Here’s my go at the Lyric Typography Poster, which is located here.
In honor of me going to see them this weekend, I choose the Radiohead classic, Everything In Its Right Place. I’m sure many of you listen to them so I’ll spare the description.
Made this in Photoshop. I wanted to use graph paper as a background because I wanted to illustrate obsessive neatness, which is what I believe the song to be about. Modernist graphic design comes to mind when I listen to this song. That came into play when choosing Helvetica (haters gonna hate).
On a slightly different note, listen to this song and gaze at the work of Michael Johansson, I think they blend quite perfectly.
Classes are done and reports are written so I finally have some time to do some ds106 work. Yeah!
A few weeks ago, we were asked to watch a video of Michael Wesch speaking at UMW Faculty Academy. After some difficulties (see previous post) I was able to see the whole thing. In listening to him I garnered a few ideas that I would like to include in an upcoming workshop that I am planning for teachers.
I had already planned to start the day with participants reflecting on their personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning by determining how much they agree with some educational theorists (or not!) Our IB programme is decidedly constructivist and inquiry-based so I thought that I would define constructivism and then engage the participants in the type of inquiry that I am hoping they will at some point facilitate for their students. Inspired by Lane Clark, at the moment, I am planning to base the remainder of the day’s activities on:
exploring resources about inquiry
determining what they could do with this information to make a difference for themselves or others
determining what they still need to learn/ find out
reflecting on the skills they used in the process
sharing their ideas with others
selecting their communication tool
creating their product
celebrating their work
As a teacher, teaching in this way is incredibly challenging and I want to acknowledge that with my participants. The rewards are numerous but it is not easy because, according to Michael Wesch:
kids don’t believe this is what school should be
as a teacher you need to start over every year
Tip: “just love your audience and they’ll love you back” – this allows you to you focus on what they need
I thought that I would illustrate one of the video’s messages using a meme. I know that it’s not funny but the picture seemed appropriate for the text – even though I believe the text can also be purely positive and not necessarily negative.
I created this using quickmeme.com Just click on “make a meme“, select a photo and replace the captions. For those of you making animated gifs, you can also upload those.
I started remaking this poster as bava art, but then I realized that nobody fits this poster better than the great Stephen Downes. Nobody more prolific, nobody more willing to speak his mind, and nobody less afraid to piss other people off! NOBODY!
All that said, nobody could be further away from the Facebook idea of corporate control and lock-in, which I guess is the joke. I’m gonna file this under the “If movie posters told the truth” design assignment, but that isn’t exactly what this is. Anyway, this was too much fun to make.
I decided I wanted to do a design assignment today, so I started browsing the Assignment Repository. There’s so much great stuff in there (although I do think some of our “Design” assignments need to be re-categorized as “Visual” assignments). I settled on Alternative Book Cover.
To get inspiration, I started browsing my digital book downloads on Amazon. (Yes, I know I’m the loser who pays more than eBooks are really worth, but, goddammit, I’ve read more in the last 18 months than I had in the last 8 years thanks to my Kindle and iPad). A few years ago I ploughed through the Stieg Larsson series and loved it. It’s not fine literature, but it’s riveting and the characters are pretty fascinating. I decided to do an alternative cover for The Girl Who Played with Fire. I thought I’d find some cute kid shot of a kid. . playing with matches. Then I realized that wasn’t so cute; it was scary.
THEN I started to think about scary kids and fires, and I remembered conversation Jim and I had yesterday about our favorite Stephen King novels. Aha! I decided to photoshop a picture of Drew Barrymore from Firestarter onto a book cover for The Girl Who Played with Fire.
THEN I thought about the animated magazine covers that Jim’s been doing, and I knew what I needed to do:
This was pretty tough for a few reasons. I wanted to stay as true as possible to the original cover of the American edition of the Larsson novel. It’s a pretty stark layout, and the letters are heavily fragmented. But, with some work, I was able to clean them up and add a dropshadow that matches the original.
I did have to change the spacing of the title to make room for the image. In the end, you can see how the text design of the Larsson book works great on THAT cover, but it’s not nearly as effective on this cover.
That’s okay, I still think it’s a cool cover.
I have two problems with it, I guess. First, it’s way big: 2.2MB. Second, the animation doesn’t seamlessly loop, but to do that I’d have to add more frames and the file would just get bigger.
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?
Below is a 10 minute screencast outlining how to create an animated magazine cover using Photoshop. Thanks go to Ben Rimes for the inspiration as well as to Melanie for the perceived need. I’ll be doing another one for GIMP shortly, but the same general logic applies for both applications, it’s just easier in Photoshop. Keep in mind I don’t talk about how to create an animated GIF in this tutorial. I recommend creating your animated GIF first, and you can do that using Tom Woodward’s tutorial for Photoshop here or mine for GIMP here. Also, the following video is best watched in fullscreen to catch any and all detail.
