So you’ve maybe realized that I haven’t done a real Alt Summit recap on here, huh? Well, it’s come to the point where I don’t think I can cover anything that hasn’t been said. Over the past month—I can’t even believe it’s been a month already—there have literally been hundreds of posts going up. Yes, Stephan Sagmeister was out of control awesome. Yes, I made so many wonderful new connections and friends. Yes, it was super sparkly. You got this I think. In case you want to get your hands on some of those posts, my new friend Callie of Call me Cal has put together a wonderful pinterest board full of round-ups and everything Alt Summit. You could totally get lost in there for hours if you’re up for it!

Instead of posting everything that I did and learned while at Alt Summit, I came home a little overwhelmed with catching up, but I also took the knowledge I had gained and started to put it to action here on the blog. Maybe I don’t talk about this enough on here, and rather in my head or to friends and family, but what I’ve really been striving for over the past year is a journey towards happiness.

I’ve been designing for a little over six years now, all while in school. I’ve gone through the internships, the taking-jobs-for-free-expereince thing. I’ve tested out a lot of different artistic venues: concert promotion, working on magazines, marketing, advertising, etc., etc. I’m just ready to find my place—and blogging has really been helping me figure that out in a lot of ways. It gives me a place to experiment with new things on a smaller scale, and test if they are adding to this goal of happiness, or taking too much away from it. Of course, you’re always going to have to do a little of what you don’t like—not everything’s gravy. What I’m searching for is more of a balance—where I feel like I’m doing what I love more of the time than I’m doing things that make me unhappy. I’ve realized if you can’t stay on the happy side of that equation, it’s just not worth it. You feel miserable, and you start to dislike even the small parts of that something that did bring you joy—aka my concert promotion stint.

I guess the point of this story is that I kind of started to feel this way about blogging before Alt. A little before Thanksgiving I took an unexpected extended hiatus from the blog. I was feeling uninspired, and it started to feel more like something that I had to do—I fell towards the unhappy side of the equation. After Alt, what was most significant, is that I got my spark back. While you hear time and time again that it’s not about the numbers, it’s not about sponsorships and how many fans you have on Facebook, sometimes those things just get to you a teeny bit. I felt like I didn’t have a voice, and I was more or less just adding to the clutter of the blog world in a really insignificant way. I’d lost my vision of why I started blogging in the first place—to find my passions and explore on a more regular basis. Since Alt, I’ve started cataloging my inspirations, I started planning with an editorial calendar—I got organized! With this organization I was finally able to see the bigger picture and make this space more of what I needed it to be. It’s getting there, and I can clearly see what a positive impact this has been having on my creative life—and yes, even my numbers—and the not-so-surprising part of that, is that I’m not worrying about that anymore! Rather than scrounging last minute to come up with posts, now I marinate on them for a couple days—or weeks—and feel like I’m contributing things that are more significant to the community and to my personal creative journey. It’s been great, but it sure has taken some time to get to this mind-set! I’m so excited to come on here every day and share the things that have been going on in my life, the artists that I’m inspired by, and looks into the lives of other creatives. It keeps me going, and I hope that it gets you rilled up to get a little creative juices flowing in your own life.

Going through my research for my thesis, I’ve been studying how blogging and other self-curative media—aka pinterest, twitter, etc.—can aid in the experience for the creative professional. I was inspired by my own ventures and I wanted to intricately study why this experience has been so meaningful and life-altering. Through my research, I’ve seen one thing that comes up time and time again as something that is important for any learning potential: reflection. What’s great about blogging is that you’re constantly putting together life experiences, images, thoughts, and inspirations and putting meaning to these items in a new way. You’re reflecting and taking that time to work out new items of knowledge so that you’re actually aiding in the learning process rather than letting these experiences happen and not making any significant meaning out of them for you to use in the future. Anyways, I realized that while I’ve been practicing this and aiding in my knowledge in a visual way, rarely do I take the time to write on here and really work out my thoughts. I want to start doing this on a more regular basis. I firmly believe after my research that doing this will significantly impact the personal learning potential that the blogging process has. I hope I impressed you with that professional research-lady sentence. Hah. This has probably already been one of the more cathartic posts that I’ve done in the past couple months. It’s not going to be perfect—I’m new at this writing thing. I’m akward in my opinions and jumble my thoughts, and probably won’t make many points for the first few of these. The important thing is that I’m trying, and it’s an experiment to test out if this research really has any ground. Have any of you been doing this? I seriously applaud you if you’ve read this far ;) Have you noticed that when you take the time to reflect on your blog that those reflections have had an impact in your life beyond the post? I’m so curious about how this effects the learning process, and I’d love to hear from you!

Cheers to our journeys, friends! Thank you thank you for sticking with me on this one. It’s going to be a fun ride, I think.

PS: I’d really like to give a shout out to my girl Katelyn Brooke. She gifted me a coveted dribble invite, and I’m excited to get started and see how this venue aids in the creative process as well! I haven’t posted anything yet, but if you want to follow me now, I promise to get some process and goodies up there shortly. Are you on dribble? Let’s be friends! xoxo

OK, for reals signing off now.

All photos taken by Kelsey Cronkhite specifically for Pinegate Road