• Much of my taste comes from my mix of growing up in a city but being purposefully exposed to nature . While I grew up and have mostly lived in urban environments in the east coast of the United States, I have been fortunate to still have opportunites for hiking, camping and foraging and find inspiration in how those two opposites connect. I find inspiration in tree leaf shapes (I especially love maple and ginkgo leaves!) and also in water masses. Growing up on the east coast I find comfort being both near the coast and also specifically in Philadelphia spending time on the Schuylkill River, next to the traffic of cars on the parkway along with the lights from the city skyline.

• In design, I like a mix of organization and also surprise. I appreciate fun and unexpected uses of color, a mix of soft and hard shapes, and love animations. I find I especially love textures that are "cozy" this could mean soft, warm, and also colors or scents that are relaxing like eucalyptus or lavender. I often like an element of play or interaction in what I'm drawn to, especially when it's done skillfully to highlight marginalized communities and/or social justice issues. I find that my taste is heavily influenced by from my childhood or that of my parents. This could be from the civil rights movements of the 60s or 90s gameboy aesthetics.

• Much of my taste comes from my mix of growing up in a city but being purposefully exposed to nature . While I grew up and have mostly lived in urban environments in the east coast of the United States, I have been fortunate to still have opportunites for hiking, camping and foraging and find inspiration in how those two opposites connect. I find inspiration in tree leaf shapes (I especially love maple and ginkgo leaves!) and also in water masses. Growing up on the east coast I find comfort being both near the coast and also specifically in Philadelphia spending time on the Schuylkill River, next to the traffic of cars on the parkway along with the lights from the city skyline.

• In design, I like a mix of organization and also surprise. I appreciate fun and unexpected uses of color, a mix of soft and hard shapes, and love animations. I find I especially love textures that are "cozy" this could mean soft, warm, and also colors or scents that are relaxing like eucalyptus or lavender. I often like an element of play or interaction in what I'm drawn to, especially when it's done skillfully to highlight marginalized communities and/or social justice issues. I find that my taste is heavily influenced by from my childhood or that of my parents. This could be from the civil rights movements of the 60s or 90s gameboy aesthetics.

🖋️Response to Typeface Design: Jonathan Hoefler episode of Abstract: The Art of Design

• I liked the example Martina gave about being in Berlin and having to navigate somewhere you don't understand the language. I love traveling to other countries and when I do I usually wander around and go to places based off of things things like the bakery example she gave. I always come home more observant of things like street signs, and subway colors, and type on a menu since I was using those for making decisions and navigating. I love going to art museums too and this made me think about how I try to understand the vibe of a museum to go to when I'm traveling alone in a place where I don't understand the language based on things like lettering, color, and overall design. Watching this video was also a fun personal example for me of visuals adding to communication since I ended up turning off the captions to focus on the visuals and still understood everything even though my Spanish comprehension is just okay.

• The podcast gave me a more tangible connection to color outside of how I'm used to thinking about it on the web. Things that stood out to me were the idea of color as a status or class symbol, the impact on animals and insects from creating these colors, and the fact that in the US we use pink instead of light red like we call other colors and how that's cultural. The stories about blue reminded me of when I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art while growing up I always loved the collection of Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary. I could never explain why that section of the museum was one of my favorites but I definitely can picture the blues that they described in the podcast and it is a color I gravitate toward. The hosts didn't mention this but for the section on the color black, I would love to hear a take on how the history of the color black relates to colorism and racism. I appreciated that they mentioned so much of this is cultural so I'm excited to look into more history of color outside of Western culture.

• In the Virgil Abloh video, he mentions going back to early childhood for inspiration which I did this week through journaling, looking at old photographs, listening to songs from my childhood, and recalling cartoons and video games I played. I lived in a big city but went to a school where every week I went to the woods to learn about nature. This inspires my creative direction to combine seemingly opposing topics of nature and technology and the mix of analog and digital. For colors, I also found a consistency of a lavender-like color and a blueish-green which became the basis for my brand's palette. I also appreciated Virgil bringing up working in a genre-less space as I've often felt conflicted on how to combine my work across mediums in one brand and freed myself from that while working this week. In the Debbie Millman video, I thought about my deliberate differentiation and the purpose of symbols for communication and I want my brand to communicate ideas clearly and simply but without flattening their meaning, value, or complexity.

Response to Typeface Design: Jonathan Hoefler episode of Abstract: The Art of Design