fun

Friday Fun: Prepare Yourself for Independent Bookstore Day!

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you’ve had a good week and have a lovely weekend ahead. Just a few notes from me today as this week has flown by. Lots of workshops, meetings, and on-the-fly design work that I should share in the not-too-distant-future. But today, let’s talk about Independent Bookstore Day!

Tomorrow, Saturday (April 28th) is Independent Bookstore Day! This is one of my favorite days of the year (really)! If your Saturday plans at all allow for it, get yourself to your favorite indie bookstore and enjoy the fun. There’s often author readings, music, and swag that you can only get on Independent Bookstore Day tomorrow. This year’s offerings look particularly awesome. A couple of years ago I got a wonderful pencil case illustrated with bookstore cats (which often have the best literary pun names).

But more than that, it’s a day to celebrate and thank your local independent bookstore. And I do hope there is one in your town. Indie bookstores really are so much more than bookstores. They are community centers and great places to find books you never knew you needed but speak to you. So, step away from your computer (after you finish reading this post, of course), put down your mouse for one-click ordering, and go to your local indie and support it. Indie bookstores really are magical.

I’m completely, utterly, 100% biased on this, of course, and really don’t care. I love indie bookstores. We buy our books at our lovely indie bookstore, Books on B, which is run by the ever lovely and wonderful Renee. I even got my library to okay purchasing the books for our popular reading collection through Renee’s store this year, which was another way to support our local community.

So go forth and discover your indie bookstore. You never know what great conversations about books you might have actually standing in a bookstore versus staring at your screen and what fabulous new worlds you might discover in a book you’d never have picked up without the recommendations of an indie bookseller.

And, you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out Chuck Wendig’s post on his love for indie bookstores. Or, of course, there is Neil Gaiman who wrote, “What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, full of discovery at your local indie bookstore, and come back refreshed to your work with new creativity and inspiration. I’ll be back soon. Allons-y!

 

Friday Design Fun

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that your week has gone well and you have something lovely planned for the weekend. I’m looking forward to finally having a weekend that isn’t abnormally hot for this time of year so I might have the energy to do some design work not related to my library work. It has been a difficult week on so many levels so I thought I’d just share a few fun design things before we run into the weekend.

First, sometimes you just need to have some retro fun and I have to say that this new camera I got totally fits the bill.

photograph of Fujifilm Instax Mini 90 camera

My husband got the above camera for me (Fujifilm’s Instax Mini 90) and I’ve been having a lot of fun taking instant photos. Polaroid-type photos for the win! There is something that’s just a bit wonderful about watching a photo slowly come into view rather than seeing it instantly on my digital camera (not that I’m not a huge fan of digital photos, obviously). It makes taking a photo a bit slower of a process and more of a fun group activity as you huddle around the mini-photo to see what will develop on film.

I’m not sure yet how I want to incorporate this into my design work in the library, but I’ve been thinking about how and when incorporating some more retro styles of design might be useful.

So I hope you have the chance to try something new and maybe a little offbeat that might spark some new creativity over the weekend. You never know what will inspire your next project.

Second, while I’m not a bullet journal person (though my aren’t the photographs of some people’s journals beautiful?), I am a huge believer in keeping paper notebooks, journals, and planners. While my phone is great for reminders, there is nothing to me like writing down plans and ideas in a journal. Below is a photo of my current journal that I use for everything except my yearly planner (which I create every December in a hardcover notebook [yes, I am that kind of person]).

photograph of traveler's notebook

While I’m not an expert in using the Traveler’s Notebook by any stretch, I really do love its flexibility and the ability to decorate all the inserts. It is really useful to my process to have separate notebooks for different projects, but probably the best thing is that I’ve decided I don’t need a beautiful notebook since I’m not on Instagram and can just use it for all my messy, half-formed, thumbnail sketched, odd ideas that may some day come together for something. It is important to give yourself permission to be messy when designing as usually it isn’t that pretty until the end.

Finally, oh my goodness a makecation! This idea of taking a vacation to do craft projects sounds amazing! I totally want to do this and would love to hear about if you’ve ever done a makecation.

So that’s it from here. I need to be off to an all-day faculty retreat in a bit, so I better wrap up this Friday’s post. I hope you have a wonderful weekend full of rest, fun, and creativity. I’ll be back soon with more design notes. Allons-y!

Podcasts and Zombies

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday!

So the big news today is that the podcast of the first Technology Brown Bag is now available. Just check out the Tech Brown Bags page of this blog for the podcast. Its runtime is just under 40minutes. And I am sorry in advance for the poor quality. My only excuse is that it is my first podcast and I am still learning Audacity. I promise the next one will be better, but at least you will be able to get the information, along with the handouts, now.

For fun, check out this article on the Zombie Tag craze that is sweeping colleges and universities. I love the fact that both classrooms and libraries are safe spaces! This is a good example of having fun without any technology. I wonder if it will come to CSUEB.

Have a great weekend!