Graduation!

I'm finally done! What a great week. My parents came for a few days and it was so great to see them. I'm so excited for a life filled with everything BUT homework!

DONE!

I’m not sure words can really explain how I felt today as I drove away from campus after presenting my work for the last time. Amazing and happy and excited… and a little sad all at the same time. Mostly just amazing and happy and excited though.

These two posters each explain one project that I worked on all year. The one on the right is my Senior Project and the one on the left is a research project that I worked on with one of our professors.

This one explains my Senior Project. My proposed project was simply to get a basic understanding of web design- enough to make a website from scratch. It was fun to present to my professors because I now officially know more about the subject than they do (since they are Industrial Designers not Web Designers).

Of course to make a website, you need to have something to put on it. I decided it would be fun to try to sell custom Wedding Invitations so I set the site up to help me with that. The invitations on there right now are not actually part of my project- I just needed to design some really fast so they could show how the site worked. So if you look at my website(jessicageorgedesign.com), focus more on the fact that it's a working website rather than at what the pictures are of! I'm excited to have time now to design some really cool invitations to put up there.


The other was a research project that I worked on with a professor all year. Research projects for designers make me smile because... I mean... we studied blocks of color.

Right now when a designer picks colors for his project, it is a pretty subjective process. There are of course rules to follow and studies to show which colors are 'hot' at any given time but it can still be hard to know exactly what shades of different colors to put together and how much of each accent color it is appropriate to use.

Our project is based on the fact that God is the ultimate and perfect designer. Everything created by Him is an example of perfect proportion and color balance. Many designers use the 'Golden Ratio' to help guide them in size and proportions. (If you don’t know what the Golden Ratio is just take out a credit card and study the proportion of the long side to the short side. That ratio, or about 1.618, has been studied throughout time because it is repeated in nature so often. It is considered the ‘most beautiful proportion’ and as such has guided many famous artists and architects in their designs) However, there has not yet been an official way to capture the color schemes used in Nature for the use of a designer.

We (Doug helped a lot in this part- we actually hired him part time... and I got to be his boss. It was cool.) created a simple computer program that allowed us to basically put in a photograph and get a list of all the colors in the photo. Included with each color is a percentage telling us how much of the color was present in the photo.

With that information, the picture of my project can make more sense.



Square #1 is the chosen photograph.

Square #2 contains exactly the same percentage of each color as the photograph did. Basically, if the photo contained 100 pixels that were dark blue, the middle chart also contained 100 dark blue pixels. They are just all grouped together.

Square #3 takes the colors and percentages used in Square #2 and creates perfect, proportional color schemes.

It’s been a lot of fun to see how perfectly nature really is designed! No matter what colors I picked out of a chart they created an amazing color scheme. Just another way to appreciate this amazing world we get to live in.

One more week!

I'm excited to say that a week from tomorrow my Senior Project will officially be on display in the Crabtree Building on the BYU campus. This is exciting news for me since this presentation has been a reason for a lot of stress in my life for a long time!

I've been planning a little website full of wedding invitations and baby announcements and such that I have designed. My Senior Project was to learn how to create a website (I took a bunch of classes on web design and flash and the like to get a small foundation) and then make a site to get me started. The main goal by the end of the semester is to have enough cards on there so I can show people what I can do and hopefully get some requests for custom designs. In the future the site will be a lot cooler- it's still pretty basic. For any of you who would like to see the progress feel free to go to jessicageorgedesign.com


I did get a chance to get out a little bit this week. On Friday I got to see my cousin Julianne. She's starting up a really cool business that takes old home videos and transfers them onto DVDs. My personal favorite part is that she puts on a custom main menu that includes screen shots of different parts of the movie so you can see whats on it. AND (you can tell I'm a designer because this is the coolest part to me) she'll put them in a real DVD case with a custom design and even has this printer that can print right on to the DVD so it'll match. Such fun toys! If I could, I'd honestly just take movies of grass growing so I could design a DVD cover and label! I did get to help her make a logo and it was tons of fun. Here's how it turned out-

Miracles

Life has been so amazing the past month! We have been so blessed to see the hand of God touch our lives. While there have been so many miracles every day, there are two big ones that I would love to share.

Last week my entire family did a big fast/sacrifice week for my Mom and Dad. The deal was that everyone should do as much service and go to the temple as often as possible during the week. Then on Sunday we all fasted together and had an appointed time to pray as a family to close the fast. (it was, of course, in the middle of church for Doug and me so we had to go the car and pray- we thought it was pretty funny) I feel like we’ve been praying for my parents to know what career move to take for so long (I remember praying for it before my mission, so it’s literally been years).

Well, just yesterday my dad told me that they got TWO job offers last week! AND they’re both in the Cleveland area- which is just so exciting to me! (I wasn’t too excited about the idea of them leaving the place I grew up!) It truly is a miracle.

The other has to do with my health. When I got home from my mission in Argentina I brought home a nasty little bug that was really good at sucking out all my energy. Last month I got a blessing that told me that through our faith and gratitude we would see daily improvements in my sickness. The past month has been so fun! I have had so much energy I haven't known what to do with it! It's amazing- I think I'd completely forgotten what normal people feel like! I am so thankful every time I get to take a walk with Doug or have enough energy to make him dinner after I've been at a long day of school.

We have been so very blessed; I am so thankful for a Father in Heaven who knows each one of us. I know that He is watching over us and blessing us each with all that we need.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Ok, so I know that Valentine's Day is clearly not in April, but we did get to celebrate it a little today!

Our first date was to Color Me Mine- a little store that let's you pick out a piece of pottery and paint it. For Valentine's Day Doug got me two little flower pots and some paint- kinda reminiscent of our first date. (he's so cute!) Today we finally got them out and painted them between sessions of General Conference.

The house hunt begins!

Doug and I have been thinking about buying something to live in when our contract is up. Right now we're really leaning towards a duplex so we can live on one side and have someone who helps pay our mortgage living on the other. We've done a lot of online looking and finally this week we decided we needed to get out there and actually look at some of these places.

We made plans to go see one or two duplexes each day after work/school. A pretty big move seeing as how it's the end of the semester and I'm trying to get a BFA presentation together so I can graduate. (for those of you who have never known someone who's getting their Senior project together for any 'bachelor of fine arts' degree- it's really really really time consuming) We've been so busy that Doug has been coming home from work and doing homework with me just so I can finish! He's honestly as excited for graduation as I am 'cause he'll get to stop doing homework too!

Our first appointment for home exploring was on Tuesday. An hour before we have to leave to see the house Doug calls me while I'm in class to tell me that his car broke down. Of course.
The busiest of weeks always have to get a little crazier- right?

Honestly the rest of the week was a blur, but by the end of it we'd seen a few duplexes. I'll be honest- a couple of them were so disgusting I really wonder if they're safe for people to even stand in, let along LIVE in. There is one that was ok and is officially on our list of 'maybes'. Unfortunately it smelled like the previous owners lived with 23 pet dogs. Ok, maybe just 3 but... wow. I'd definitely have to look into deodorizing a place before seriously considering it!

We were also able to fix our car and do...a little bit of homework... hopefully next week will be a little less crazy!