While work on classes and other UTD-related activities took up most of my time for the past five years, that’s not to say it took up all of it. Some of the, in my opinion, coolest stuff I was able to do took place outside of the coffers of the university. That includes:
• Creating rudimentary videos with animations. Over the years, I wanted to visualize opinions I had about Eurovision, and began to create videos to rank all the competing songs. It became a tradition for me that I continued up through 2018, and I’ve included the final two I made below.
• I enjoyed getting involved with Eurovision sites whose content and communities I appreciated, which led me to create and organize different events in a digital space. One of those was an NCAA Tournament-style knock out game for the songs in Eurovision 2017, where I ran all polls and created graphics for each step.
• For the first two years of college, I created and managed an online song contest for Eurovision fans, where each player could submit a song to represent a country and vote on other songs. Eventually, I had to relinquish control to a friend, as school became more important, but I’m proud of the legacy I created. Fête de la Chanson still exists in my heart, I suppose.
• In 2016, I collaborated with a friend of mine to complete the layout for a 40-page digital fan magazine. As one of the largest-scale design projects I’d been lucky enough to work on at the time, I was proud of what I did, and the zine is still available here.