Greetings!

To keep people warm and cozy this holiday, my cards include a packet of hot cocoa.

Baking + Making

It’s been a while since I’ve baked aggressively, so I was really excited when my mom suggested that we make our gifts for the holiday season. We also thought it’d be nice to customize our labels – so I designed the packages for our homemade goods. It’s been fun looking through our cook books and deciding which recipes to take on.

Holiday Invites

Christmas invitation for the Velarde family gathering.

Typing

Recently, I’ve started a new project– drawing the alphabet. Above are some of my sketches.

Design Ignites Change.

This past spring, during my last semester of college, I participated in Design Ignites Change–an initiative developed by WorldStudio and Adobe Youth Voices to encourage high school and college students to use design to create messages and  solutions to promote positive social change.

I had the opportunity to work with and mentor Rudy Marron, a talented high school student who went to the Paseo Academy in Kansas City, MO. The particular project we worked on required us to design a billboard to promote tolerance within the community. Rudy illustrated a luchador knocking down the words “Don’t tolerate stereotypes”. He wanted to encourage people to not let themselves be defined by negative stereotypes and to rise above those pre-concieved notions.

This fall, the billboard that we worked on for a semester finally went up. It’s 14 feet high and 48 feet wide. It’s really great to know that Rudy’s positive message is out there for everyone to see.

Me and Rudy with his billboard project

SixthSense

Oh, the possibilities!

From Ted Talks:

“This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.”

Blog Blog Blog

It’s really hard for me to imagine that at one point, I was really hesitant about blogging. When I was first asked to create a blog for a design class to document my process and progress work, I thought, “Why can’t I just put all my process and research work in a binder?” I thought it would be a hassle– another thing I had to do and maintain on top of all my projects. Yes, I was unsure about the idea, but it was a class requirement and so I blogged. I blogged my sketches, mind maps, research, thoughts and ideas. I blogged my breakthrough discoveries as well as my failed concepts. I blogged and blogged…and somewhere in between blogging and blogging, I thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad after all. I might even like this”.

Looking back at the several blogs I created while in college, I now see its value and realize that it made me a better student. I could have put all of my process and research work in plastic sleeves and compiled them in a binder and I would have been satisfied with that. However, the main difference between a binder and a blog is that a binder is more enclosed while a blog is more transparent. With my blog, my classmates + professors were able to view and critique my work and at the same time, I was able to be inspired and be motivated by the blogs of my classmates. It was truly amazing how the simple creation of blogs made a big difference– knowledge was spread, ideas were shared, and progress was made.

The best part is that I can now scroll through my past blogs and see that it’s all there– what I was thinking, doing, reading, making and imagining at those particular moments in my life. And so, I’ve decided to start this new blog, “Monina Makes”. I am hoping that this will be a place where I can share my everyday thoughts, discoveries, creations and hopefully, it will also be a place where I and others can learn some things from you.