Widow and her Orphans

I've just noticed how many orphans and widows are showing up in all of my blog posts. Damn the limited formatting options!

Eeeeeeevil!

Adv. Com. Design - Packaging

So I tackled a Burt's bees redesign. I love their stuff, it's healthy, smells good and isn't made with the same crap that the other stuff is made with. So basically the assignment was to design or redesign the packaging for two hair care products (luck of the draw!), and naturally I chose shampoo and conditioner. I'm just going to put up the printer templates.

18th Century Research Gem

In my search to find a good pastoral engraving for my packaging assignment I stumbled across this gem. It is a collection of prints, engravings and other images from the British Museum. The best part is that they are all from the 18th to early 19th century.

Above: I. Cruikshanks, A French Invasion, 1798

Self-Branding

I may be getting ahead of myself with this...

For my design class this semester -since it's the last one, ever- we have to do a self-branding assignment. We've done one of these every year, in every class and I've never been too enamored with my designs. But I think now I've hit the goldmine.

In Japanese culture, each family has their own mon, or crest. My family crest is a circle with two opposing arrows in it. What it signifies, I have no idea, but from a design point of view it's cool. Every family had their own distinctive logo!

On my German side, there is a coat-of-arms too, and as much as I love the medieval-look, I want something simpler and not so ornate.

What I'm thinking for my logo is to create a new mon, based off of designs of older ones, from my name. I've seen several examples of mon with Iris' in them and they are very striking.

This is an example, From Nikkei Concerns.

The Frontlines

So I "started" working as customer service today at work. I ended up spending most of it either doing breaks or bringing lines down. That's fine, but I would have much rather had another four hours of training instead. I felt like I knew nothing... and technically-speaking I don't.

At least I didn't get yelled at. I'm waiting for that to happen.... It's bound to, I'm on the frontlines now.

The Costume Museum of Canada

Here in Winnipeg we have some fairly cool museums. One that is severely overlooked is the Costume Museum of Canada, which just moved from their previous home in Dugald, Manitoba. They have new digs in the Exchange/Museum district, which is super close to school (a huge bonus for me).

Now I love fashion. So it pains me to see a cool museum be so unknown. Their new location is in a renovated warehouse, It's bigger than the old location (I think). And they have a red wall. A red wall! You can't say no to a wall that's been painted scarlet red!

109 Pacific Ave.
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3B 0M1

Admission is super cheap and they rotate their exhibits frequently. The Museum also houses a cool resource room, which has hundreds of fashion-related books and magazines. They also have a large collection of old clothing patterns. If I could I'd stay in there forever. Of course there is also the giftshop in the front of the museum, they sell everything from architecture books to vintage clothes.

They've also redesigned their website. You can find it here. It's looking cool, much better than what they had before. Love the purple... Now if only people would actually visit the museum.

Check it out!

No, it's not pronounced Amy.

So I thought I'd start off with the bane of my existence, the constant mispronunciation of my name. I've had to deal with this my entire life, it's not Amy, people! The first two weeks of school are killer because of this. Every single teacher, "Is it Amy? Iyome? Ayamay?". >.<

I have a lovingly outdated Japanese name. Thus, you say it phonetically.

AWW-YAAW-MAY

It means Iris by the way.