not a planner
seriously, i am not a planner. not in the buzzy, corporate sense anyway. i love paper and pens and paper related things. and yet i’ve have managed to avoid paper that in planner form since since high school, or thereabouts, when everyone was issued an agenda for keeping academic engagements and homework organized. while i haven’t established a relationship with a physical planner as an adult, i have meandered through online planners and task-management apps. nothing’s really stuck. the closest i’ve come to it is drawing months onto post-it notes and marking days with color coded dots to signify whether i had an exercise class or evening meet-up. then slashing across the days as they passed and stacking up the spent months a little post-it pile.
around this time last year i prototyped a physical planner page, but only tried it out for one week. afterwards, i pasted it into my sketchbook like a piece of evidence and didn’t try it again. there’s a documentation method that could use some work… and i should probably prototype more than one week (uh, duh). i pulled it back out today and re-tooled it a little, just in case this year is the one that includes a planner.
style a: the iteration i tried last year, giving preference to friday which was a busier personal day of the week
style b: maybe this could work for a spread across pages or a small, single-sided planner?
style c: “the weekender”
fooling around with composition. i think this would be neat as a digital, interactive planner sheet. (and maybe one of these days i’ll finally learn After Effects for vector animations)
i computer-ized the first iteration from last year. this was from a time when i mainly used my work calendar for weekday things with personal appointments in the margins of weekdays and mostly on weekends. i still used my work calendar to log personal appointments as a courtesy for scheduling purposes in the office but not really for reminders or notifications. i wanted a calendar that had room for weekday reminders and notes, but gave preference to the weekends since that’s where i had the most personal time.
nowadays, in quarintime, my days bleed together without clear definition between work time and personal time. and seeing as it’s a new year, i’m willing to give this planner thing another shot and to see whether it can be flexible enough to handle the time-soup i’m in.
playing around with the composition and proportion of weekdays on the sheet, i thought it could be cool to explore as an interactive digital planner. that way the space for each day could respond to the schedule, sliding around and allowing some days to bloat and others to shrink. oh! and the boundaries of the digital “sheet” could be locked so that a really busy week would be stuffed and bursting! disgusting, but so real. lacking coding knowledge beyond very basic html, this would need to be a collaboration with someone literate in the computer languages and such.
keeping this open ended - i’m interested to see how this works out.
left: scanned a few hours after being taken. right: scanned this afternoon, about 24 hours later.
a followup to yesterday: there was a difference in the polaroid over time (i think). it may just be psychological, or most the difference is a result of scanning technique.
scanning Polaroids directly on flatbed scanner glass runs the risk of producing Newtonian rings which are a bit like a moiré pattern and a total pain in the butt to edit from images, so i usually just leave them in… i’ve found that leaving the scanner lid up helps a little since there isn’t pressure mushing the photo onto the glass, and that’s what i did with the first image scanned yesterday.
i tried something a little different today by keeping the scanner lid up and placing a blank sheet of bristol over the polaroid as a background. i think the improved results may be a result of the bristol rather than the development time, but i’ll have to try this again to see.
Newtonian rings, blast!
while composing this news was coming in that the Capitol building in Washington D.C. had been stormed by terrorist t**** supporters. i’m not immune to what’s happening, not by a long shot; but i am trying my best to focus on the things that are within my immediate circle of control. no notifications, no doomscrolling, and limited interactions with talking heads. it’s also important to remember that words mean things, no matter how hard politicians try to manipulate language to suit their agenda. here are a few that best describe t****, his actions, and the political climate he is inciting:
coup d’état (n): a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics; esp: the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group
sedition (n): incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority
insurrection (n): an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government
terrorism (n): the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion
treason (n): the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government or the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign’s family
thank you Merriam-Webster’s for keeping it real.
