I hope to get more furniture in the next week or two, but the landlord couple was kind enough to leave the old mattress from their daughter and some other things, and to sell me a very nice futon so I’m set for the weekend at least. Tables would be nice though…

As you can see it’s pretty big but once I get furniture it should be cozy. It has more closet space than I know what to do with though. The bathroom is pretty cool, it has three doors, so you can close off the shower part, or the whole thing from both the bedroom and main room. There’s a private laundry room downstairs too. Apparently some condo owners have cut holes in their floors to go right down to their basement, but mine have not. Still a nice feature to have a basement though.

So those are my living conditions for the next year.

Snackstick.com, for which I set the design style, is live. Kerstin did all the implementation and a lot of the refining of the design, and we both worked on rewriting their copy text to be a little more marketing-oriented and a little less home-grown. I like the way it came out, doesn’t it start you salivating just from that palette?

GiveAKick.org is also live, which I spent vast amounts of time over the summer working and reworking as we learned that free DNN templates are probably not the way to go for a low-budget non-profit. The final design is all Kerstin, and she was very proud of it and pleased when the client finally accepted her total redesign from the template we had originally been tweaking. (by the way, type-knowlegeable people check out the 0′s in the “KICKAP00″ sign at the bottom – just like on their actual park sign :P)

Now after two weeks of work, I have a little car and a signed lease to move in to a privately rented condo in Pittsford at the end of the month. It looks like a great deal, and the landlords are leaving me a certain amount of their daughter’s furniture that they don’t want to bother moving!

My car! A little 2008 Honda Fit with lots of room in the back.

Let me just say that I was unbelievably glad to be done with the car shopping and dealing with used car salesmen. Hoping to avoid them for a while. I do like my little car a lot though. I’m learning to commute 20-30 minutes by interstate each way and to drive in snow. Rochester has been alternately rainy and warm, and snowy and very cold, with brief periods of sunshine. Earlier this week we also had literally gale-force winds in the evening, which was a little startling.

Things have been pretty good, if busy and often stressful. At work I’ve been doing some branding materials for Olympic-style sports competitions, and a website redesign for an insurance company. When they’re farther along in the process I’ll see about sharing them here, but I will say that I’m very excited about the new logo I’ve designed for one of the sports competitions!

I took some pictures around the office. The office building is outside the village of Victor, about half an hour outside Rochester proper, which means that it’s a very pretty area, very removed from everything else. Our building doesn’t look like much on the outside but is in a nice spot nestled on the side of the hill the road runs on. I had a pretty walk to the post office at lunchtime earlier in the week and it was pleasant to walk up and down the rolling hills and past the little farm fields around the office.

The outside of our building that we share with three sister companies.

Miriam (lead project manager) in the break area.

StormFrog is on the third floor (well, and increasingly the second) up under the roof of our building, with a cozy little break area/lobby that is kept decked out with a wide variety of teas, a fancy single-cup coffee brewer, and a selection of snacks. Oh, and FROGS! ^^

Of course a place named StormFrog needs some cute little froggies.

The office has a couple of fishtanks around too (and more leafy potted plants than anybody knows what to do with), but the frog in the break area is my favorite. I like to look for him whenever I get fresh coffee. I saw him fed earlier, and he looked so happy nomming down on live fruit flies. The atmosphere the boss’s wife (and others) have created with the plants, bright paint, and lighting makes you feel almost like you’re working in the rainforest, in a good way.

Frog tank, and top of the stairwell with its big green frog climbing the wall.

StormFrog's ADDY from last year for their web work for Scion.

There are a couple of these cubicle clumps around the break room, for the Quality Assurance and Project Management teams.

My desk is around the corner in the “creative ski loft” with the other two designers and the Flash/Interactive developer. It’s a pretty cool room with wood beams, big windows and skylights, and nice people (although that goes for everybody I’ve met at SF so far).

My desk right next to the window, with a couple of plants I adopted.

The view out into nature from my window.

I like the view out the window right behind my computer. I’m hoping to spot some interesting animals out there at some point, but nothing so far, just a good view of the depressing weather when it rolls in.

