Last week, I went on a business trip to Zurich, Switzerland. It was my first time to Europe, and even though I was only there for a few days, I had a great time. Luckily, I had the whole day on Saturday to actually see the city of Zurich, rather than work all day, and I wanted to share the photos I took. Many thanks to my new friend Judith for showing me around!

(Click on any of the photos to see a larger version)


Apparently Zurich has more fountains than any other city in the world. However, it was so cold that almost all of the ones I saw were frozen solid.

Our fancy breakfast, where I ate the best omelet and hot chocolate I’ve ever had in my life.

I’m so inspired to recreate this design somewhere in my own apartment!

Even the sale decals on the shop windows were beautifully designed.

This shot got a bit covered by my glove, but it was too pretty not to share.

I loved the 3D letters in this window display!

Bacon thin crust pizza. Again, absolutely delicious.

I spotted this guy on top of yet another fountain.

Some gorgeous posters outside a theater.

At one point during the day, we stopped into an English-language bookshop, where I just had to hunt down a copy of The Fault in Our Stars (sadly not signed).

This is a board game designed to teach you about Switzerland if you plan to move there. I love the box design!

With Judith, who volunteered to show me around Zurich after she saw the video where I mentioned I would be visiting.

I attempted to take this photo while standing on the above-ground subway/train thing (not sure what it’s actually called over there). These were the cleanest trains I have ever been on.

Back on Swiss Air to head home. Honestly, I never want to travel on any other airline again. They give you so much food it’s kind of crazy, and everything is beautifully branded.

Thanks for scrolling all the way through my photos! If you’re not sick of me yet, check out my newest video, which has a bit of footage from Zurich as well:

In December, John and Hank Green asked me to put together some designs for the 2012 Tour de Nerdfighting. I knew that I wanted the designs to reference the 2008 Tour de Nerdfighting map, which was one of the first things I designed for John and Hank. So first I got to work on the t-shirt design, which actually ended up being the cover of the exclusive tour CD.

(Click to see larger)

After the map was finished, I got to work on the poster. Right around that time, I had just read the book Sterographics: Graphics in New Dimensions, which inspired me to use photography and real world elements, rather than doing the whole thing digitally. I decided to gather up all the nerdfighter memorabilia I’ve collected over the years to make just a big colorful explosion of awesome. I cut the map outline out of a cereal box and painted black, while the red 2012 is made from paper which I then painted. You can see a behind the scenes look at the photoshoot in this video (starting at 1:40):

We took a ton of photos from all different angles. This was literally just set up on an IKEA table in my bedroom – design doesn’t have to be fancy and expensive!

After I chose the photo I wanted, I printed it out at full size and penciled in all of the city names and the title (doing a test version first to make sure the concept wouldn’t look completely awful). After trying way too many types of black markers to find one that didn’t bleed on the paper, I inked the whole thing, scanned it in, and composited it in Photoshop. As you can see from the photo of the title, I ended up changing it around in Photoshop a bit, in order to make the poster feel cleaner and more balanced.

(Test drawing, done on a letter-size printout of the photo)

I hope you guys like the poster and CD, and managed to grab a copy from the merch table if you went to any of the tour stops. You can also check out my video from the Redwood City tour stop at the end of this post. It was a fantastic night and I’m so happy to be part of such an awesome community!

A few weeks ago, I finally made it over to the Cable Car Museum in San Francisco. The main part of the building is where you can see the cables turning which then run under the streets. Then there were some nice displays about the history of cable cars, as well as some gorgeous old typography I couldn’t resist sharing. If you ever find yourself in San Francisco, it’s definitely worth a visit!

A few years ago, I had the idea to make a miniature copy of the book Paper Towns by John Green, and film the process of creating it. John’s newest book The Fault in Our Stars was just released about a week ago, so I decided to redo that video, except with a copy of TFioS. I hope you enjoy watching, and check out more photos below!

Thanks again to kaysyconundrum for allowing me to use her gorgeous original song in the video.

A few months ago, I got an email asking if I wanted to design the first official t-shirt for Elmify. Seeing as how her channel is one of my absolute favorites on YouTube, I could not pass this up.

We went through a bunch of different designs and color combinations before settling on the final one, a typographic imagining of her famous No! FRODO! video clip.

I also wanted to make a handwritten logo for her name, which meant writing her name over and over in my sketchbook until it came out right. Anyone who looks through it will probably think I have the biggest elementary school crush on her.

This is the final design we settled on, which is now available for purchase on dftba.com. You can see more photos of it below as well as the video Elmify made when it was released. Thanks for reading!

While I was in Toronto over Thanksgiving, my friends Andrew and Andrew brought me to a department store called Honest Ed’s, which you might also recognize from Scott Pilgrim. It was…quite the experience.

These were actually from a different store, but look! Scrabble mugs!

Ok, back to Ed’s. The thing about this department store is that they sell some really strange things. There seemed to be a department for anything you could ever possibly need, from clothing to hardware to toys to pianos to…mannequins and creepy Elvis sculptures. There’s even a hair salon and dentist. By far the best part though, were all the handpainted signs and lettering on all the walls. I tried to take photos of my favorites, but definitely make your way there to check it out for yourself if you ever get the chance.

Click the image to see it larger

It’s become a tradition of mine to design a custom Christmas card every year. For the first few years, while I was at RISD, I would make letterpress cards to send out to my closest friends. However, last year and this year, due to time constraints, I only had time to design a digital card.

