Achievement: Geometry League

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED

Geometry League
Those that didn’t flunk it, now use it to save the world

What do you know… my blog didn’t just evaporate after 11 months of neglect. Since nobody actually reads this thing, I won’t expound upon what I have been doing for 11 months (although I will say that cooking meth is hard business).

In short, two new things popped up in my daughter’s life and this post yields a pictographic mashup.  The first bit of news–much to the delight of my wife and I–is that my daughter managed to learn and recite the names of several shapes from a flash card set gifted to her by her Grammy and Pop-Pop. The second, completely unrelated piece of news is that she started to sit with her daddy through episodes of Justice League on Netflix. The wife is not so thrilled about the latter.

The result of these two momentous life changing events is a small piece I call “Geometry League.”

Click image to view full-size

The shapes featured are the ones she has learned so far. Success with pronunciation varies. For example, “rhombus” wasn’t going to happen, so I simply call it “diamond,” which in terms gets pronounced by her as “di-men” (hopefully this is not uber-radical feminist foreshadowing). The shape “octagon” becomes “oct-a-gom” and “circle” is “kirk-le” on low energy days (see also “semi-kirk-le”). “Triangle” is a tricky one that is typically “tri-*something indiscernible*” and on one or two occasions was “tri-oval.” I’m proud of her nonetheless, not just because I’m her father, but because many adults I know are terrible with pronunciation (and in all likelihood, even worse with geometry).

The style of the image is inspired by minimalistic superhero posters you can find all over the web. I’m an untrained amateur in Photoshop, but I do enjoy taking a crack at trying to imitate something new. Plus, you know, superheroes… got to jump on that bandwagon six years too late.

Anyway, I was pretty happy with the result and thought it was worth sharing. If you enjoyed it too, give it a like or share. Until next time (whenever that might be)…

Note: some of the silhouettes that I used and/or modified for this design were sourced from freepik.com.

Achievement: Daughter’s First Year

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED

Daughter’s First Year
In (almost) one second a day

My daughter turned one last weekend.  As a gift to her (which she will hopefully appreciate as she gets older), I created a short video comprised of footage of her from the last year. It’s inspired by the “one second a day” concept. Unfortunately, I had not become familiar with the one second a day concept until months after my daughter was born, so this video fails to live up to that single, ever important requirement: having a clip from each of the 365 days. It also violates the structure of having each clip be one second in duration; sometimes they’re shorter and sometimes they’re longer. Nevertheless, the concept provided a starting point and a framework for hours of video scattered across camera and phones. The end product turned out to be a wonderful way for us to look back at our daughter’s transformation over the last year, and we are thrilled to be able to share it with our friends and family.