Earlier I was typing an email in which I related to my friend how busy I have been, and then described everything I had to do over the next few days.

As I typed the email I thought, “this could be my blog post. I could just copy and paste.” But that didn’t seem right.

So instead, I will merely describe my day today.

I got up at 7:45, because it is Wednesday and my first class is at 10:00. This means I got a solid six hours of sleep, which tends to be the max during school days.

At 10:00 I had Design Seminar with Dick Buchanan. We discuss papers by Erving Goffman and Carl Rogers. Most of the class didn’t have much to say. I participated in a study group the night before, so I contributed, though often not the answers Dick was looking for.

After class, I began creating my data visualization project in Illustrator. I don’t have much experience in Illustrator, so it was slow going. I had to ask my classmates a lot of questions and felt a bit guilty for constantly interrupting.

My Illustrator rendering was not turning out like my sketches. I had a meeting with Dan Boyarski at 3:15 to discuss my progress on the project.

(In case you haven’t been following, my project is to visualize a week’s worth of my email traffic.)

Dan made some really good suggestions and told me to go back to paper and sketch out the new direction first. This new direction has me drawing individual lines for each of the 800+ emails I received.

The final full color printed version is due on Monday. (This weekend I also have to finish up a web development project for my biz.)

After the meeting, I went home and re-read Chapter 5, Modeling Users: Personas and Goals, of Alan Cooper’s About Face 2.0. I then researched persona examples online and ended up on Cooper’s website. I also searched for “user flow diagram example” and downloaded some stuff from Adaptive Path.

At 5:30, I went to soccer practice. Actually, I went to the wrong field, because I hadn’t been to practice in two weeks due to school. I arrived at the correct field a half hour late.

I got home at 8:00. I showered and ate dinner and drove back to the studio for a 9:00 meeting with my mobile project group. We spent nearly three hours coming up with a scenario for our persona, creating a flow diagram, and then sketching wire frames for tomorrow’s 8:30 class. We were relatively effeicient, though I don’t think we worked out every problem.

At midnight I began an assignment for my graduate type class. I decided to use Mrs. Eaves for my type face: 11pt., 14pt leading. I experimented with two page layouts. This is an exercise for laying out an article in a book format (I think).

I made fun of another group that was creating either wire frames or flow diagrams on the computer. I’m pretty sure that’s too much detail at this point.

1:15. Everyone went home.

1:30. I’m done. But I feel compelled to blog.

1:53. I’m done. Time to leave the studio.