A little over a month ago some of my friends and I traveled to New York City for the day on an art trip. We visited the Museum of Modern Art where we saw Lucian Freud and the other exhibit. Finally, had the change to see the Helvetica exhibit and pretty successfully explained to some of my friends what was so awesome about the font. They seemed to get it an pointed out signs that were in Helvetica the rest of the day. Furthermore, I found some books in the store at the museum that were published by HOW Books, the same people that are publishing my book. Several pictures from the trip are below.
Wanted to take a minute and share this animation about the story of Adi Dassler who was the pioneer of Adidas. The video has also been featured on my other online publication called Videos for Creatives. This is a frequent showcase of videos from the online creative community.
Today at school I gave a speech to the entire student body on my belief that creativity can solve anything. It is part of a program where every senior has to prepare and deliver a speech on anything they want. The following is an excerpt of my speech which was very well received.
We constantly hear about wars, the environment, and the economy among other things.
There never seems to be any good news to spread these days.
However, there is hope and people all around the world are coming together to make effective changes. People are coming together and using their creativity to solve our global and local problems.
It is my belief that creativity can solve anything.
This type of creativity isn’t about working on a painting or designing a poster, but is about how people are thinking and developing new concepts to solve problems. By using the creative process we can then form better solutions.
It is my belief that if and when we bring creative thinking into the government and organizations that play both major and minor roles in the world, we as a society will be better off. We need a culture of innovation.
We are collaborating and connecting online to share our creativity.
We are applying our creativity to new business concepts that benefit other people.
We are making plans for the future based on creative thinking.
My wish is that people, governments and organizations start bringing creativity into it all.
Creativity Can Solve Anything.
Thank you.
Just wanted to take a minute and wish everybody a Happy Easter. Hope everybody is doing well and got a day of relaxation. My two week break from school ended today but its not that bad, plus I got lots of candy.
Recently, I was the featured reader in Unlimited Magazine.
It is great business and culture magazine that is published in Canada.
For the next two weeks we are on break from school. It is a wonderful feeling, let me tell you. I stay up late working and then wake up late and the house is still and the sun is shining through the windows. These two weeks my work will span from Grab Bag Book and College Scholarships to Painting and Graphic Design. And let’s not forget this place, new written work is coming here tomorrow. Looking forward to sharing the awesome things I make in the coming days.
This is it. This is home. And it is all brand new!
Over the past couple weeks I have embarked on a course to re-design and re-structure my online identity and presence. Through the process I have gone through many designs and plans, and in the end went with what you are seeing now. The new design has a consistent header on all of the pages with my name and a new tag line, “Happily Creative”. There is the page title and then the navigation on the right hand side. The site uses multiple installations of Wordpress that are all linked together. While this is not ideal, it works and I know my way around Wordpress.
In case you didn’t know, before this site I had a separate site and different designs for the blog, the book websites, the portfolio, the main page, and all the other websites. So this is a huge step in a direction that makes it easier for people to use and view. It makes everything unified because the same design is used! And all the old sites now re-direct here, so don’t worry.
The Portfolio has new work to show.
The Videos for Creatives blog is getting tons of new videos very soon.
The Blog is going to have content posted daily.
The Grab Bag Book has a new home and updates are coming soon.
There is also an Information section which provides information about myself. Instead of having to put a little paragraph on each of my sites about myself, there is now one place that can be seen in the navigation throughout the entire site. In addition, there is a Projects section which is where smaller side projects are being hosted.
I am glad that you are here reading this today. If you have been around this place for a while, thanks for everything! If you are new to these grounds, welcome and please explore the site. It is a pleasure to have all of you here and I am proud to share with you this brand new site.
Thank you, Ethan.
Hope everybody out there is doing well. This blog, as you can see, has got a new design. I finally fixed the terrible typography of the posts and switched to a serif title font. There is a new header and I made it more clean by removing the navigation tabs that didn’t really have a purpose. Other changes include the footer text, the time icon is gone, and new sidebar changes.
So with a brand new look, there is also brand new content on the way. I have just finished a large amount of work and for the rest of the year will be bringing constant content to this blog. I have missed sharing my ideas, stories, and thoughts with you here over the last month and that is about to change. Some articles coming soon include, The Story Behind My Creativity, The Importance of the Internet, Recent Film Viewings, Practicing Design, Literature and Design, Collaborative Consulting, Future of Telling Stories, and hopefully some great interviews.
Lastly, I am going to be re-launching and designing my online brand. There will be a new personal website, new portfolio website, new websites for both of my books, and new logotypes for them all. So keep a look out for those.
Thanks for being part of this all and help spread the word about what I am doing. Talk soon!
Hope everybody is having a wonderful holiday season. Mine was a pretty successful one. Thanks to everyone who has been reading the site this past year, it is much appreciated. I am going to be taking the next couple days off to get some work done and do some relaxing, so I will be back soon. Happy New Year!
[Got some books for Christmas (above) that I will
soon be reviewing here on the blog.]
