It was really interesting to see the home he built for his family, especially from the point of view of a designer. He had quite a lot of fascinating ideas, but they only developed over time, as is clear in the home. Some parts are very familiar as part of his style, but they’re pieced together in large part with older styles more in fashion at the time. I recognized the same sort of struggle for personal style, toying with fashions, and desire to experiment that I think a lot of designers work through. He was also a self-trained architect, which was sometimes noticeable in the building’s structural issues.

I really appreciated the way the rooms flow together, with common styles and color palettes extending from one room to the next. The custom consideration of how his family would be using the space leads to some wonderful details as well.

I really like the “Not So Big House” concept photographed so beautifully in Sarah Susanka’s home design books. So it was quite educational to see one of the sources for her methodology, especially in moments like this privacy bath window, set at 90º to the room. As the tour guide pointed out, it does produce a scene like a still-life.

The master bedroom had a kind of weird mix of nominally Japanese and Native American styles, which was echoed other places in the house (Note the glass “kimono” door and the mural above). I guess it must have been fashionable at the time.

Especially in the children’s playroom (built specially for them in many ways), there were great details. Some reminded me of the architecture of First Unitarian Church of Rochester, with its geometric proportional emphasis. Some of them struck me as a bit Myst-like – in particular the little spotlit shelf among the books.

Kitchen, above, studio/drafting room below.

He was big on octagons, apparently. Also, in case you forgot, my lens is kind of absurdly wide-angle.

On a final note, I’m in love with this sculpture.

Although the junior designer on the team, I was able to draw on my experience at Uni High School to create the winning style proposal.

Original site homepage

Like Uni, Pomona has a freewheeling, premier liberal arts school attitude and high expectations. In return, their answer to students’ ideas is “Yes! How can we make it happen?” – which means they have clubs that play everything from Taiko drums to Quidditch – and as a result, their students are personally engaged in their own education.

Ranked #1 by Forbes (as well as doing spectacularly across the board), Pomona is a “West Coast Ivy,” and their existing brand appearance played to the Ivy part. It looked stuffy and gilt by comparison to what NewCity’s user research showed the campus was really like. Pomona wanted something fresh for their new website that would capture their real personality while retaining the existing logo and palette. (The repeated specific request from the client was to make sure it looked “California,” and our whole design team was at a bit of a loss as to what California design would look like.)

Early design ideas

So I did some thinking about what I would design for my high school – I thought about all my favorite, sunniest memories of spectacular teachers who wanted me to grow up crazy and hungry for learning. And then I thought about how I’d represent that in a place where they literally are sunny and warm all the time. I did research into what the websites of other California campuses looked like (UCLA in particular struck a note for me).

There were a lot of revisions – here are just a few of just the spotlight boxes on the homepage.

Unlike most schools, Pomona is well-endowed and thus didn’t need as much focus on asking for donations as many. They also had large amounts of great lively photography for any aspect of campus life that could be desired. As a result, I was able to design a website that relied heavily on huge banner images that would bring the reader right onto the campus. The photography was rich and engaging and showed the texture of life – so I threw in a little digital detailing to keep the site feel as modern as the millennials applying. And even if they don’t need the reminder to donate, I didn’t think it could hurt my chances of approval if I threw a little one in at the bottom. Kills two with one stone, in fact – it reminds alumni to donate, and it gives the alumni a chance to tell prospective students why this school is worth it. I wanted something tropical about the website, too – as rainbow as the diverse students – which I brought out in the color palette.

The site needed to evoke the heritage of the school while looking forward. This I brought out in the typographic combination of Galliard (their existing brand serif) and Futura (a familiar but futuristic sans). Galliard’s pronounced thick-thin strokes and angled serifs evoke very clearly the behavior of traditional calligraphic pens, harking back to a time when books were hand-written by scribes – a perfect representation of Pomona’s high standards and academic excellence. Futura has been used on high-design Bauhaus style work since its creation, and with its precisely geometric proportions and pointy corners, it brings to mind both the precise detailing on a rocketship and the bold type on a modern art show poster – representing to the viewer that this school is producing the next break-out-of-the-box thinkers. It was important too to be clear that Pomona isn’t RISD either. The focus needed to feel familiar and practical in its cutting edge qualities, rather than wild art-for-arts-sake or inappropriate.

Final homepage design

We presented two design style options to the client, one from me and one from the senior designer, and Pomona picked mine to move forward with. Working with the senior designers at NewCity, I extended the homepage to all the other page designs that would be needed. The students and staff – everyone on campus who saw the design as it went forward – were pretty unanimously favorable about it capturing the school’s personality.

In the end, there were 16 different page designs, for desktop and mobile sizes, plus a stylesheet I put together in Photoshop with notes for the developers to help them make any guesses about design decisions they might run into. The result is a riot of color and overlapping elements that must have been quite an undertaking for the developers, but I couldn’t be more pleased with the way it turned out. Despite the tough CSS challenges I threw them, it is nearly pixel-perfect to my comps, and is responsive across screen sizes.

Check it out in full life-size pixels at Pomona.edu!

It was indeed all that it was promised to be, and I was only sorry not to have danced more dances! My enjoyment of the weekend was much greater than the Gypsy Moon Ball (which was still quite good), between being able to go to my own room afterwards and knowing a lot more people between the Chicago, Urbana, and Indy people who were there.

There were a few workshops in the afternoon, for variations on folky dancing, or in this case, a freeform singing workshop. I took my camera out for a while too.

