Andy Mangold

I am in the middle of orientating a slew of new students at MICA this week, and therefor am completely exhausted. As part of tomorrow night’s DIY fair (an evening activity during the orientation program), I will be doing live, green screened photo-manipulations of new students. I know, it isn’t really DIY at all, but I still think it’s going to work out pretty nicely. I have set up a Tumblr to showcase the results of these live photo-manipulations, with the students’ permission, of course. You can check out all the action tonight at 9:30pm EST at photoboothofwonder.tumblr.com.

I have my friends and coworkers at MICA‘s Student Activities Office to thank for this awesome find. Been working hard there all week to get ready for new student orientation, which will be consuming all of my time next week.

I wish I could develop a self-brand with this much character, I just don’t quite know what my unique character is yet.

This past semester I was really digging on my lettering course, but also feeling compelled to connect more directly with my community, and maybe even help somebody with my work. So, for my final, I decided to try and unite my aesthetic, passionate interest in lettering with philanthropy and community focused design. I set out to create an old-fashioned hand painted sign, for one of the many well meaning organizations in Baltimore with less than wonderful signage. After some research, I decided on “The Action Upscale Cultural Community Thrift Store,” a secondhand store nearby my apartment, run by volunteers, that puts on programs for “women, youth, young adults, and the elderly”.

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After much delay, my new website is finally up and running! Please have a look around, check out the new work, and be sure to shoot me an email if you have any comments or find any bugs. I have some more content to push out later today, so stay tuned.

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!