Sorry about my unplanned hiatus! I was hoping to blog weeks ago, but I was stuck in a rut. It’s been difficult trying to push myself do anything lately; blogging, doing schoolwork, returning comments, going outside, doing anything remotely productive—meh!

The great weather is making it all better though. I’m finally getting back into the groove of things and on the road to being ultra productive…I hope!

Stuff that happened while I wasn’t blogging

I watched The September Issue a while ago and my first thoughts after finishing it were: “Man! I had no idea making a magazine was so much hard work!” and “Those editorials are so pretty!!11!1! squeeeee!” and let’s not forget, “Grace Coddington! What a talented woman! I WANT TO BE HERRRRRR”

So Imagine my surprise when I found the 840-page issue that was featured in the film under our coffee table I decided to carefully extract my faves from the huge volume and hang it up on my bedroom wall to create an “inspiration wall” of sorts.

The first four from the left is from Vogue and the last three is from H&M magazine. I’m thinking of replacing that painting below with another row of prints.

Back in January, my teacher signed me (and a few other students) up for this high school competition being held at OCAD. There were several categories like graphic design, photography, and web design, and I went into the web design competition. So it happened on March 7th and guess what? I WON!!!! Granted, I was competing against only one other person who, mind you, chose a blinding shade of electric-blue for his site’s background plus <iframe>’s for his content—*breathe*—but that’s not the point. The point is, I am now representing the TCDSB (my school board) in the second round of the competition this May!

Am I scared? HELL YES! I’m supposed to learn everything about PHP, MySQL, Apache, Javascript, and Flash before May. It’s all a little overwhelming and daunting, but I don’t want to let my family and my SCHOOL BOARD down. (my sister was SO SO SO close to winning in the graphic design department, so I want to win for her especially!!) This is also something pretty I can add to my resumé.

So if any of you guys know of any good books/sites/resources that can help me with the above, please share!!!

I leave you now with some pictures from the beautiful art school where the competition was held (and, who knows, maybe my future school?):

1. Posted by Krystal:

Wow, congrats Hazel! I hope you win the second round, your designs are really good! I wish I could win something like that, but I’m not that great when it comes to graphic/web designing. I just make whatever that seems to work. :P Your “future school” looks awesome! ;)

Also, about your most recent post, just wanted to say that I’m so not those type of visitors who expects a comment back/for page hits. xD I actually could care less about getting any comments on my own entries. I blog because I want to and when I feel like it. Bloggers shouldn’t feel pressured to quickly return comments or (another thing I see in the web world) pressured to update daily. If you don’t blog for a year, so what? It’s your blog, you can blog whenever you want to. Don’t apologize because you were gone for so long! I used to find myself doing that back then, but now I’ll post as if I was never ever gone. :P

Comments used to be such a hassle for me back then. I felt that I had to quickly comment their site because they might be expecting one from me. Now, I don’t do that. I just comment when I feel like it!