October has brought me pumpkin flavored Hershey kisses (explosions of delicious, creamy pumpkin spice that release the spirit of autumn in your mouth as soon as they melt on your tongue) and school.

School began a week ago and is slowly drinking up my time with each progressive day. I’m okay with this! I’m loving being back with all of my studio friends and I’m ready to begin some amazing projects. We’re starting to work on visual effects (green screens, matte painting etc…), but the project that has me excited is the open ended group project for digital design. Our goal is to communicate the importance of design to a particular audience. My group has generated some exciting ideas and I think we’ll be doing a motion piece.

Apart from DAAP, I’m taking poetry and another advanced fiction class with Jim Braziel. Poetry is okay, there are a lot of people in that class who are only there because it’s a requirement, but I’m sure it will turn out to be a decent workshop. Advanced fiction on the other hand is intense! I LOVE being with all of these passionate writers and creative thinkers. It really opens up your mind to what is out there in the writing world. Everyone has a particular voice and we all learn from one another’s strengths and weaknesses through the weekly workshops. I, for some reason, have taken it upon myself to start a novel this quarter. I’m scared shitless, but Jim is encouraging and I’ve started an outline. I’m really excited to hone in on one big piece of writing. Short stories were okay, but I think I really enjoy writing on a bigger scale. I’m determined to follow through with this – my story idea has everything  I love – the fantastic element, love, scandal, a horse…I can’t wait to get writing :)

On that train of thought, something great happened this past week. Someone from a relatively new children’s book publishing company saw Kiki Magazine’s new website (designed and developed by me!) and contacted me about some freelance work and potentially some illustration work! This has me super excited – I LOVE ILLUSTRATION and I have such a strong passion for creating characters and pictures to tell a story that this freelance job, combining interaction design and illustration, makes a perfect fit for me.

Conclusion :: Lately, I’ve been handling so many disciplines within design – animation, motion, webdesign, graphic design, and illustration, that I feel like the doors are wide open for me – ( yey cliches! ). Anyway, to sum-up, I can’t wait to have another co-op so that I can keep delving deeper into design and discover what I really want to do when I graduate.