Holiday Travels and New Year Changes
The past few weeks have been busy, rushed and widespread. But finally, I have time to settle, collect my thoughts and reflect. I spent 3 weeks away from home around the holidays. Starting with a week in my hometown, Salisbury, PA, for family Christmas, then heading out to San Diego for the week between Christmas and New Years, and then back to Salisbury for the first week of the year to teach Digital Art at my old high school. In that time, change has been the only constant.
The first week at home was one-part family time, one-part location scouting, beginning to seek out potential places to relocate to later this year. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this move is centered towards being able to pursue a more peaceful lifestyle, as well bringing creative work, training and mentorship to an area where it is distinctly lacking. That mission was further emboldened in my mind during this trip as I was able to meet with several local friends working in the area and younger kids looking for ways to pursue creative careers.
The second week was a much needed, personal work only, break. While a large part of my time was spent enjoying the extreme beauty and peace of San Diego, catching up with old work buddies and hiking the areas awesome trails. I was also able to have evenings free to commit real time to developing and finishing my personal brand launch that had been “Under Construction” for the better part of 2015. And so, with the new year, I was finally able to finish and launch my new brand, HRVY Creative, on January 1st! An important first step in the further development of my endeavors, creating the face for what will be the parent company of my furniture and decor design studio and creative educational resource center.
My third week of travel, and second back in Salisbury, while less recreational, was certainly the most important. I spent this week in my old high school working with kids in the digital art class and talking to them about the potentials of pursuing a creative career. This is the second year I have been able meet with this class, and to see the growth that 12 months can hold was encouraging to say the least. With the class growing in size from 6 kids last year to 14 now, and the school working to provide all 10, 11, and 12th grade students with iPads for school use, the potential for projects has grown immensly. While I was there, we worked on designing website mockups using Adobe Comp on their iPads. While this also taught them the creative capabilities of this little app, it was an important first exposure to web layout and design for many of them. It opened up great discussion about hierarchy and organization, creating smaller lessons on composition when working together with type, images, colors and icons.
The end results were of course very raw, but several of the students displayed incredible, unprompted, aptitude in their designs and how they used the tools available to them to create the look that fit them. As well as several other students who may have needed more than a week to really take to new tools we discussed, but had a fantastic eye for good creative design when it came to picking out their inspiration. That is the start of what I hope to be a really productive process as I transition back to the area. Identifying talented kids who are interested in more advanced creative training and education.
My next post will discuss the great potential of iPads in schools, and some exciting updates Apple is putting into their next iOS update to advance the application of iPads within schools.
