This will likely mark the only time that I'll be able to blog the night before a project is due while having completed it.

Tomorrow...

Studio begins.

But now for a numbered list of thoughts:

1. It's odd to see my work in the context of my classmates - I'm so used to knowing familiar styles / fonts / colors / design tricks of my Kent-mates, that in a new setting, I'm surprised at everybody and everything (and wonder if they feel the same way). Are people stretching out of their comfort zone? Relying on old tricks?

I'm probably doing a bit of both

2. Wholly crap, free food. Two times today. Once last week. ...insert your favorite "tuition joke."

3. Coming from Kent, I'm significantly less picky than my classmates on the quality of plotter output. This is both good and bad. I could probably be a bit more critical of colors and such, but maybe that's a wonderful stress to not have discovered yet.

...From my experience at Kent, it was a minor miracle every time a print comes out in general. In fact, what seems more miraculous is that I didn't have to physicall hand my flash drive to the tech guy so he could load the photoshop file on his computer, check to see if it was flat, and then push PRINT . I also didn't have to walk a quarter mile, from one studio to another, where I didn't even have key card access. The price is unbelievably cheap. $1 a foot? That's practically free!

4. My class is extremely international (by almost 2/3). The language barrier will be interesting; noted by some odd misspellings / mis-grammars on printed boards

5. Almost everybody here can render circles around me. This is something for me to work on

6. I can 'Maya' circles around almost everybody else (model, animate, etc). (Yay Kent!)

7. The year I spent at the CUDC seems to have rubbed off on me. I feel like I'm on the extreme non-technical side of projects - what I've developed is all about "selling the vision" (very urban design) This is also something for me to work towards; a comfort zone issue

8. The actual studio space is "okay." Though, it's weird to be in a school with pinup space.

9. Hey, if you go to (or went to, or teach at) UPenn and read this, come say hi. I'd like to hear your thoughts on what I've said in person.

More after we start. We've gotten a digital copy of the studio brief, but I'll wait until we hear it in person to tell the world what we're doing.

...although it's slightly reminiscent of my studio from last fall at the CUDC