An Album Cover: Create an album cover to a fictional band.
Following the assignment’s directions, I generated the following: Band Name: Philipine Legislative Election, 1946 Album Title: “Save what you choose to impose” (Which comes from Alan Moore’s Watchmen. The full quote is, “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.”) Album Image:“nightways” by Flickr user brian hefele
Here’s what I came up with after several hours of trial and error:
It’s got a real grunge or rap feel to it, which wasn’t intentional. It just kind of went that way. I wanted to stretch myself in both Photoshop and graphic design, so I tried mixing texture and colors, messed around with filters and just about everything I could think of. Oh, and also the colors. I’m terrible at picking out matching/appropriate colors. Thank goodness for my trusty color wheel. I didn’t go into the project with a plan in mind, and it resulted in a hefty amount of work. Next time, I’d like to have a picture or end result in my head before I get to it.
I visited dafont.com, where I picked out some Horror fonts.
The most difficult part of this was finding a place for the band name, and the right font. It needed to match the grunge of the album title, but it couldn’t be too similar or it would all look the same. Photoshop doesn’t do much in the way of grunge and dirty fonts, but I finally settled on the one you see now.
Maybe I’ll make a little video showing you all the layers and the settings I worked with to create this thing.
I’m not completely happy with it the way it looks, but I’m not repelled by it, either.
Part two of my Design Assignments requirement, I chose to do the Creative Commons Poster.
Being an animal enthusiast, I chose an adorable hound in the middle of a field of daisies. I chose the caption “Share the joy” for my photo because without the ability to share photographs and information, we wouldn’t be able to see the joy in photographs like this.
I love the idea of sharing the world, experiences, and joy and I think that this photograph that I chose tells a greater story than just an adorable hound in a field. It says something about the place the dog lives, the freedom it experiences regularly playing in a field. The absence of a leash, the rolling hills in the background, it all adds to the sense of freedom.
Thanks to encouragement and suggestions from Melanie and Cogdog, I was able to rescale Slide Guy to precisely the size that seemed right for the Mean Machine.
Of course, then the machine was missing a thumb on its right/left hand so I attempted to draw it in. Shape is okay but now I’ve got to learn about shading, blurring, and highlighting. While I was at it, I also filled in a missing chunk of Slide Guy’s right shoe.
Here are the two versions. I’ll add a third at the end of the semester to assess my GIMP progress.
I thought I would write since it has been like forever since I last communicated (literally), but who would understand me better than the dog pal who followed me across the country and then some. You might noy be aware, but I have been away for three works helping run a summer camp called Camp Magic Macguffin – the magic meaning that nothing bad happens here and the people who come just want to create, create, create art and funny animations all day long.
In a way I wish I was a camper, because then you get to play. But I also have to work .My colleague Martha and I have much to do with orienting our UMW students to things like WordPress, creating course materials and videos, running live camp fire sessions, clearing timber, planning activities, etc. And we have to make sure we review and give feedback all the time.
It’s a good thing we have the grooviest bunch of counselors to help us out, especially people like Ol Hatchet Jack, who sounds threatening, but has been super helpful, Cheryl Colan that fun do Wop Girl, Giulia Forsythe, our drawer and mentor extraordinaire, Sergeant Pepperstorm who has been building like crazy in Minecraft (along with Ben Rimes). Tripper Harrison has been running live music over the PA system, and Zazzy, who seems to be questioning me all the time, has been a champ at commenting and doing innovated creative work herself.
And then the open online aprticipants! Woah, I would break my hand trying to cite them all, but we have about 50 whoa re active- you can see all the camper blogs here http://magicmacguffin.info/subscribed/
But yeah, last week, besides running all the camp, I managed to get some work done.
We saw a string of folks give the Album Cover assignment; mine was the first disc from Sid Hammerback’s “Let the Rest Go By” do you remember all of those Orhestral Funk raves we went to? Man those guys were up and down the chromatic scales.
I spent a lot of time taking the play list story assignment I did last year and adding images to make it a slideshow, but the outcome was really worth it, check out What The Tax Man Doth Do, taking the original Taxman playlist, tossing in creative commons images, and publishing via PhotoPeach:
Also this week, since we gave the UMW students a mandate to do 5 daily creates, I aimed to make that my minimum:
plus an audio!
I really need to carve out some more time to explore in Minecraft- there is a ton of stuff happening, and it looks like this week we will have our weekly campfire there. I have more updates on the side of my job as co-director at my Magic Macguffin blog, mostly the videos I am posting when I get a chance
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.....
