the taryn zhang blog

My notes from the board meeting:

The corporate lawyer at the end of the table with her nose in her portfolio folder?

Yeah… she’s probably not diligently transcribing everything you say…

After the mind-numbing task of creating every single frame for the [first draft of the] above animation and the [first draft of the] larger-res one that appears on the splash screen, I realized that (1) the square logo kind of resembles the Chinese character for “country,” or guo (total accident/serendipity), and (2) say I really were to run with the whole resembling-the-Chinese-character thing, my [first draft of the] animations animated the drawing of the logo in the wrong stroke order. (See Wiki on Stroke Order.)

The correct stroke order for the character guo is as follows:

In dumb-speak, only three sides of the square are drawn first, then all that interior mumbo jumbo, and then the last bottom line of the square.

My [first draft of the] animations “drew” the entire square first, then filled it in with the T and Z interior mumbo jumbo.

Shouldn’t have been a big deal, especially since I never intended the TZ logo to look like the character guo. Who cares about “the correct stroke order,” or whatever “the correct stroke order” even means? My reluctance to re-do the entire thing convinced me that I did not care.

The effort and energy it took to convince myself that I did not care started giving me anxiety attacks. No, really. So tonight, two glasses of Riesling in, I admitted that I did care. I scrapped the old animations and started over, following the stroke order depicted above, the first three sides of the square, then the interior mumbo jumbo, and then the last bottom line. Bam. Done. No, actually it did not go so fast. It took all night, and I had to stay up past my bedtime.

James, my husband, said that redoing the animations just “to get the stroke order right” was a bit OCD. Well, when you’re doing something for yourself and you know that the result of it will be a reflection of who you are, then you can’t help but be just a bit OCD about a detail like stroke order.

P.S. The above character for guo is not the way I write it, just so that is noted. My heritage is Taiwanese, and so I learned to write Traditional Chinese. The above is the Simplified Chinese way of writing guo. The Traditional character is this:

Prettier, I think, though the stroke order is essentially the same as the Simplified — left, top, right of the square, then all the interior mumbo jumbo, and then the last bottom line.

Full Disclosure: I’m not actually literate in Chinese. Doh! However, I’m trying to change that by learning the language. It’s one of my 2010 resolutions– learn Chinese.

I am reminded again why I love books. You may learn anything you need to learn from books, like fashion and design.

The books that are teaching me more than I ever presumed I would need to know:

Helen J. Armstrong, Patternmaking for Fashion Design (Prentice Hall 3rd ed. 1999);

Gini S. Frings, Fashion: From Concept to Consumer (Prentice Hall 9th ed. 2007);

Sharon L. Tate, Inside Fashion Design (Prentice Hall 5th ed. 2003);

Kathryn McKelvey and Janine Munslow, Fashion Design: Process, Innovation and Practice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); and

Mary Gehlhar, The Fashion Designer Survival Guide (Kaplan Publishing, 2008).

It’s like law school all over again. I’m highlighting passages, placing little color-flag-stickies (I have no idea what they’re formally called) to bookmark the chapters I want to reread, and taking notes. For Gehlhar’s book, I even started an outline.

There is an academic element to fashion and since I lack the degree from a design school, this is my best alternative. I found the titles to these books by searching online for design school syllabuses (or syllabi? apparently both forms of the plural are correct) and noting the required readings posted by the instructors. The above five books were the ones I decided on.

Samples production for the Alpha Collection isn’t even complete yet and I am already eager to apply the knowledge I’ve learned from these books to design the Beta Collection. Nuts.

Yes. Taylor Swift inspires me. And?!

When I first married my husband, I contemplated changing my name, except if I did, I’d forever be mispronouncing my own name. I cannot pronounce “Zhang” correctly. My husband and his family pronounce it something akin to “Jrrohhng.” My tongue hurts when I try to pronounce it that way. So I say “Zayng,” like zany with a twang.

Wrong or right, that is how I pronounce it. Zany with a twang. And that’s how anybody trying to say Taryn Zhang should say the Zhang.

As for Taryn, some say tear-in, like tear my heart to shreds, while I say tahr-en. It’s softer sounding. Tar, like the viscous black stuff. En, like enchant, or entice. Tahr-en Zayng.

In Chinese, the name of the brand is pronouned “da lun,” my mother’s best transliteration for Taryn. Normal this name is not! The majority of the native Chinese population would wring their faces at the juxtaposition of those two characters and look puzzled. However, I love the poetry of the name, and the meaning behind it.

Also, not sure if anybody noticed this, but I thought I’d be cute by drawing the first character “da” in “da lun” on one of my two-dimensional models from the previous post. I drew it from memory (while sick with the flu; that’s my excuse!) and it turns out it was wrong. In fact, I had drawn a completely different word.

See the error? The top square thing isn’t connected to the bottom line like I had done on the model’s tee. Oops! =P