I chose the back ground image because ever since I was a small child, coloring has been a fun and most times therapeutic hobby. I was taught how to color by my grandmother. I remember her sitting me down on the floor with a coloring book and large bucket of crayons. She instructed, “Now, be careful, stay inside the lines.” Yet, the joy of a creative mind is finding ways to purposefully stray outside those lines. Rebel against what is normal. The whole premise of Creative Commons is a community that creates new things and shares their creativity with the world. So why should we color inside the lines, stick to the mainstream notions that the sky is blue, and bottle the creative juices inside?
“Sharing is Caring,” words my mother instilled in me a long time ago. I found this picture on the Creative Commons website and it looked as if all the origami birds are looking over and reviewing something. That is where I got the idea of ”Flocking Together.. Sharing Ideas.” I also like how each bird is a different color and for my it symbolized different cultures. Or maybe I just read in to it a little too much.
I feel that this picture really shows what the Creative Commons is about. I know it’s a tad bit corny, but a bunch of birds together is a flock, and the creative commons allows you to share work with many people. Sometimes when sharing things you have to be sure that you aren’t doing anything illegal and I believe the Creative Commons allows you to share works without the fear of being punished.
I used a picture that I took last year for this assignment. In Word, I used Word Art to create the caption. Then, in Photoshop, added the two together.
This picture was from a family vacation to Panama. We were driving out to a rural coastal town and stopped at an open air restaurant on the way. Surprise, they had toucans! I was fascinated because I had never actually seen a real toucan before. The toucans, however, were more fascinated by the skirt I was wearing. The caption came to me instantly. If I think of toucans my mind immediately goes to Toucan Sam and his Froot Loops. Now, with the caption in place, the entire meaning of the picture has changed. The attitude of this avian went from inquisitive to impatient. Obviously, Toucan Sam also has relatives that he doesn’t like to talk about.
We are very busy this week at Camp McGuffin, with design assignments, the Design Safari, the research on Creative Commons and all the readings we need to do.
I am also really, really busy at work, so I’ll keep this post short.
The picture you see above is the one I chose for my Creative Commons Poster. In this assignment, our task was to use a Creative Commons licensed image to design a poster about how cool Creative Commons is.
I started with the image above and, using Pic Monkey, I created this:
I tried to make that outer frame similar to the inner one. I hope the message is clear – this is what I feel Creative Commons can do for you if you CC your images or lesson plans. If they appear on other people’s blogs and Facebook profiles and the attribution leads back to you, more people will see your work. Isn’t that what the internet is all about?
Thank you, Creative Commons, for being there for all of us. And big thanks to everybody who decides to share their work with others through a CC licence.
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.
Inspired by several campers’ lyric typography posters (2 stars), I decided to go back to this assignment. I passed over it during my design sprint because the first few ideas I tried didn’t work – I wanted to do something purely typographical with the background color being the only non-textual adornment. I couldn’t pull it off by myself. I didn’t really get the examples, which looked good, but didn’t always marry the lyrics and designs in ways I could grok.
My subconscious kicked around a few ideas – I wanted to do something with Radiohead; I played our Florence + the Machine CD on today’s drive to Grammy and Poppy’s.
Here’s what I came up with while working entirely in Acorn.
Florence + the Machine
First, I tackled this Florence + the Machine poster. I had originally thought about using inverted carrots to make teeth for the dog days, but then I decided to try coding some impact into the poster. I used a bold Rockwell font to lend weight and vibrancy to happiness and a few other bits of text. I threw in a bracket and a wide-stanced Bank Gothic font for the hit. I used Cracked (always stop at 3 fonts, Chad!) for “bullet” and rotated some forward and backward slashes to suggest a spider-web of stress fractures from a bullet hole in the middle of the “b”. I also left “bullet” in all lower case to contrast it against the other lines of text which are all capital. Finally, I kerned the last line to -12 (I go past the absolute value of 11) so I could have the text wind back on itself and fit the bottom of the page. I also split it into “in the b” and “ack” so I could make it wind back in a less predictable way. I like the gap. I think it helps punctuate a kind of hard return and possibility of escape up or down the page in the recursive loop that the last line creates. Maybe that’s where the happiness-bullet hole is.
I also worked on a Radiohead poster combining the colors and sans-serif-ness of the In Rainbows album typography (I used a bold Euphemia UCAS font) with lyrics from “Fake Plastic Trees.”
I decided to repeat the line about the town getting rid of itself, omitting one word per iteration so that the quote would get rid of itself. I put the text in a box that takes up most of the page, sized the text to fill the box, and let the line breaks take care of themselves to approximate the random aesthetic common to many pieces of Radiohead art and web design. I love the way the last line doubles itself while disappearing itself. The last bar of background is white to complete the vanishing and create some ambiguity about whether or not there is anything there in an invisible, white font.