Matt's desk right next to mine. (also check out that field of view on my camera!)

Niki, the ever-enthusiastic project manager and Joe Mayernik, designer, on the other side of my desk.

We figure we need skis to work in the creative loft.

Creative ski loft, with Joe Burgess, interactive developer, in the background.

I have a few little reminders on my desk already, some old and some new.

• The Dieline - as the name indicates, this is for package design, but the designs and products they exhibit are so amazing and inspirational that I will definitely be subscribing to their RSS!
• For Print Only - similar to The Dieline, this one focuses on stunning print work, and really makes you wish you had the budget for letterpress printing. Which brings me to Studio on Fire’s blog of their letterpress shop work. More drool-worthy stuff there. Under Consideration also runs Brand New in addition to FPO, which is a good blog of branding and logo work.
• Logo Design Love also has a lot of nice links, and many of the articles are quite short and bite-sized.
• Dribbble.com is the place to be currently when it comes to show-and-tell for the world’s best digital designers, and where you can be weeded out if you don’t behave. Behance.net is also good although not as picky about who joins. Between the two of them they seem to set a large fraction of current design trends.
• Stankowski06.de – I like this guy’s work quite a bit (at least what’s listed on the site), and wish I could see an exhibit of it sometime. Apparently he made the iconic slash-in-a-square Deutsche Bank logo plus a lot of other logos, but I also like his less-directly-design, more artistic pieces.
• Viget Font Roundup – a long list of font pairings that are useful for book design, but with the prevalence of print-style digital design as a fashion, I’ll be using this as a reference when I next have fonts to pick out. Relatedly, H&FJ’s advice on mixing fonts. I love their writing style that makes each font sound like a finely-crafted wine. In fact, I’ll just list the article where I got these links and more from: DavidAirey.com.
• Myfonts.com – It’s nice to be able to buy a font knowing it’s better produced than the homemade ones that populate free font sites. They have pretty good prices and a mind-boggling selection that’s constantly growing. They have a really great newsletter too, which I highly recommend and which I absolutely love reading whenever it comes around. The newsletter from FontShop is also good, but since their prices are higher it doesn’t have me drooling and wishing for a bit of a font budget quite the way MyFonts does.

Also, I really want a deck of these Icelandair cards.

I got a new lens for my camera, the Canon 10-22mm, which is an extremely wide-angle lens for taking pictures of panoramas and architecture and things like that. I’m still working out how best to take pictures with it, since it covers about the entire view your eye can see (which makes it hard to avoid getting things like telephone poles in the picture) and tends to have a certain amount of barrel distortion (where straight lines come out curved because of the view angle). Here are some pictures from our Christmas day and subsequent walk.

And from Tuesday morning when it snowed here.

Another BIG present that came on Friday was a job offer to go be a full time Junior Art Director (clever trendy title pending) for StormFrog in Rochester, NY. I’ll have full benefits and a very good salary, but I have to get a car and move out there ASAP as I’m starting January 9th! There’s some talk of me getting to do things like brand design in addition to wireframes, which would be exciting.

The whale rock outside their house.

I love New Hampshire forests and granite.

They have a very cozy cottage in a retirement village in the middle of the New Hampshire forests and mountains. It seems like the perfect place to retire for people like them. Until a few years ago, my grandfather would teach ski lessons at a local slope, and both of them liked wandering in the forest and taking care of the garden. The community takes care of all their needs, from cleaning the cottage to providing food and medical care.

They have a little greenhouse porch in the back, and I had fun taking pictures of the plants in the bright morning sun. I’m pleased because these are the only pictures I took on the porch, and I think they all came out quite well, considering that there aren’t any extra photos that failed.

So we had several nice walks around the community’s woods, and the one Saturday morning had enough good sunlight to take a bunch of pictures. Here are some:

My dad took a couple of nice pictures of me too, while we were all wandering around in the woods.

This is my favorite :P

The rest of the day was mostly spent sitting around and talking, but we got my grandmother out for a bit of a walk around the river dam before the sun went down.

After a nice day and a half with them, my friend Piyush came and picked me up and we hung out in Lowell, MA for another day before I went home.