The best truth that I know is the one inside me

I had a great conversation with a friend over some noodles in chinatown today. In short, the conversation topic was about not censoring oneself or constraining oneself to the needs of other people and instead just doing what feels right. Like Frank Ocean’s mom said, “Be Yourself and know that is good enough.”

When I moved to NYC, I moved during my 20s and said to myself that I want my 20s to be selfish. The past 17 years of formal education was the culmination in a collegiate degree in order to fulfill my late mother’s dream for me to attend college. The past 17 years has been focused on fulfilling the village’s dream of raising the child. In short, community focused, not individual. I want my 20s to be a time when I focus on myself and give myself whatever I want because I hate to say it, I don’t want my kids to be my fulfillment. The goal is by the time I have kids (which is a whole other topic because I’m not the one who will be pregnant) is to have my goals fulfilled.

Now what does it mean to be selfish. My definition of selfish is doing anything that I want that doesn’t hurt other people. Yeah, love and relationships will always be a question, but hey, I have an emotional support dog (for at least the rest of her lifetime T-T). At this moment, I think of bell hooks and say, when you can be with yourself and are at peace, then you can be with others without feeling like you’re using them as an escape from your needs and desires. Not to say that hanging with people is bad, but rather, focusing on what I want now means sacrifice. My priorities of sharpening my crafts does come at a cost of not seeing friends, skateboarding, and working out, but I have to be confident that it will be worth it in the end.

For these designs, the constraints were add rules (lines) and shapes

Week 6

Using all of the text provided, create a layout using rules (lines) and shapes

Design 1

Didn’t really do much here except add the small square from the golden ratio. To be honest, I know I’m getting lazy with doing these designs so I’m just copying the same layout and posting it up. When I do this again, I’m going to have to start it from the end and then go to the start so that I get better focus on this.

Design 2

I’ve worked with circles a lot this year because when I first moved to NYC, I was really into circles and how they don’t naturally occur in nature which makes them an interesting shape to use because they single out what you want to be seen. Kind of just reminds me of a cow. Again, I’m not entirely sure if this design is working, but it looks like it would work in the “wild” or real world.

Design 3

I used different parts of the golden ratio in order to create this design. I’ve made similar designs to this one in the past. If you look on Behance for Profound Aesthetic by Bradley Afroilan, I rebranded the brand Profound aesthetic just as a challenge to myself.

Design 4

Very similar to the last one, but what’s special about this one to me is that I made like 3 other designs using the same layout as Design 3. However, the issue was the how I was going to put “Features” on the page. At first it was all the way at the top and the middle of the page, but that felt off. However, when I moved it to the bottom to align with “In this issue,” it came together for me.

Design 5

Again, I took this design from Week 2 designs because I wanted to do more rules rather than just shapes. I’m still trying to figure out shapes and rules, especially rules. For some odd reason, I can’t get out of just copying even though copying is perfectly fine right now. It’s about tasting the original a bunch of times in order to know what works and then eventually being able to move away from it and experiment.