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Memorial Minimalism in Design

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

Yesterday, Dave & I took a drive from Fredericksburg to Lexington, Va. It was a beautiful day for that scenic drive. On the way back, near sunset, we stopped at one of the established “scenic overlooks” along I-64 near Afton Mountain, outside of Charlottesville. Here we found the VDOT Workers’ Memorial.

VDOT Workers Memorial

This monument, built solely with donations, serves to honor state highway transportation workers who died performing their jobs, many in work-zone accidents. The design of this memorial is an uncomplicated and dignified. Carved in black, white, and gray granite, it depicts three profiles or silhouettes of workers, symbolizing the diversity of the VDOT workforce. A simple, minimalist design, chosen from 41 entries, was submitted by Fredericksburg District Location and Design Engineer Harry Lee and his daughter, Stephanie, a studio arts senior at Mary Washington College at the time. Standing against the majestic scenery of the mountains and valley below, and beautifully landscaped with colorful flowers, this commemorative shrine is a perfect example of the power of minimalist design.

 

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Postcard from the Edge

Friday, June 15th, 2012

I always liked the idea of someone being at the very edge of things and sending back a postcard. I’m never sure if it is because they want others to join them, wish they were back home, or just excited to see how the world barrels over the edge into a pool of oblivion.

None the less, one of the design challenges this week was to create a postcard from a magical place. Specific to Camp Magic MacGuffin style, it needed to be from our Minecraft camp. So, I ventured over to Bunk House X. BH X is the fabled, mysterious and cantankerous island of veteran DS106er’s. Not unlike the Island of Misfit Toys and certainly with more curmudgeony goodness.

So, I find this dragon which is probably the coolest little piece of Minecraft art going (no dig on the others) and grab a screenshot. The hardest part was trying to find the dang screenshot from Minecraft. The instructions from class were spot on but the navigation needed to be entered into a browser window. Then BLAMMO!

So, here is 2 stars of this week’s 10-star design assignment challenge.

Posted in bunk2, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments363, ds106, Magic MacGuffin, magicmacguffin, minecraft, openonline | Comments Off on Postcard from the Edge

Domineering Downtown Dwelling

Friday, June 15th, 2012

Dominance simply sounds like a controlling, authoritative word. In design, it holds the same meaning. Creating dominance in design makes creative use of size, color, density, value, and white space to create the effect of one object being larger than others, hogging the space, begging for attention.

Domineering Downtown Dwelling

In this image of a building on Princess Anne Street in downtown Fredericksburg, the building and, more specifically the windows in the building, use size and perspective to create the effect of dominance. The building is ruling the lamppost! The post is actually in the foreground. I was standing on the street corner, looking up with the lamppost only an arm’s-length away from me. Perhaps a change of angle to emphasize the lamppost would turn the tables on that building then the lamppost could dominate the building!

 

 

Posted in bunk2, Design Safari, designblitz, ds106, ds106 Reflections, magicmacguffin, umwsum12 | Comments Off on Domineering Downtown Dwelling

ballgame. Daily Create 158: Take a picture of something that…

Friday, June 15th, 2012



ballgame. Daily Create 158: Take a picture of something that reminds you of your childhood. (Taken with Instagram)

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Create Your Own Smartphone App

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Create Your Own Smartphone App — MISSION: DS106

Although it seems like smartphones can do anything these days, every iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry owner can think of one thing they wish they’re phone could do. Well here’s your chance. Come up with your dream application and then create a picture that encompasses what the App would do. It could be something feasible or something completely out of this world. Maybe someone will even be daring enough to try to make your idea into a real app and make millions! Have fun with it.

A week or two ago I made a simple Remember to Create Daily web app for iphones. If I was a real developer I’d take this a bit further and make a TDC app that could submit to Flickr, youtube and soundcloud. It would let you pick pictures and photos from your camera roll and record audio directly.

The app would post and tag the media to the appropriate service. It would optionally post to your own WordPress or posterous (and anything else with an API). In doing this it might be that the DS106 organisers would encourage the use of a ds106 tag for things participants want in the main DS106 stream, this might not include the daily stuff.

