Issue 3 — The Shopify ✹Course
Hi! It's been a while since I last sent out a newsletter—almost 2 years, to be exact.
Some of you may have subscribed to this newsletter for my kintsugi practice, the Intro to Coding for Designers course at Index, or because I know you IRL. 👋 Hello to everyone who is reading this, no matter where you came from! Thank you for tuning in and reading this newsletter.
🪴 writing again
I've started blogging again, partially in response to Threads and Twitter (I mean "X"), but mostly because I've felt social media malaise for years. That means I'll be sending out this newsletter more often! Please reply to this newsletter with your thoughts, or say hi on my blog's guestbook.
🛍 shopify course
The biggest announcement I have is... The Shopify ✹Course is open for enrollment! For the last two years, this course taken up so much of my brain, my heart, and my energy. Now that the course is launching, I can free up some of this energy and start interacting with students! It's a great feeling.
Here's the official signup page. Sign up by August 24th, and class starts August 25th! Curriculum is self-paced but there are live monthly workshops and weekly office hours with me. If you sign up, tell ilovecreatives that I sent you by selecting me as a referral source on the checkout page.
More behind the scenes info in this blog post.
🚛 focusing on education
This course launch marks a turning point for me—instead of primarily working in client services, I'm serving the people who work in client services. I'm calling it "client services services" 😂
Bad jokes aside, I want to focus more on creating educational content and resources to make designers and developers' lives easier. Maybe that's workshops, templates, articles, videos... I'm ready to try out new mediums.
I'm still doing client work selectively. At the moment, the only client project I'm working on is a redesign of Song Tea & Ceramics (coming soon!) This is an absolute dream project—I drink their tea daily, recommend it to everyone, and I've known the team since I first started working at their family shop when I was 18.
The theme of this summer is freeing up my energy to work on things I'm passionate about.
👾 generative art
If you've seen my Instagram (or my are.na), then you know that I got obsessed with Dall-E when it launched. That obsession has cooled down a lot, mostly because the resolution is too low for good prints, and concerns over copyright of the training images make me feel uncomfortable doing anything commercial with these images.
I made this computer in a garden image with Photoshop Beta Generative Fill, which is supposed to be better than the competition because it only uses stock photos for training, and has theoretically cleared the copyright issues by purchasing licenses. It's not bad, but still only makes 1024x1024 images.
If you're worried about artist rights, I think Photoshop is the way to go. But it still raises a ton of ethical questions, many of them shared by employees of Adobe.
I'm stepping back from this debate and refraining from using these in commercial projects. I ultimately decided that the only acceptable way to use these new tools is to generate Soundcloud thumbnails... and I guess personal email newsletter images!
Despite the ethical conundrum and the proliferation of scammy AI services, I still find generative art to be very fun. I like running DiffusionBee while I watch TV, then I can edit the prompt and re-generate a batch between episodes to get ideas or inspiration. Seeing what a computer thinks humans want to see is fascinating.
📖 from the blog
Here are some articles from megu.space (my old digital garden blog, will be forwarding over to my new blog soon):
and a post from garden.megumi.co, my new blog:
🥬 food for thought
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty burnt out on creating new social media accounts. Until the dust settles (I'm buckling up for a wild couple years of new apps and platform wars), I'm going to be hanging out on my blog and email newsletter, where I have complete control over how my thoughts are presented and discovered. If you crave stability, maybe you should write a newsletter too! If you do, please send me a link :)
🌱 signing off
That's all for this issue! See you next time!
– Megumi