Texas au naturale

All photos taken in Zilker Botanical Garden, right up until the moment that my camera’s battery died and this is officially where my photographic record of Austin, Texas, ends.

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A glimpse of Austin

When you walk a bazillion blocks in 105-degree weather, a local ice cream stand is a MUST. In Austin, we had to walk to South Congress to find Amy’s Ice Creams. Yummm…

How amused was I at the guy who rode past us on a bike with a bottle of wine docked in the water bottle holder?! Very.

One of the things I was told I must do in Austin was to watch 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats fly out from underneath the Congress Street Bridge. You’ll want to click on these pictures and make ’em bigger. Those little suckers are fast, so in the photo on the right (of the water under the bridge), just notice the slight smudgy-looking swirl that comes out from the underneath the concrete of the bridge (top left) and arcs downward and back under the bridge (bottom right). Tour boats, kayaks and one lone rower were all crowded onto Town Lake to watch the evening’s nature show.

Good morning from Apple Annie’s, with a cup of coffee in hand! This place made Sarah and I so happy once we found it, we ate there TWICE in one day. Seriously. I wouldn’t kid you about great food…

At Zax (on our way to Barton Springs) I was inspired to exercise my inner photographer:

I blame the creative juices on the great food, and that pint of Real Ale’s Fireman’s #4. Yummm.

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Yellow

This one is for Sarah S-E:

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Texas sights

Ah, Internet… how I haven’t missed you! I don’t say that to be mean, it’s just that for the first time in a long time I finally feel like I’m getting back to my life. And by my life I mean not being stuck on a couch, attached to my laptop and begging my body to start cooperating. Because finally — AT LAST — I’m not crippled over in sciatic pain, I’m not winded by walking from the living room to the kitchen and back, and I’ve found a pair of shoes that seems to be supportive enough to negate some of the plantar fascitiis pain in my right foot.

I’ve gotten up off of the couch, taken a shower, and have “got a move on” — and I’m not looking back. Which, unfortunately or fortunately (however you view it), means a lot less computer time in my not-at-work-hours.

So, I’m not timely. Get over it. Here are some moments caught on film from my recent trip to Austin, Texas:

Beautiful, vibrant and interesting flowers outside of St. Elias inspired both Sarah and I to take our cameras out for the first time. We ended up seeing these same blooms elsewhere in the city, but the backdrop was never quite as gorgeous as that of the stonework of the church.

Austin is the state capitol of Texas, and our hotel was two blocks from this most magnificent building. Instead of visiting during the day, we wandered about the campus at night and marvelled at how pretty it was, all lit up. My pictures came out more “true” once I adjusted my white balance (the white-white version is not what we saw with our eyes). As we were taking it all in, some random guy rode up on a bicycle, parked, took off his helmet and began to dance. People came up to pose and take pictures in front of the Capitol, but he kept going –his dedication to grooving was impressive.

One of my favorite photos from the city part of our trip — A shot of buildings and the setting sun reflected in one of Austin’s office buildings along Congress Avenue.

[Insert note: I’m having a bear of a time uploading photographs to WordPress and Facebook, and since I don’t like to go to bed grumpy please consider this Austin Post 1. More pictures from my trip will follow, once I figure out why my Internet connection speed here at home has recently dropped like one of Michael Jackson’s posthumous tribute CDs.]

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An ocular feast of written elements

Sarah and I were making our way to a room on the upper level of the convention center to attend a session and true-to-form I was rubbernecking the entire way, trying to take in anything and everything — mundane details mixed with people-watching and a general curiosity to see what there is to see. During one of my origami head-craning sessions, I glimpsed a tiny bit of black-on-white lines through an open door, a dash of color amongst the alphabet.

“Oh Sarah… we’re going to have to go in that room. YOU are going to have to go in that room.”

“Okay…?!?!”

“Trust me. That room will make you happy.”

An hour and fifteen minutes later, Sarah’s eyes widened and a smile graced her lips. TYPOGRAPHY. The art and technique of arranging type, type design and modifying type glyphs. In other words, verbal art.