Most of the inspiration for this comes from the MakeWaves app, this is one for school pupils. It is the only blogging app that allows you to post audio as well as the more usually supported images and video. I reviewed Makewaves on my main blog: Making Waves

I though I was going to bang out a series of screens for this assignment, the audio capture, the settings screen etc. As I started I realised that this would take a great deal of thought and many days. I just stuck to the first screen. I grabbed the icons from the Noun Project. These downloaded as svg files. I had to use Gimp to open these, I then copied them and pasted into Fireworks 8. Even this one screen could do with a lot more thought. The spacing and positioning of elements, choice of icon and workflows all would need careful consideration.

My other ideal app would be a journey teller, this would combine the above with a gps tracker and create a series of ‘post’ which would be placed on a map when published, (or viewed with maps in the post) I’ve messed about with such things before: Boos on a map and A Mapped Walk for example. But it is a fairly long drawn out process. I’d love to do this on the fly without having to do any work on returning home, again I’d like image, video and audio support. The app would have to be able to store the information when there was a poor or no signal.

Posted in Assignment, bunk2, DesignAssignments, DesignAssignments525, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on Create Your Own Smartphone App

Surreal Moments

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

So I’m sitting here at Toronto International Pearson Airport en route to Vancouver for Northern Voice, grabbing a bite to eat. On the television, Germany beats the Netherlands in football. Passersby stop to watch momentarily.

I’m not watching the soccer game, however, I am tuned into http://nmc12.umwblogs.org/ and the surreal moment of my twitter and professional networks colliding and watching @timmmmyboy @grantpotter @rushaw present at the #nmc12 conference while @heloukee and @allyson1969 shake hands.

Then.

I look down to my beer and what. the. >???????

um. excuse me, waiter, what is Slide Guy doing in my beer?


cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

The backstroke?

Posted in bunk2, counselor, ds106, magicmacguffin, NorthernVoice, nv12, openlearning, openonline, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments595 | Comments Off on Surreal Moments

I got this picture from google

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

What is Creative Commons?
What is Creative Commons? | Flickr – Photo Sharing! by Enokson

I’ve been using Creative Commons media since I discovered the web 2 world. It makes perfect sense to me. I’ve just added the same license to this blog Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License as I use on my ‘real blog‘ I slap a straight Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike on my flickr photos.

I was annoyed when this one, cables, was used Is this theft?, not because I wanted money, but I just like the idea of sharing. That one broke the Noncommercial bit. I never did hear from them.

On the other hand, someone mailed me through flickr mail and asked if they could use this photo in a book, I was delighted. I got a book, but no cash crossed my hands.

As a primary teacher I always found it hard to teach attribution to young (say 10 year olds). Sometimes I though they had got it, but then thy would attribute photos that wee not marked as reusable. I recall one pupil, very pleased with a blog post who attributed: I got this picture from google.
At that point I decided there should be a wee kids license, this would allow youngster to attribute all the various license, CC, GLP etc as used under the wee kids, I don’t fully understand copyright but I am trying license.
Once I though I had the perfect chance to explain. I found that several My Space (remember that) sites were hot linking blog headers my pupils had made as backgrounds. I hoped to engender some indignation. On showing the class the response I got was COOL!
The other thing I did to try and help young pupils attribute was to make a variation of the flickr search sites. A flickr CC search toy. This you search for CC flickr photos, it gives you the embed code with attribution (unlike Flickr’s own, which just links. It also will produce a photo with the attribution stamped onto it. Hopefully making it much easier for primary pupils to find images and use them while helping attribute.

The Stamping option produces a photo like the one above, adding a strip of attribution to the bottom.
(The coding and design of A flickr CC search toy is pretty horrible, but I think it does what I wanted it to do.)

Posted in bunk2, creativecommons, ds106cc, flickr, magicmacguffin, openonline | Comments Off on I got this picture from google

Jeep – Daily Create 156: Eyes closed creativity. Close your…

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012



Jeep – Daily Create 156: Eyes closed creativity. Close your eyes and draw an everyday object. No peeking! (Taken with Instagram)

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My Week in Review (Week 3)

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

Wow, was it a busy week! I may have bitten off more than I can chew this Summer but I’m trying hard to stay on top of everything. In addition to ds106, I am also taking a course at Germanna Community College to fill in some outstanding general elective requirements. That course is fairly easy for me and not too time consuming…at least not yet. I intended to take a third online course this summer as well, but I am seriously rethinking that idea! As desperately as I want to finish my coursework and graduate next May from UMW, I don’t want to set myself up to fail or lower my GPA. Yeah, I know I am hard on myself about my academics, but it’s too important to me not to be. Anything worth doing is worth doing right!

