Andy Mangold

A few thoughts on ideas and brainstorming to close out the year:

It seems to me pictures have become a much bigger part of the way we communicate these days, largely due to the internet, methinks. Of the 95 RSS feeds I am subscribed to, only two or three ever have the backbone to post content free of pictures, and a solid five or six only post images. While I may agree with the ol’ adage “A picture is worth 1000 words,” I hope people aren’t forgetting how valuable and powerful a word can be.

With this time between semesters comes not a break, but rather a frenzied attempt from me to finish, or at least start, all of the self initiated or otherwise school-unrelated projects I have piled up for myself over the last six months. This means I have been doing a lot of brainstorming recently, and with some reflection I have come to realize that my methods for working through ideas are almost completely based on words. While I think most people sit down and start sketching to hash out ideas, I tend to start writing. (Probably largely due to this exercise from earlier in my education at MICA).

Words hold such power because they are a hot medium, as McLuhan would say. An image is flat and tells the whole story; if it is crisp and in focus, it leaves little to no room for interpretation (of the image itself at least, the “concept” that produced the image is a whole different matter). A word however, is completely unique, not just to other words, but to every individual person. In reality, there are no true synonyms: big, huge, gigantic and massive may be more or less interchangeable, but each evokes a slightly different feeling. I have found these nuanced differences between words to be the best way for me to represent, sort and generate my ideas. Once I have found a set of words, maybe two or three, maybe twenty or thirty, that I think represents the idea I have, the sketching process becomes an investigation into what these words look like, both in and out of context of the words surrounding them. You’d be amazed at the scope and scale of visuals that can spring from something as simple as “What does authenticity look like?”

May your 2010 be even better than your 2009! I have a lot of stuff coming down the pipes, including a lot more activity on this ol’ blog. Stay tuned!

As a young designer, my web presence is an important aspect of my personal branding, my best method of marketing myself, and a strong reflection of the designer I am, or want to be. Since I started putting my work online three years ago, this domain has had six different designs, only three of which I am not completely ashamed of (a good sign I am growing as a designer). Keeping to my unintentionally established six-month website life cycle, I will be redesigning my portfolio and blog for launch sometime in early 2010.

I have been spending the last couple months accumulating bookmarks of portfolio and blog designs that I find to be highly effective, compelling, or interesting for any reason, and I thought I would share my thoughts. These are some of the best websites out there in the portfolio/blogosphere, in my humble opinion.

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Huong and I collaborated on this sweet cannibal pumpkin and I thought you might like it. Enjoy your Halloween everyone, tomorrow we begin counting down to the best holiday of them all, Thanksgiving!

I have conducted the first few rounds of interviews and photo shoots for my “Heirloom” project that I am getting pretty excited about. I figured I would post some shots from today’s work in hopes of enticing more of you to participate! THIS COULD BE YOU!

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Big thanks to my buddy Mark for digging up this GEM from Junior year of high school. I simply had to post it. This piece of audio nostalgia features myself on acoustic and electric guitar, Mark on piano, and Kevin on viola. We wrote and recorded it in my basement for one of our ridiculous video projects for our Junior year English class. This my friends, is how i spent(read:wasted) my time in high school. Those really were the most care-free years of my life and I don’t think I will ever have that much fun again; I just wish someone had let me know while it was happening.

I will come back here and listen to this whenever I miss those days and people.

For my independent research project in my Folk Art and Folk Life class this semester, I am planning to research the story, design, materiality, and personality behind objects members of my generation hold significant or irreplaceable: a study of the Heirloom. I hope to interview anyone and everyone I can in MY generation who has an object they consider irreplaceable and document my findings in a book I will edit, design, and bind by the end of the semester.

This is where you come in. If you are under the age of 26, have an object that you consider unique, irreplaceable, or significant for ANY reason, and (preferably) are located in the Baltimore, MD or West Chester, PA area, please consider letting me interview you for this project; it would be a huge, huge help. If you are interested, or have any questions, post a comment below, shoot me an email, give me a call, or otherwise get in touch with me.

I will be sure to provide status updates as the project moves along!

This semester I am going to have the unbelievable privilege of working with Mike Weikert and Ryan Clifford, along with a small handful of other undergrad and grad students, at the Center for Design Practice. We are working on an exciting project I will not explain just yet, but Mike & Ryan have said it will be okay to blog about the work we do, so I hope to document the project fairly thoroughly on here.

Now that school has started back up again, my work will be for ME and I will therefore actually be able to post it. Hopefully things will get a lot more lively around here in the weeks and months to come!

Today is Bill Watterson’s 51st birthday. I have been waiting for an excuse to gush about Calvin and Hobbes, his masterpiece, for some time, and his birthday seems like as good a reason as any.

I have always been completely enamored with Calvin and Hobbes. When I was a little kid I was drawn to the strip, and now that I am nearly 21 years old, the comic is even more dear to me. Something about Calvin’s antics, his innocence, his explosive imagination, represents the way I hope to move through the world. Really, what more could one ask for than to set off everyday in search of fun with a best friend. Watterson has a way of tackling some serious issues, like those of death, faith, and war, from a beautifully simple angle: the innocent perspective of a child. His beautifully illustrated strips have always helped keep me centered and never fail to put a smile on my face.

I shall consider myself lucky if I am able ever to create something that affects somebody the way Calvin and Hobbes has affected me. The strip is like a warm blanket, or a slice of my mother’s homemade cake.

Bill doesn’t consider himself a celebrity and refuses to sign autographs or make any kind of public appearance, something I admire him for. He probably wouldn’t even want me writing this little bit about him on my modest blog, but I wanted to spread the love about him and his work. So today, get out your books and read some Calvin and Hobbes, and if you some how are not familiar with the strip, buy yourself a book and delve into its glory; you won’t regret it.

Though it may make me seem a plebeian, there are few facets of culture I hold in the same high regard as Calvin and Hobbes. Happy Birthday Bill Watterson, and thank you for your fantastic work.

I must confess Anthony Mattox and I are responsible for this monstrosity. What you are looking at is approximately 97 “Otter Pops” brand freeze pops that were emptied, in liquid form, one by one into this bucket in the freezer, only after the layer before it had frozen. What we thought would be a beautiful, rainbow tower of summer fun turned out to be a monolith of sweet disaster, lubricated in sugary sludge.

I’m calling it a success.

Appears as though I have finally caved to Twitter (You can blame Jonathan Hallman & Joshua Hepworth).

For those of you that are interested, you can follow me here.