I began thinking about this year’s card over Thanksgiving and came up with the idea of making it into a puzzle. I designed a custom wordsearch, where the leftover letters spelled out the URL to a secret, unlisted YouTube video when read from left to right, top to bottom. I hoped that it would become clear that it was a YouTube URL when “watch?v=” began to emerge, since that’s recognizable to anyone on YouTube.

I definitely took a risk of making it a bit too hard by not providing a list of words, but I’m happy to say that as of a week after Christmas, over 130 people have solved the puzzle and found the video! If you didn’t manage to solve it, you can cheat by checking out the answer key here.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

For Halloween this year I decided to dress up as a Slytherin student as inspired by Lady GaGa. I already had a ton of various Harry Potter and Slytherin-themed costume pieces, so this was mainly an excuse to put them all together into one outfit. Let me know what you think in the comments below!

Many thanks to my IRL friend Alex for taking the photos. We ended up shooting these in front of a huge, gorgeous church on a Sunday afternoon, which meant we had quite an audience of (very confused) tourists. Although, I seriously doubt it was the strangest thing they’ve seen in San Francisco!

Shirt: Vintage, found at Beacon’s Closet in NYC
Tie: Whimsic Alley
Skirt: Salvation Army, modified by me
Tights: Urban Outfitters, on sale for $2!
Shoes: Off-brand, found in a large shoe store in a mall
Wand: Noble Collection
Glasses: IMAX 3D glasses, modified by me

And don’t miss the video I made with some of the footage we shot during the photoshoot, which also features Michael Buckley from the What the Buck Show!

(LeakyCon staff with the Starkids!)

Ever since LeakyCon last July, I’ve been meaning to put up a blog post with all the design work I did for the conference that I didn’t cover in my previous LeakyCon post. Well, we’re only about three months late, so let’s get to it. I’m not covering every little graphic I did for the conference, but below I’ve detailed my three main projects.

(Click to see the maps larger)

My biggest project was designing the maps of the hotel’s convention center and vendor room for the programming book. The challenge here was bringing in decorative elements to make it flow with the rest of the book, while still keeping it readable and useful. I had never been to the hotel before, so I really just had to use my best judgement on how much detail to include from the original map that the hotel provided. Overall though, I think both maps were quite successful aesthetically, and I hope they were useful to people trying to navigate the conference!

Another project I worked on was completing the library of icons for the mobile app. Jordan designed the first batch and I picked up the rest, seen above, as the deadline for submitting the app grew nearer. The icons still needed to be readable when they were only about 50 pixels tall, so while it was tempting to put in a ton of detail, they really needed to be kept simple. Overall though, I think the icons were a nice custom touch for the app. My favorite icon is still Signings, in that the “Jo” could be taken to mean either Jo Rowling or John Green, who did actually do a signing at LeakyCon.

I also became the go-to person for intros and outros for various LeakyCon videos. It was awesome seeing the intro I designed on the big screen as part of the opening ceremonies video. And the intro and outro for the LeakyCon Ball video just added a nice finishing touch to the beautifully edited video of the event.

I have to say, LeakyCon was one of the best conventions I’ve attended, and I’m so honored to have been a part of the staff for it. Everyone who helped to make it happen was fantastic and incredibly talented, and these designs were only one small part of tons of people’s work and effort. I really can’t wait to work with everyone again on LeakyCon 2012. See you guys there!

Obviously I can’t share all the secret things I’ve been working on at my job at YouTube. However, I did want to give you guys something, so I got permission to share the poster I designed for a few events that happened in the office this past week. This was a really fun, quick project for me, and it was the first time I’ve done print work in quite a while, which was a nice break from my main job responsibilities as a UX web designer.

(Apologies for the terrible quality of my cell phone camera – but check out that awesome stage!)

The two events were part of the Tune Into YouTube 2012 conference which took place at the YouTube office. First up on Wednesday was a lunchtime concert featuring Karmin and Paul Dateh. I saw Karmin perform at VidCon, and it was awesome to see them again in a smaller venue. They are seriously some of the most talented, gorgeous people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

Then on Thursday was a panel featuring Michelle Phan, MysteryGuitarMan, Richard Ryan, Meghan Camarena (Strawburry17), and Cory Cotton from Dude Perfect. The panel was really interesting and trust me, the panelists made their concerns with broken sub boxes known to all the engineers in the audience.

After the panel I had a chance to speak to Coby Cotton from Dude Perfect (twin brother of Cory, who was on the panel). He gave me a copy of their new book Go Big: Make Your Shot Count in the Connected World, which I proceeded to read in it’s entirety that night.

Dude Perfect’s videos mainly consist of trick basketball shots, which isn’t necessarily a niche I would usually be drawn to. However, the story of their YouTube growth which is documented in their book was fascinating, since it’s so different from my and my friends’ experiences on the site. I definitely recommend the book to anyone who is trying to grow their channel on YouTube, or really trying to succeed in any entrepreneurial venture. The strong religious themes in the conclusion didn’t resonate with me as much as they probably will for others, but the rest of the book was incredibly inspirational. It’s hard to believe that a group of college boys could go from shooting basketballs in their backyard to building a brand and making incredibly high-production, sponsored videos in only two years. With chapter titles like Get Excited, Own It, and Blink Later, Cory Cotton spells out the lessons they learned while doing it.

I’m so glad I had the opportunity to attend these events at YouTube and design the poster to help promote them. I love meeting other video creators, especially people who are on the same site but in completely different communities within it. It gives a fresh perspective to the user experience designs I work on, to meet and speak with other people who will actually be using them.

Between the events this week and reading this book, I’m also so inspired to continue making high-quality videos for my own YouTube channel. Look out for a new video early next week!

Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment below, email me, or tweet at me me with any questions or comments!