Several weeks ago the Christmas decorations were taken out of the attic.
The tree was put up. Christmas cards started coming in the mail.
We went to one of my friends christmas party.
My art teacher started playing Christmas music during class.
Snow has been falling. The menu for the twenty-fifth was planned.
It is time for the holiday season.
School ended this past Wednesday with a big holiday concert, school wide secret santa, and snow covering the ground. We went out to lunch to start of our next two weeks of freedom from school. Finally, time to get some stuff done. In these coming weeks I will be working on some final art work for my college portfolio, inviting some great artists to take part in Grab Bag Book, drawing a new series of type illustration, organizing and writing a new book, and just hanging out with family and friends during the holiday season.
Later on next week I will have some new content for the blog, including my review of Once, thoughts on playwriting, ideas for the future of storytelling, and more. So stay tuned.
I would like to wish all of you Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!
Alright, so it has been a little quiet here on the blog. So, I thought I would give an overview of what has been going on for the past week. This is where I have been, what I have been doing, and more.
Last Thursday through Sunday (6th through 9th) eleven of my friends and I headed up to Boston for Harvard Model UN. This is a huge simulation of the United Nations with thousands of high school students from schools around the world. We are broken into committees that debate certain issues and each school has to represent a different countries’ views. It all took place in the Sheraton where the Prudential Center is. Some highlights from the trip include meeting with Shel Israel, eating pizza six times, dinner on Newbury Street, going over to Cambridge for a day, and making a video of the whole thing.
Then we had a week of school. We rang the bell for the Salvation Army. Friends starting getting into college, so congrats to all of them. I announced that my first book is being published. We had a snow day and a delay in the morning. And then the week ended with a Christmas party on Friday night.
On Saturday (yesterday), two friends and I headed down to New York City for the day. We went to see the tree, the Nike Store, the M&M store, the huge toy store, went out to lunch, then we went to see Spamalot at the Shubert Theater on Broadway.
That is about it. Only two and half more days of school left. And then it is time for Christmas. Hopefully I will be getting a good amount of stuff done in the coming weeks and I look forward to sharing all that with you.
Managing the people that I connect with is starting to become a problem. (Not the people I talk to often, but the other ones that I have connected with that I don’t talk to as frequently) I am fine with keeping all of their names and information in some sort of address book. In this address book I could keep notes on our conversations and what the connection is between us. But the problem is that they can not see the address book. This means that they do not know our connection or can not see our past conversations. My main concern are the problems this leads to down the road. When I attempt to contact someone in a couple years that I only talked to through email a couple times, will they remember? There is a good chance that they won’t and then a valuable connection I made in the past is lost.
I can simply find the last email that was sent and click reply. That way they can see what we have said in the past, but that gets messy, you can’t change the subject, and people don’t always scroll down to see all of that. Facebook, Plaxo, and other social networks and tools don’t work well because not everybody uses them. I really enjoy the way Highrise works but not sure how to make it work for what I need.
Any suggestions out there. How can I make this work?
For some time now I have been wanting to take a camera to the grocery store and photograph the shelves of food . A couple days ago I finally got around to it and was lucky to have one of the low-end Canon DSLR cameras from school. There is something that I really like about these photos, perhaps it is because each photo has the same color throughout it and features the same item countless times.
As Thanksgiving approaches us we should all be thankful for the food (as in the photos above) that we will enjoy and realize that others aren’t as lucky. Be thankful for your friends, family and for your life. Happy Thanksgiving!
The leaves have fallen from the trees.
The yard is not raked.
The pumpkin is still on the porch.
It is cold outside.
Hats and scarves have found their way out of the closet.
Winter jackets have come along too.
It flurried the other day.
Thanksgiving is coming.
It is Fall, almost Winter.
Just wanted to let everyone know that I have joined on with Macteens as a staff writer. Macteens is an online apple and technology news website targeted toward the younger crowd. I was invited to become a writer for them around the end of summer and have written two pieces that will be posted on the site shortly. I’ll be sure to let you know when they are up.
In addition, I have also been working with Behance as a “remote” intern doing online marketing and advertising. Behance has recently launched the Behance Network, a platform for creative portfolios, projects, and collaborations. My first move was to set up a group on Facebook and start using Twitter.
Thanks to both Behance and Macteens for the great experience so far.
I am currently engaged in a community service project I started. We are building a bench and a sign that is surrounded by a garden. This will act as the starting point for a self guided walking historical tour of my town. There will be a map and brohure that you can take from the starting point or download off the internet and proceed to learn about the town’s history. We have planted the garden and are in the process of finishin up the bench.
Thanks to the people I have already met and thanks to the one I will eventually meet one day. The day when we meet in a Italian street market, or when we sit down over a cup of tea in your London apartment, or when I hike into your remote village in the middle of Africa, is highly anticipated. The stories, ideas, and thoughts that we share will be the best gift anyone could give me. And for that future when are paths cross, I am grateful.
This is an excerpt from an essay that I have written.
The full version will be placed online later this year. Copyright 2007.