And when it rains it pours! Work has been a little hectic as I am now the only Proposal Manager still standing in our organization. One quit and walked out, the other just went out on medical leave for an undetermined amount of time. I am frantically trying to carry my workload and get up to speed and assume their former projects as well. I hope my upper management hires the replacement as soon as possible—I’m not sure how long I can keep all the balls in the air without dropping something.

The good news is that as busy and work-intensive as I am finding ds106 to be, I am thoroughly enjoying it! It is providing me the opportunity (ok, really the requirement) to be creative and contemplate things around me differently. I am still a little behind the curve, I think, due to my learning curve on some of the technologies and tools involved here, but I am having a blast learning this way.

So what have I accomplished this week, you ask? Well, here’s a rundown:

  • I managed the complete 5 of the 7 Daily Creates (tdc). My original goal was to complete them all but I intentional skipped the sound recording one, and the other, I just didn’t get to on Sunday. If my schedule ever opens up and I get a grip on this camp, I might go back and do some of the ones I missed. I especially enjoy the photography challenges. The photography tips tricks and hints were very helpful in getting better photo compilations. If you haven’t been following along daily, you can see a review of my tdc submissions from Week 3 in my last post: A Daily Dose of Creative Photography
  • For Visual Assignments, the requirement was do complete and blog 10 “stars” worth of project (or I like to think of them as challenges) from the ds106 Assignment Repository. Again, I wanted to do more, but time is my biggest hurdle these days. And since I haven’t done a lot of photo editing before, learning the ins and outs of some of the programs has been challenging and time consuming. I think my favorite to do was If you’ve got them… followed by Seasonally Friendly?. The Average of Lily and The First to Admit It (Checking Out) were fun and fairly easy to do, but it didn’t include any “original” work on my part…just following instruction and seeing want happens! I’ve had a little blogging trouble that apparently left Art that Pops sitting in a draft vortex way too long, but I realized it was missing and was able to publish it this morning.
  • I got Google Reader up and running and subscribed to all the ds106 blogs, but I am ashamed to admit I have not been as active commenting on my bunkmates’ and fellow campers’ blogs and assignments as I should be and/or WANT to be. I need to step it up a notch there!
  • I have also spent a significant amount of time this week investigating many photo editing tools, including web-based tools (Fotoflexer, Pixlr), free download software (Picasa, GIMP), and iPhone/iPad apps (Snapseed, Photoshop Express). It’s been a lot of fun playing with them. My strategy is to write a tutorial or two, showcasing a tool that hasn’t already been described in past tutorials. Especially for those of us who can’t afford to invest in PhotoShop or want to have a mobile option through apps.

I’m proud of this week’s accomplishments, but I’ve run into trouble along the way and getting lost in the forest once or twice. I will give Jim Groom props for twittering me a few links to help me with my blogging issues on Saturday. I’ve been having some issues with sizing photos in my posts. I *think* I may have figured it out, but we’ll see…

I usually avoid any and all virtual worlds, simply because my real world keeps me busy enough that I don’t have time to run a fake one! I briefly dabbled in Farmville, but gave it up when I couldn’t keep up and my crops kept withering! So Minecraft is foreign territory to me!!! I got it installed, but I am completely lost at how to move around, do anything, or find anything, or anybody for that matter. I need to do some further research on how to work that world! Maybe I can get in there with someone else, who knows what they’re doing, to help me figure out the basics. Since our next Campfire is being held in there…and finally at a time I can join…I guess I better get it figured out fast!

That’s all for now…marching forward with week 4….

Posted in bunk2, ds106, magicmacguffin, umwsum12, weeklyletter | Comments Off on My Week in Review (Week 3)

A Daily Dose of Creative Photography

Tuesday, June 12th, 2012

I tried a different approach this week for blogging my Daily Creates. Instead of blogging them one at a time, as I completed them, I am showcasing the whole collection here this week. I have been twittering the Flickr links each day but I will probably return to blogging each one separately in the future (in addition to twittering, of course!).