I need a skirt like this woman has. It makes for some impressive swings when she gets going!

The Mean Lids are an awesome contra band.

Several people asked if the woman in pink and I were sisters.

This time of year, I always like to think about the winters I’ve spent in Europe. I remember is how cozy and warm the living room in Sweden felt with all the yellow light of the tree and the dark outside. I remember Jul Tomte coming on Christmas Eve and how my dad went out to get a newspaper and just missed his visit. :( Apparently this happens in many Swedish families, that the father has bad luck in seeing Jul Tomte’s visit to the house. I remember the huge piles of snow and how muted it was under the whitened pine branches outside. And inside, there was sitting at the kitchen table while the sky only turned pink with dawn when it was already midmorning.

From the time I lived in Germany, I remember the deep snow as I walked back to my apartment in the dark, with frosty breath and a few stars overhead. The Christmas market was bustling and everyone was excited out of doors, but indoors was quiet and peaceful and lit with warm light. There was an awareness of the darkness outside, a respect, in the soft voices of people catching up over coffee and cookies around the barely-lit kitchen table.

That contrast is what this time of year is all about for me.

The dark cold nights and glowing lights that made you aware of your body working to keep you warm, and the human heritage exposed through songs, the wonder of the christmas market full of little handmade treasures and tacky trinkets, and the dutiful performance of traditions like drinking Glühwein. The sense of how good it is to eat good food in a warm house in the glow of yellow light with the dark pressing in on the windows.

So more than any specific wintertime ritual, for me, this time of year is about the celebration and observation of wonder and heritage of tradition, the contrast of cold and dark with candlelight warmth, and the contrast of bustling human family with the peace of the den under the blanket of white. Observing how close we still are to the animals that hibernate under the snow and how small we still are in the face of winter. The centuries of people who have celebrated like us down through history.

The music at the dance was excellent, and the callers did a great job too. It was so much fun to get to dance with the most engaged dancers from the area (people who would bother paying for a dance weekend and traveling to one) and I was finally able to get a handle the buzz step needed for a proper swing. As a result, I got lots of compliments on my ability to follow well and my (I still don’t believe in this) grace.

Reluctant as I am to waltz, I gave in a couple of times. It’s uncomfortable and takes a lot of concentration, and people often count for me or make a fuss about stopping and getting our steps lined up. This time though, someone pointed out that if I count to six instead of three, that makes it easier to know what foot I should be on.

Saturday night involved a costume contest.

It was a good weekend, and nice to get out of the house and meet some new people. I came away with some new friends, and my first dance button (though I’m pretty disappointed that it doesn’t have my name printed on it; the sharpie is rubbing off). It was a little rough being an introvert and not really knowing anyone from the Chicago group yet, but I had a lot of fun all the same. I can tell my stamina is getting a lot better since the start of the year too – though I was skipping probably half the dances, it was more because I felt socially overwhelmed than because I was physically tired.

Along that line of thinking, was a good conversation in the car with someone I gave a ride to, who suggested that some of my eating troubles may actually stem from a sensory eating disorder and/or what she was calling “jagging,” where you have a small set of specific foods that you rely on, meal after meal. I definitely do the latter, and perhaps part of why living at home for a few months helped get me on a better eating schedule was because I was eating with my parents, instead of my staples of freezer food. And since talking to her, I’ve noticed that there does seem to be some sort of sensory thing going on, probably also linked with surges of anxiety.

But now I have finally gotten around to editing them! Tune in next month to see what excuses I find for not publishing more! It’s been so long, I really don’t remember what I was going to say about them – but I did have a great time at the festival. I really enjoyed all the performers so much.

First, I enjoyed the patches on this guitar case:

Then I enjoyed just how many guitars there were in evidence over the weekend:

Off to a good start with Lee Murdock and Tom Kastle doing a variety of sea shanties together.

There was an open Shape Note sing – I loved the opportunity to try it genuinely for the first time, complete with the waving arms and fa-so-la-mi’s. It’s such an organic, earthy form of music; the complete opposite of the modern refined produced music we tend to consume these days.

As one of the participants said, “I’d travel hundreds of miles to sing shape note music, but I wouldn’t cross the street to listen to it.”

In the midst of all the “Social Justice Warrior” stuff on the internet, I really appreciated the folk fest having a session just for women and their songs. Seated viewer’s left to right: Claudia Schmidt, Zoe Mulford, and Cosy Sheridan (plus that one dude who played bass for her). Their contributions of women’s songs about women’s issues definitely brought some tears to the crowd.

There was an informal jam band for the non-scheduled folk musicians to play at, I gather. They were supposed to be playing for an intro-to-contra dancing session, but the only people who showed up were this couple and their tinies. They proceeded to dance in the sunlight all by themselves.

There were a bunch of other fun sessions, including the sea shanty group that I was there to participate with. Also, Joe Crookston; Cosy Sheridan; Curtis & Loretta; and Zoe Mulford being joined in her singing of “Bold Riley.”

I took way more pictures than this of Mustard’s Retreat, but I’ll spare you. They all look more or less the same as these anyway.

Mustard’s Retreat has some great music. I heard them perform at the Rochester UU church a couple of years ago, and I think both times they did this song:

In case any of the musicians from my pictures are reading this, I still have more than 200 photos from the weekend, and I would be happy to send you full-size copies of any pictures with you in them. Just shoot me an email from the contact page!