7 things I loved this July

Erasure poetry, song lyrics as mottos, and jumping around the creative process

Welcome to my roundup of things I loved over the past month! If you’re not interested in 7 Things, you can specifically toggle off these emails in your account settings.

Hi there! July was a weird month. There were some highs: birthday celebrations of my closest loved ones (I have so many Cancer friends!) and an epic concert of one of my favorite Korean singers. But there were lots of lows: getting really sick (most likely covid), mass layoffs at my day job (though I wasn’t affected, layoffs are tough on everyone), and enduring mega NYC heat waves.

Though I’m thrilled July is over, there were lots of things I discovered and enjoyed despite the tumult! Here are the seven things I loved in July:

1. I’ve been working on redesigning my website from the ground up. After collecting visual inspiration and determining a content structure & hierarchy, I got stuck for days trying to make wireframes which I found so incredibly boring. Finally I decided to say screw it and jumped straight into Figma, which has been a thrill! This was a pleasant reminder that I can jump around in the creative process to unblock the flow, even skipping steps entirely and going backwards if necessary.

   

   WIP of my website designs, subject to change of course!

2. My friends Nicole and Cissy hosted an awesome erasure poetry workshop! They printed The Star-Spangled Banner and a hilariously bad Linkedin post for us to black out portions of the text to create a new poem. This was such a fun, approachable way to get creative since everyone has a starting point from which they can chip away new meaning!
   
   If you’d like to read more blackout poetry, Austin Kleon is a great start. This month I also serendipitously came across

   Jamal Robinson
   who has been crushing it with inspiring erasure poetry on his Substack,
   Found Notes
   .

   

   All of our erasure poems. It’s a fun challenge to add visual meaning through how we black out the text!

3. Afrobeats/R&B singer Ayra Starr’s The Year I Turned 21 is my album of the summer. I have adopted a new motto from the chorus of my favorite song “Commas”—”energy wrong, I log off”. Every time I catch myself getting confused or anxious about my goals and values because of other people’s chit chat (which has been very often this month!) I sing this line to myself and log the hell off, mentally speaking.

4. I am thrilled to see

   Beth Spencer
   ’s “Created with Human Intelligence” art challenge reach even more folks through press coverage in Fast Company & Forbes! Thanks so much to Beth for kickstarting this pro-human art movement, emphasizing the beauty & emotion in hand-drawn creations that AI won’t ever be able to fully replicate.

   

   Here’s my Human Intelligence badge! No AI-generated art from me; I will use my hands until they fall off.

5. While I am skeptical of using generative AI for creative purposes, I do experiment with using AI chatbots to plan, research, analyze patterns in my journals, and find ways to connect different concepts together.¹ Lately I have been using Perplexity, which is an AI-powered search engine with a more up-to-date corpus than ChatGPT. Perplexity recently announced they will share ad revenue with publishers whose content they (often unethically) use to train their AI models. A meager attempt to address ethical AI, but an attempt nonetheless?

6. While visiting cool art store Nico Scout in Rhode Island I picked up a free copy of Kiblind Magazine, a French publication focused on contemporary illustration. You can browse through all of their issues for free online!

   

   Magazine on the beach, yay! (Not pictured: lots of mucus in my sick body)

7. I keep referring to this diagram of the yin & yang of creativity from James McCrae’s book The Art of You. We both need the soft, receiving state of being and active, energetic state of doing in our creative practice, which requires a back and forth, push and pull cycle between the two. Which side do you gravitate towards?

   

☁️ As always, comments are open if you’d like to chime in with a thing you’ve been loving this month or further discuss any of the seven things mentioned!

1. If anyone is curious about how I use AI for concepting, planning, and self-discovery, let me know and I can dedicate a future post to it!