When The Functional Art was launched, I went through my RSS feed to identify the bloggers I should send review copies to. I also used Google's Blogsearch to find those that I was missing. The most captivating blog among the ones I had never heard of was not written by a professional, but by a graduate student at Ohio University, Karla Sanders. The blog was titled Wind Arose.
Wind Arose got my attention thanks to its slightly chaotic combination of posts about environmental communication, visual arts, information graphics, and cartography. Even if it was clearly a student's personal website —and it wasn't likely to attract a large readership— I decided that I wanted Karla to have a copy of my book. I asked Peachpit to send her one.
Wind Arose has not been updated since August 2012, and I've just learned why. Karla spent a year in Europe and has recently moved to Colombia to open a graphic design studio, Consider Your Story. Here's a portion of her e-mail:
"This note is quite belated, but I want to greatly thank you for your generosity. I hope to reciprocate your gift by also helping a younger designer one day,"That second sentence made my day. A good life can be based on just trying to make oneself worthy of words like those, I believe. Thanks so much, Karla and Andrés.
