When I first moved to L.A., I was feeling a bit weird. I was alone, working in my apartment, and suddenly I had these weird memories about being a child. It made me melancholic, crying alone in my apartment, thinking about something I’ll never be able to redo. For me, this album is a tribute to those years of innocence where everything was perfect. I had the perfect childhood. My father was a policeman, and my mother sold fabric in her small store. They were very normal, very simple.

When you’re young, you can do anything. And the more I grow up, the less I think that way. Through my music, I’m really trying to convince myself that I can do it. It’s like therapy.

What a beautiful, pure way to work. It’s so easy to wrap yourself in a giant stressball of needs and objectives and shouldn’ts when you’re creating in exchange for money. But it’s continually clear: a zen-like state of childlike joy can help us make something much more magnetic.

A few weeks ago I picked up this 1960-edition of the Girl Scout Handbook at an estate sale. I don’t own much ephemera—being in a constant war of thing-like vs. too-much-junk anxieties—but I loved the cover, the illustrations, and I really wanted to spend some time with the content. Not only is the separation of half a century intriguing, I’d always wanted to be a Girl Scout. I think it’s the badges.

Yesterday I looked at the credits page for the first time and was surprised to see the designer for the cover was Alvin Lustig! This particular edition was printed 5 years after Lustig passed away, but there’s still something magical about finding a piece by such a prominent designer, which was used and appreciated (?) by its original intended audience.

That original audience is a little girl named LaBonney Parnell, who gave herself near-perfect scores on all the good citizen quizzes.

Appropriate, as the Olympics are upon us.

Illustrations are by Eleanor Dart and Alison Cummings, neither of whom I can find much on. All images are linked to their large sizes, for deets.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my discovery of HTML, right around sixth grade, and how that pushed me down a track to becoming a web-focused designer. Thinking about table-based layouts made me nostalgic, and I wished that I had saved some record of my earliest attempts at making sites.

Thanks to Wayback Machine, I can finally show off the travesty I was making in the early days of user-generated web (and would love to see your tragic firsts too!).

Here we have expage.com/glowygirl, my very first website. At the time I hadn’t heard of Geocities or Angelfire, so in order to build a site on Expage I had to register one page at a time. I’m guessing the empty box had an image that wasn’t cached. Fruity Raindrops was the successor, the pinnacle of my pre-teen sites, if you could call it that. Sadly the Wayback Machine didn’t save much from there.

The content menu. Yes, that background is animated. All girly websites at the time had Me, You, and Fun Stuff sections. If you were “creative,” you named them something interesting. Apparently I deemed myself ~*~ The Princess ~*~

Page name suggestions! If you can read them.

Apparently I was cool enough to distribute awards. Yay for circa-2002 marketing tactics.

And finally, Melanie’s website tips, 2002, verbatim:

1. Use a layout to keep it nice and neat.
2. Don’t be a copy-catter off of other sites.
3. Offer to link peeps on ur site.
4. Include graphics on ur site.
5. Have things available for peeps to put on their site.
6. Make ur page bright and colorful.
7. Don’t have a bunch of pop-ups–they get ANNOYING!
8. Have a page rater.
9. Have lots of subpages.
10. Learn tons of html from http://www.funky-chickens.com
11. make sure all linx r correct–broken linx get ANNOYING, 2
12. Get a guestbook from somewhere lyk http://www.bravenet.com.
13. In fact, get a lot of kewlio things @ Bravenet.
14. Don’t b boring! Here’s boring: your name, shoutouts, thanks 4 goin 2 my site, tell ur friends about it. I’ve seen a lot lyk that and they honestly stink!
15. Have fun and CONSTANTLY expand ur site! Effort will b noticed!

Illustration, bookmaking, history (local, federal, world), human-interest journalism, microfiction, zine crafting, hiking, novel-writing, photography, street hockey, screen-printing, Riso printing, linocut printmaking, cross-stitching, sewing, cooking, Ruby on Rails, Russian language, video art, performance art, dance (hip-hop, modern, ballet), spoken-word poetry, singing, public speaking, short-story-collection writing, starting a new language, saving an old one, gardening, grilling, woodworking (whittling, making furniture), Polish language, the art of cocktail-ery?, stamp collecting, Chinese brush painting, Norse mythology, [deep understanding of] local and federal government, international relations, the science of environmental policy, etymology, Esperanto, Communist wooden language, EVERYTHING ABOUT COLD PLACES EVER, etc, etc, etc…

Curiosity is the creative’s life blood. But to attempt to become sufficiently adept at all of the above would be a lifelong struggle with distraction, half-baked attempts, and I’m guessing, a pinch of loneliness. It’s few of us that can be good at everything, so we have to pick: what’s important now? What gives me life? What makes me a better designer, a happier person?

Priorities.

Basically, living.

For that reason, I’ve decided not to launch a pixel-perfect portfolio. I’ve always thought it was important to stay a vocal part of the global design community, to contribute ideas to this brand-new-baby of an industry. It seemed clear to me that those good ideas needed to be backed up by good work in order to be taken seriously. I’d still argue that’s true, and I’ll probably scratch that I-swear-I’m-awesome itch in the future. Right now though, I’m nearly a year out of my design program, and it seems important to focus on experiencing life, that great giver of inspiration.

So for now, I’ll be using this journal to explore personal projects and post interesting things I come across: weird bugs, hand-painted signage, great passages from greater books. What this will not be: a series of posts with good design captioned by “hey this thing I saw in my RSS feeds is cool.” That’s 90% of design dialog today, and we need more than that.

And I’m looking for it.