Full Steam Ahead, Ask Letters!

It's been a busy few weeks. First, my treacherous laptop suffered a meltdown; the only saving grace was that the friend who fixed it let me pay him in trade. He now has several newly-repaired and -restored WWII-era fountain pens for his use, including two lovely and precious Parker 51s--a big deal back in our grandfathers' time, and rather apropos considering what the laptop crash interrupted!

You see, following that adventure I got myself in line and reconstructed my write-up on Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard, which was in operation during WWII churming out Liberty and Victory ships. I focused on the women workers who were hired on; the transition, I learned, was far from smooth. Class, sexism, and racism all made the issue a real hot potato, based on info I gathered from archived issues of The Sun and The Afro-American

I must thank Katie Hern, one of our class's interns. She did her capstone on the Fairfield area, and turned me ontosome amazing stuff; a couple of photographs she turned up in an archive helped me to find more taken at the same time by Arthur Seigel, a photographer for the Office of War Information. The Library of Congress has a great collection of photos that were taken during the war, painting a picture of people just going about their lives.

Seriously, look at this! It's amazing!

Now, things really seem to be taking off in terms of the Garden Gala planning. The IRC Fellows are helping us design a postcard--a few options are showcased over on Mai Hyun's blog, and we're supposed to talk more about them on Tuesday. So far, I like the emphasis on the Garden's "place" in the ones that include shots of the water tower, a vital landmark and point of local pride. It's so beautiful!

Have you ever seen such a gorgeous piece of functional civic engineering? The gradients! Image courtesy of IRC fellow Brian Dillon.

Our T-shirts show up in class tomorrow, and we're working on the Ask letters for potential donors. (Pedantic nitpicker that I am, I in put a million notes about tiny little formatting issues!)

Committee Work, Step 1: Coordinate!

Most of my participation this past week was limited to working through Google Docs. It just figures that once the snow thawed enough for all of our committee members to feel safe driving, I would get food poisoning and be unable to make it to class!

Still, I think we made some good headway on our Feasibility Study; the Doc provided a great way for everyone to toss their ideas in and comment, even time-shifted. It's funny just how many ideas we all have, when we put our minds to it. Chris Byars, for example, whipped up a really great Vision Statement, something I had been at a complete loss as to even where to begin.

For my part, I used to write a Cheap Local Entertainment column for The Retriever (UMBC's newspaper), so I knew how to find all of the local event listings that we might want to post to. Ahh, memories--combing through listings on FindLocal, Patch.com, and lots of community calendars proves that people really do use such services to find entertainment, so we should take advantage rather than just relying on print news and paid ads. BaltimoreGreenWorks is even targeted to sustainable efforts, so it's almost a sure bet that people who follow it will be the type to care about the Filbert Street Garden. Besides, the more we can do for free, the better. I just need to put together a little standard piece of copy to paste into each such tool. (Not quite a press release, more of a blurb--the press release does need to be written too, though!)

One thing we learned the hard way, though, is that cross-committee communication is key. You see, we (mostly me and D'Arcy Placilla) had put together a basic Save the Date format in anticipation of the fundraising event. In addition to figuring out what information we wanted to convey, we had also kicked around basic design aesthetics. In our mind, the themes of growth, sustainability, and DIY-action would suggested a rustic and recycled look--something like this image from lovevsdesign, which I found through Google Image Search:

Little did we realize that the Events committee was planning a more gala-styled event! So while the info can stay the same, it's back to the drawing board for a more formal feel. *Le sigh* I'm thinking fancier fonts and white or cream cardstock with black or dark green ink. Maybe not quite as fancy as this emdotzee version, but with a similar feel:

Now we're in the middle of polishing off our Feasibility Study, and I'm still working on my Mapping Baybrook research. More on that next week!

Committees & Concepts

This past week, students in AMST-442/680 divided ourselves up into teams: Event Planning, Outreach & Promotions, and History & Products. I'm on O&P, because of my copy editing experience, but will probably be shared out to H&P as well. That's a good thing, since I feel a lot of our promotional materials (as opposed to promotional actions) will need product design input. Prof. Steve Bradley's IRC students, with whom we're partnering, should have a say as well, since from a visual perspective they know more than any of us. Speaking of which, they've just about wrapped up our logo design! I don't have a completed version to put up here, but the one Prof. Bradley posted in this blog entry is just gorgeous. I love the clear, hand-drawn aesthetic of it; the human qualities feel perfect for a community-based project like this one. We're hoping to get it printed on black and green tee shirts (I want a green one!) by a local print shop. I'd say more on this, but I'm not certain whether the deal has been finalized yet. The logo design is also central to the Outreach concepts we're batting around, such as a convenient little Save the Date card to be tossed into each of the products H&P works up. Ideally, I'd want the logo to be ubiquitous and, through the cards, constantly wedded to our upcoming fundraiser event set for May 18 at 2640 Space. In today's class, I hope to talk with my committee and H&P about ways we can use an upcoming craft fair for the dual purposes of fund- and awareness-raising.