Here’s the poster:
Radiohead
I’m very glad I found a way back into this assignment. Thanks, ds106 campers! Learning in community!
In gratitude, let me share this wicked pair of multi-layer stencils of Thom Yorke that a student did as a learning project this year.
I created this in Word by inserting the images. After each insert, I went under Wrap Text and chose Tight. This allows the image to be moved around the page, rather than be treated like regular text. To upload the file, I saved it as a PDF.
As a kid, I loved these picture riddles. I had worksheets full of them. I got really excited doing this assignment because I had so many phrases that I was already converting into picture riddles in my mind. This one happened to be my favorite. I won’t give away the answer, but it should be pretty easy for any of you that love anything to do with the final frontier.
For my next design assignment, I decided to do the Lyric Typography Poster. However, I did go a bit beyond just using text, and added a very basic vector graphic. I was really inspired by the examples at Music Philosophy — Especially when I saw how adding just a very simple graphic could be so effective.
The lyric I picked was from the traditional Shaker song Simple Gifts. It’s a particularly meaningful song for me because it was one of the songs that was played and sung at our wedding (10 years ago this summer!). The song is really meant to be a simple dance, and the last lines of the song (which I didn’t use) is, “To turn, to turn will be our delight,/ Till by turning, turning we come ‘round right.” I wanted to evoke that sense of movement a bit in the poster.
It actually is a song that encompasses what I strive to make more of my personal philosophy: looking for the simple, coming back to where we were, finding the gifts in the things we already have. Really, very beautiful, yes? I’m not sure my poster is beautiful enough to capture this sentiment, but I had fun doing it and thinking about this song again.
I can openly acknowledge my love affair with the Harry Potter series, and both books and movies alike, I can’t get enough. As I worked on this latest design assignment I was watching a special on the Harry Potter movies, which moved me emotionally because of the story itself, as well as reminiscing on the frustration that I never received my owl.
I chose the Minimalize Your Philosophyassignment which I saw for the first time on Chad’s blog. I loved the assignment for the simplicity and another opportunity to play around with typography. I’ve got a book of favorite quotes longer than the HP series (because the entire series counts, but regardless), so this assignment let me open it up and pick one.
But! This quote, reminded me that despite not being magical, It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
I played around with the colors in this for a while, but I eventually chose a pale yellow and blue because they felt dream-like. I needed something in the blue space, so I put three yellow dots and then I changed the opacity on each to increase, as if the clarity of the speaker is also increasing. I wanted the “forget to live” to stand out, because it is the main premise of the quote.
I feel like I try to live by this quote. It isn’t the most spectacular like Shoot for the stars or If you can dream it you can achieve it. To me, it isn’t about what could be, or what we shoot for in our lives, because if we, for whatever reason, aren’t able to reach our ultimate goals of doctors and lawyers, so long as I can look back and have had the time of my life getting where ever it is I eventually end up, that’ll be OK too. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have dreams! But don’t let the obsession of the goal obscure the path you take.
Inspired by Groom’s animated magazine cover, I decided to try my own. I thought of those creepy Jack Nicholson GIFs from The Shining, and how they really belong on the cover of Parenting magazine.
So I did a search for Shining GIFs to find the right one, then did an image search for Parenting magazine to find a good one to work with. I picked this particular issue for the pixel dimensions. (If you hover over one of the search result thumbnails, you’ll see the size. This one was something like 1600 pixels tall. Most of them were 200-400, which wouldn’t give very good results.) It was a nice bonus that it had an article about tantrums. I tried using Select-Color Range to pull out the type, but wasn’t too happy with the results.
Instead, I used the rectangular selection tool to replace most of Kourtney with the background color from the cover, and then used the paintbrush tool to clear up the parts where her sweater gets behind the type. I duplicated the second “n” to fix the part of the title covered by her hair, and had to do a little more manual work to fix the “e”. It was a little tedious, but not too much.
Then I used Select-Color Range to grab the background color, played with the fuzziness a little, and inverted the selection. A flash of insight told me to change the Image Size of the GIF to match the height of the cover before trying to put the two together.
I pasted it in as the top layer, and the animation plays underneath. I didn’t like the way the GIF aligned with the type, so I undid my pasting and cropped off some of the right side to bring Jack’s head more towards the center. Repasted the type layer and cropped the whole image to magazine proportions, then reduced the image size to make the resulting GIF under 1 MB.
Camp is now over (see the final story. If you are craving an experience like this, head over to ds106 and see how to participate. For more on the Summer of Magic Macguffin, see.....
