Ethan Bodnar    |    Designer and Student
  • Awesome day in New York City this past Friday! Checked out the Skillshare office and got to meet their team and then attended their Penny Conference. Skillshare allows you to “learn anything from anyone, anywhere” through their online community that facilitates classes happening around our cities.

  • Re-imagining the future of higher education this past weekend with The Third Teacher and Cannon Design was a remarkable experience. Lots of amazing people, new friends and old friends, and my first time to Chicago!

  • I’m very excited to announce Spark, my senior project which is all about learning through creativity and curiosity. We are building a toolkit to prompt and inspire creativity in the classroom. 

    Lots more coming soon, in the mean time check out the inspiration and trend watching blog. And don’t forget to sign up to be notified when we launch on Kickstarter.

  • It was exciting to teach my first Skillshare class on making your own portfolio website at the Hartford Art School. You can view the presentation here.

    Once you make your work, whether you are a painter or a sculptor, the next step is to get your work out there and share it with the world. This presentation will provide an introduction to creating your own portfolio website. 

  • It was great to return to EduCon again this year. David Bill and I gave a workshop on bringing design thinking into education. Also, nice to see a bunch of friends and past collaborators.

  • "Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in. We make our world what it is and we become the kind of people who live in it."

    Wilson Miner, talk from Build, quote found at A List Apart

  • On the first day back from Winter Break, we visited the Community Farm of Simsbury as part of the first project for the Issues in Design class that I’m a teaching assistant for.

    [I’ve been taking a lot of photos with Instagram lately, and so I’m going to try out a new kind of blog post where I re-cap some of the experiences that I’ve documented through Instagram. To see all of my Instagram photos, head over here]

  • During our winter break, Jessie and I travelled to California with her mom on a ten day exploration of the San Francisco Bay Area. Being my first time to California, I found it to be a remarkable place, with lots of outdoor adventures and a couple days in the city itself.

  • Merry Christmas! Jessie hand painted me this amazing holiday greeting!

    Merry Christmas! Jessie hand painted me this amazing holiday greeting!

  • Present & Correct is an awesome online store offering a curated selection of paper and office products, some designed by them and others that they have found around the world along with vintage items.



  • Ever since Little Printer from Berg was announced I can’t stop thinking about it. What I find even more interesting is the new platform that it runs on called Berg Cloud, which will have a whole line of products eventually running on it.

    Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.

  • Jessie and I went apple picking and to a corn maze with her mom and cousins. It was my first time to a corn maze, we did pretty good and made it through!



  • Thanks Steve, for inspiring and empowering creativity in all of us, and for everything else.

    The Macintosh was the computer I learned to use Adobe Pagemaker on as a kid and was the first computer I used to connect to the internet using a dial-up modem. I remember watching the above video above at a young age and getting the chills.

  • At Next Chapter we designed the future of K-12 libraries together for three days at the Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia. I was honored to be part of the team that put this event together. Thanks to Laura Deisley, Christian Long, Jeff Sharpe, and David Bill for having me along for the adventure. My role included all the graphic design for the event as well as leading a group of librarians and educators through the design process.

    Photos above by Laura Deisley.

  • We shared ideas over meals and stories around the campfire. We canoed down the river as the sun was coming up and came back for cold showers and hot cups of tea. We planted vegetable seeds. We kneaded bread and cooked it on the fire. We drank Welsh apple cider in the pub late into the night. And we listened to a remarkable set of speakers who inspired us. All of this we did together, as we camped out in the woods and hills of Wales at the Do Lectures.

    There wasn’t time for handing out business cards or checking the internet, instead there were hugs and plenty of dancing. We didn’t have an agenda, but rather we shared what we were passionate about with each other.

    We listened to the sounds of the sheep at night and took in the smells of the tomatoes still on the vine. There was a sense of beauty throughout every experience of the four days. There was a feeling that we were all present.

    I am so grateful to all the new friends that were made, the speakers who inspired us with their stories, and the organizers of such a remarkable event. You can see more photos here and I previously wrote about the Do Lectures with this post.