerpt:
Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future. As more school districts strive for accountability, standardized tests have proliferated. The pressure to do well on achievement tests for college is filtering its way down to lower grades, so that even third graders feel as if they are on trial....
