Scheduling Mayhem

Lia N. — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:28:52 +0000

I just looked at my calendar and realized that my life is getting out of control schedule-wise, but I feel more productive than usual. This is kind of how I work - the easier I go on myself, the less committed I am to the things that I commit to. The more overloaded I am, the more I rise to the challenge. Theme of every college application I wrote, in order to explain why the high school IB Programme pushed me to much higher grades than NY Regents level classes in freshman year. Wouldn’t be at Wellesley if it didn’t make such a cute, characteristically overachiever statement about me. Hence you’ll notice that while I’m doing all of the things listed below, the Allia Studio site is finally beginning to happen.

So it’s fortunate, in some way, that I’m doing the following:

Working as an RCC (Residential Computing Consultant)
Taking 5 courses (two Computer Science, two English, one Chinese)
Choreographing for Wellesley College Dancers this semester
Dancing in five routines for WCDancers
Teaching hip-hop at a nearby prep school
Taking classes at Jose Mateo’s Ballet Theatre
Training for a half-marathon
Freelance work!

Oh, and watching Flight of the Conchords a lot.

How Preteen Angst Created A Designer

Lia N. — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 05:54:36 +0000

Anyone who has known me for several years knows one amusing fact about me: I had a DeadJournal, and sometimes I was even one of the cool kids on DeadJournal. I would read posts written by a solemn narcissist about the merits of playing DDR naked, and I was struck by brilliance. My entry into the upper echelons was marked by phone calls from twitchy intellectuals who wanted to rant after they were jumped on their way back from Papa John’s. Let me tell you, it didn’t get much more awesome than that (which is, incidentally, why I realized I was giving the personal journaling life a way higher rating than it deserved). The whole experience had a happy ending, though, because it gave me something healthy to keep me less socially available: experience with web design. In order to showcase my angst and my ironic hipness, I started hanging out with CSS and Adobe Photoshop and we ultimately all went down a path to do great things together.

At this point I can’t really imagine life without design, particularly web design. I now hit up CSS showcases daily, not necessarily because I’m looking for ideas but because I love seeing art and science intertwine so perfectly the way they do on the internet. It’s inspirational in a general sense - it encourages me to learn, and it’s extraordinarily gratifying to do something I enjoy and realize that it happens to be a marketable skill. I mean, World of Warcraft was great, but I’m sure Blizzard has enough GMs-For-Life.

Also, web design has opened the doors to some great conversations with genuinely sane people that have changed the way I’ve thought about my future opportunities. A conversation with Strand Communications’ Christopher Strand after designing a Students for Hillary Clinton site for his daughter made me think twice about forcing myself into a International Relations degree just so that I could say I took the most intense major at my college. A conversation with Justin Blanton made me realize that just because I gave up my superficial International Relations dreams for Media Arts & Sciences and English didn’t mean I was blocking myself out of opportunities to pursue a law career.

So when it gets down to it, I thought it would be appropriate to launch Allia Studio with some quick thoughts as to how different communities, different circumstances and different directions have contributed to who I am both as a person and a discerning designer. Besides, I like to keep telling myself that I can have a blog without succumbing to the urge to post memes.