Chicken Soup

Since an early age, I’ve been waking up at the crack of dawn. I come from a long line of early risers. My mother was a schoolteacher who woke up every morning around 5. My grandmother lives in England, and honestly, I don’t know her sleeping habits but whenever she visited during the holidays, she’d be up just as early as my mother, sipping her morning tea. Before I moved to America, I lived with my great grandmother in Jamaica. I don’t remember much about those times, but I do know Mama didn’t take no mess, and she probably had us all up before the cock even waddled its way out the chicken coop. The point I’m trying to make here is I get up early.

When I worked full-time, my days began with the typical morning routine, followed by a few minutes on the computer, checking email and reading the latest headlines. Rarely was there time to sit and recharge my senses, as your Yogi might say. These days are a little different. My predisposition to waking up early, coupled with the fact that I now work at a tiny workspace in the corner of my room, allows my mornings almost infinite possibilities. Some mornings I wake up, immediately walk to my lonely acoustic guitar and awkwardly, though passionately, finger my way through my paltry repertoire of nineties pop songs. Other mornings, I walk straight to my desk and resume working on whatever project I had been tinkering with the night before. And then there are mornings like these. The mornings you wake up and you’re so inspired you want to call radio stations. Well, not really.

Anyway, some mornings you get up feeling like TODAY I WILL DO SOMETHING GOOD. Those mornings pretty much anything you come across has the potential to inspire. Combine that with a healthy blog-reading habit and you’ve got the recipe for a Chicken Soup For The Soul kind of day. If you’ve ever read any of those books, you know that nothing inspires people more than other people’s stories. Well, this morning while browsing Design Observer (I read other blogs but Design Observer is just so good!), I came across this interview with designer, Carin Goldberg, from Success Secrets of the Graphic Design Superstars, a blog whose namesake pretty much sums up its content. Goldberg is one of my favorite designers. She’s designed hundreds of book covers, some of which I have here on my bookshelf (love these!). Her work is so inspiring to me because it appears to come from a deep understanding of design history, as well as a highly conceptual thought process. Not only that, she does what I want to do: work with writers. Every time I look at her work, I get that warm feeling inside about the possibilities of my career as a designer. Yeah, it’s being sentimental, but as the poet Beau Sia once championed, “WHAT’S WRONG WITH SENTIMENTAL?”

Get some chicken soup here
then
Go see Carin Goldberg’s work here