Here are some of the alphabetic works that I wanted to remember from the showcase:

** Me too…

** This one makes me smile, though I don’t particularly know why.

** Pirates are cool, and beards are the new black.

** Amen.

** Dude… Seriously. “Who should?!”

** The Wonderful World of Typology (Alphabet Animals) was a personal favorite of mine, but I liked the idea behind the Judges poster as well. The artist asked each judge what their favorite letter was, and then “drew” their portrait using only that letter. Same with the animals — the Jaguar is made entirely of “J’s,” meanwhile the Elephant is shaped from “E’s” — uppercase and lowercase, regular and emboldened. Genius.

** I want this font; I think a student created it…

** In this piece, the part of the skate that had the grommets was actually 3-D, as was the laces. Fun!

** Campaign posters for 2012, anyone?!

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HOW Austin

Austin, Texas. I’ve heard so much about it being a great place for art, music and design — a hub of creativity — that when Sarah and I got permission to go to the 2009 HOW Design Conference we were stoked. Then we stepped off the airplane and realized we’d have to be careful not to end up stroked.

Ausin, in June, is H-O-T. Like, 104+ degrees. Yowsas! (Did I mention that we had a 10 block walk from our hotel to the Austin Convention Center?!)

Luckily for us, we were given the big Texas welcome, the venue was air conditioned and we were treated to an array of PowerPoint presentations that weren’t put together by engineers. (One of the recurring topics discussed was how so many business people are unaware how great design can affect their successes — and failures. I wish that Sarah and I could run an instructional forum at our workplace to get people to understand that there’s really something substantial behind the time and effort put behind good design, and how a well-crafted presentation makes a world of difference to the viewers.)

We took our between-session breaks outside — a temporary baking of our bones before the chilly numbness of hour-plus presentations, barely padded seating and sometimes rambling, side-tracked speakers. Several of the sessions were as-expected; well-done with familiar scholastic information (Jenn & Ken Visocky O’Grady’s Information Design Dissected) or thoroughly littered with examples amidst a light explanation of why certain things worked and an emphasis on working with your client (DJ Stout’s Variations on a Rectangle: The Art of Magazine Design).

A few presentations were exceptional — Michael Osborne’s Design That Matters; Cameron Moll’s Good vs. Great Design. Von Glitschka’s Living a Creatively Curious Life may not have told me anything necessarily new… but his presentation was fun and interesting, threaded with great real-life examples and repeatedly encouraging all of us to investigate our curiosity to find inspiration (and even leading to an impromptu dance session at the end!).

Some, unfortunately, were crap. An explorative, explanatory review of the process behind logo design turned into a self-indulgent and ill-prepared portfolio review. One session on Open Type (fonts) didn’t even begin to live up to its program description, so we walked out and slipped into another session that was discussing how to market yourself (or your company) using social media. We weren’t being rude: session-hopping was encouraged so that all attendees would really feel like they got the most out of their three conference days.

Our last session on Friday was a bonus one — Germany’s Tobias Meyerhoff gave a presentation on his company’s software, Font Explorer X. Sarah and I were dutifully impressed — as only Type A, OCD organizers and perfectionists can be — with the cababilities of said software (currently only available for Mac, but coming soon for you PC users!). Basically, to steal Tobias’ line, if you use fonts on a regular basis, Font Explorer X is for you. The biggest draw is its ability to let you manage your entire font library in an iTunes-like window, and to activate/deactivate fonts based on the programs you’re using. (For any designer who has a decently large collection of fonts and who’s ever had to wait for FOREVER for Illustrator to load its font libraries, you know what this could mean for your productivity and system resources!) Basically, Sarah and I were impressed and I believe we’ll be downloading a free 30-day trial of the Pro version for home use within a week of returning home.*

Late Friday night we realized that Saturday’s single session was based off of an article in the last issue of HOW Magazine (subject: copywriting), which we’d both read… Looking back through the issue, provided to us in our conference goodie bag, we could practically envision the speaker’s presentation slides based on the bullets in the article. So, we made an executive decision to skip the session and spend the day checking out Austin.

This, as you will soon see, was a most excellent judgement call on our part.

* Jenn — Conference goodie package coming your way later on, with coupon(s) inside. *BUG*

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