After camp announcements were posted on Monday, I did a little research and just kept clicking links, following a crazy curve path through the Web, absorbing as many tricks, tips, and hints as I could. The photography resources the Directors provided were great! I’m really learning to work my new digital camera as well as my iPhone camera! I learned some pretty cool ways to add interest and intrigue through photography. For instance, some of my favorite, most helpful lessons  were:

  • Take photos of anything, ugly things, everyday things (anyone looking at my memory card might think a two-year-old was playing with it! LoL)
  • Change positions with your body to change perspective (I have stopped trying to center subject from straight on)
  • Keep all photos, even bad ones (I keep thinking these might be useful later)
  • Shoot like you don’t have Photoshop (I don’t so that’s easy, but my goal when photographing is to not think about editing the shots. I’m trying to get the shot I want with JUST the camera)
  • Always carry a camera with you and use multiple cameras (I’m now carrying two with my everywhere—my iPhone and my Canon PowerShot 260SX. I find myself stopping to take pics that I wouldn’t have bothered with before)
  • Last but not least…use the “grid” and “rule of thirds”. (this is helping me get more interesting and creative shots J)

And now for the instant replay:

tdc148—Create a photograph today where some/all of your subject isn’t in focus.

Cloudy Canine

You’ve met Duke in previous photo assignments. Here’s Gracie, my other Golden. Cloudy and out of focus. Had to play with the camera a bit, using the fish-eye lens, I had to be quick to beat the auto focus feature. Took me a while to get it but I had fun trying!

tdc149—ds106 day in your life – Take a photo at 6 minutes past the hour for an entire day.

Pix @ Six

I had a few ideas about how to do this one, so all day I took a few shots at 6 minutes past every hour. This way good or bad photos, I would be able to figure out what to do with them at the end of the day. Ultimately, I had to nix my original idea, which was to replay the numbers on a clock face with an image that I took at the corresponding hour. It was getting late and I was having trouble getting GIMP to cooperate with me to create the final image I wanted, so I changed in up a bit. In this collage, I show an image of a timekeeping device near me, displaying the time at xx:06 every hour for 12 hours.

tdc150—Make a monochrome photo (monochrome doesn’t have to mean black and white)

Mayan Calendar

In making a monochrome photo, I decided to attempt to actually take a monochrome photo, instead of using filters, B&W, sepia, or photo editing software. After wandering around my house and yard, taking a dozen or so options, I think this is it. A zoomed in pic of the Mayan calendar wall sculpture I bought in Mexico a few years ago. This is where some of the photography tips kicked in! Instead of showing the whole sculpture, I zoomed in on an interesting portion of it and used the Rule of Thirds to make it interesting and unusual.

tdc151—Take a photo of something that you are envious of (physical or metaphorical).

Beautiful Drive

The topic for this one gave me a lot of trouble. I was at a loss for ideas; so much so that I almost skipped it. But on my way home for work that day, I passed the entrance to Curtis Park in Stafford, Va. I have always loved the look and feel of a long, mature, tree-lined drive. Inspiration struck! I pulled over and started shooting (photos!). I played with angles and lighting, taking many pics so I would have at least a few good ones to work with. I chose this one because it captures the calm, serene feeling that I so envy and desire in the grand entrance to my home, my haven.

tdc153—Take a photo of the oldest building near you; use add filters to make your photo look even older.

The Lewis Store (est 1749)

This was Saturday’s Daily Create. I was just getting ready to leave for my historic downtown Fredericksburg Photoshop, when I saw it pop up on Twitter. I stop to do a little internet investigation. Knowing there are so many old, historic buildings there, I was curious to know…exacting which one IS the oldest. The answer is The Lewis Store, built in 1749. It is not only the oldest building in Fredericksburg, Virginia, but one of the oldest retail buildings in the United States. It sits at the corner of Caroline Street and Lewis Street. Again, I follow some of the photography guidelines I learned this week and took many photos, at  different angles and depths, with different lighting. I was tempted to edit out the street signs, to give it a “less modern-day” look, but decided to keep the integrity of the image intact, just playing with the sepia filter to give it an antique feel.                 

 

Posted in bunk2, ds106, magicmacguffin, tdc148, tdc149, tdc150, tdc151, tdc153, umwsum12 | Comments Off on A Daily Dose of Creative Photography

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