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?
After struggling, for hours, to create a venn diagram in Word, Excel, and GIMP. I went and found http://www.gliffy.com/, an online diagram making software. It was simple and easy to use. You drag out the shapes, shift them into position and then add the text.
At first, I had no idea what to put into a Venn Diagram. I looked at others to find my inspiration but nothing was coming. Then I started thinking, what do I want to put in the middle? Who deserves to be in the middle? Who beats out everyone else? Batman! Duh. It took me a while to come up with attributes that would put him in the middle, while having other heroes in the diagram as well.
I subscribe to the DC Universe. DC has all of the big boys and girls, including my favorite hero of all, Batman. A human who fights psychotic villains, bosses around heroes with superpowers, and manages to run a successful business. You can’t do much better than that!
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.
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.)
This is such a great design! It is based on famous sitcoms with a twist. The design is in balance created by the squares. No matter which way you look at it, 3×3 all the way around. The design is centered around the title of the show, which is where most of your attention is focused. Yet, the design is symmetrical and in proportion. The pattern of girl on one side and boys on the other with the parents creating the connection supplies the rhythm of the design as well as the unity. The bold blue creates a solid background for the characters to stand out against. Normally, people scan over the faces and recall names, yet here you find surprise. Gilligan has replaced a Brady. This replacement creates a connection between the two sitcoms. The alteration blends so well with the design that someone actually has to look to find what is different.
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.....
