After a clean weekend of sendy skiing with some of the Compass gang (Matt and Guillaume), the hectic and chaotic era of the ski bum chapter is closed, and we're back to the equilibrium. Given the amount of skiing I did this weekend, I'm giving myself at least today, and possibly tomorrow (depending on how my body feels) to recover, and focusing on some of the other parts of life.

Cleaning

Since the lads came the day after I got back from Canada, and I also left to Canada in a bit of a hurry, the pad has been an absolute pigsty. It took a couple hours, but locking in and tidying up everything felt great - a load lifted off my chest. There's an idea that a messy environment negatively affects psychological state (which often leads to a vicious cycle, since negative psychological states induce messy environments), and I definitely can attest that I feel much lighter and better after cleaning everything.

Coffee exploration

I had a nice cup of espresso in Canmore that reignited my interest in exploring coffee more. Before, I thought the additional time and capital cost wasn't worth it, but I think exploring and learning more about it is beneficial in and of itself. To that end, I bought a bag of beans from that coffee shop in Canmore, and I also bought some whole beans roasted here in Utah from Costco as well. Ideally I'll get an espresso machine once I move to a more permanent setup, but as of right now, I'm primarily using the pour-over V60 clone I bought off Amazon a couple years ago. I did also buy an Aeropress, but I haven't used it yet (too lazy to clean it).

Tried it out today for the first time with a grinder I bought as well, set at 20/30 coarseness.

Trying to get into coffee is a bit of a lost cause for me, to be perfectly honest, because I have a really bad sense of smell, and so much of coffee appreciation is the smell. Even then, I think there's a lot of taste that also drives good vs. bad coffee, and I want to get to a point where I can brew a really nice cup of coffee for myself (although to be honest, this cofffee didn't feel that different from the shitty preground coffee I've been using up until now). Even still, there's a certain feeling of satisfaction from personally grinding your own beans and brewing the coffee yourself, and I enjoyed this cup while looking out at the Oquirrh range.

Sinosphere seals

One thing I've always been fascinated by are the seals used in the Sinosphere. I actually had a couple made for myself and some friends in 2023 that I bought off of Naver while in Korea.

One of the longer-term visions with this "website" is to extend it to a personal brand: Jisu Studio. I felt inspired yesterday to really lock in and build out one of the fundamentals of the brand, the "logo". I wanted the logo to be a seal that could be applied to anything, whether it's a sheet of calligraphy, a machined metal product, or even the favicon on my website. I hate badly designed and badly executed logos, so I really wanted this one to be clean.

What's in a name

To design a seal, I first had to come up with a clean name for my "brand". I had mused upon this earlier in my Utah chapter, landing on 智洙文室, but I didn't feel super satisfied with it. The chunk 文室 didn't feel right, and this was confirmed by the fact that a Google search only yields ancient Chinese figures, and the pinyin keyboard doesn't even recognize it. After some GPT'ing, I landed on 工房 instead. It's not the most canonical phrase for what a "studio" should be in Chinese or Korean, but I personally like the sound, look, and feel of the characters. Funny enough, I do think it makes the most sense in Japanese, where こうぼう really does mean an artist's studio / workshop, according to Wiktionary.

After choosing the characters for the brand, I started to workshop different ways to design the seal, including how to turn it into a circular seal as well.

Graphic design

To actually come up with the seal design, I used a site called hanziyuan.net, which has a bunch of scans of different stages of Chinese characters. It's honestly really sick to think how these characters that make up a modern language have a direct artistic / design lineage to pictograms made by people thousands of years ago, and tracing that lineage is super fun. The site has a section for seal characters and 六書通 characters, which I used as inspiration for my own designs. After coming up with the initial design, I moved to the digital world to make a clean version of it. I had Claude set up a basic SVG grid, and drew out different versions of the seal with Inkscape. The first version I made was decent, but I lowkey wrote the 洙 wrong, and I didn't like how I designed the 智 as well.

After some more finagling, I came up with a clean SVG version of what the different paths should look like, but still wanted to do a little bit of refinement. Since SVGs encode the actual start and end points of paths in space, you can use it as the template and apply additional transformations to get it to the final design that you want.

Based on the template, I then had Claude generate a project that would let me play around with some of the different parameters for the seal (e.g., line width, how rounded the edges are, creating a negative-space version) as well as creating a circular seal from the original square design, which you can find here. Still a WIP on how exactly I want the seal to look, but I think this is a great start.

Again, this is still WIP, and I'm sure the character design itself isn't canonical to a true Chinese-character seal, but this isn't supposed to be a legal extension of my authority, but simply a design project for a logo for my brand, so I'm OK with some inaccuracies, as long as it looks sick.