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Movie Novelization: Freaky Friday

Friday, June 15th, 2012

The Assignment: It’s time for the Design Assignments at Camp Magic MacGuffin. It is in attempting the assignments from this category that I come to face-to-face with my limitations to execute an idea as first envisioned. I’m totally comfortable with this and it motivates to try to pick up one or two new tricks or techniques each time out.

In doing the ds106 I Can Read Movies assignment, the goal is to create a beaten and battered book cover that depicts the novelization of an iconic film. Alan’s recent Andromeda Strain rendition led me to take a stab at Freak Friday (1976 version).

To get a true sense of what is possible with this assignment, there’s no better place to go than the original source: Spacesick.

The Process: I didn’t think it would be possible for me to come up with a cool minimal image such as those on the Spacesick site, so I decided to focus on the typography. For some reason, I’m under the impression that it is best to use a vector editing program when working with fonts. If someone can confirm or refute this, I’d be obliged. So the application I chose was the open source InkScape. As with the GIMP, it is available in Mac, Windows, and Linux version. When working on a Mac, it is also necessary to have the X11 environment installed (I assume this is now standard but am not certain).

So before I opened the application and found a suitable font, I put pencil to paper and fairly quickly came up with the idea to play of the symmetry between the two words – same first and final letter and similar length. The idea for the 4F logo in the center didn’t come until later in the process. With the idea on paper, I decided to find a new font for the project.

For the font, I went to Da Font and browsed through the retro category until I found Locked Window. It was a spontaneous decision which I really can’t explain or justify – it just seemed to be the right font for what I had in mind. Installing newly downloaded fonts is much easier than it used to be on a Mac, I assume the same is true for Windows. The Da Font site has help files that explain the procedure.

Working in Inkscape is a wee bit of a challenge. As I rarely use it, it always takes several rounds of mistakes and undos to figure how to do things. Fortunately, this was a fairly simple task. I’ve not run text vertically before nor have I had occasion to flip it as was done both vertically and horizontally here. Once I’d figured out how to command the application, the design fell into place rather quickly. I was able to use my new facility with flipping text to put the 4F icon in the center together. But next was the question of color.

I’m indebted to a former student for introducing me to the ColourLovers site. ColourLovers is more than a site, it a community of creative image and design people who share resources and ideas. Though most of what’s on offer there is way over my head, I’m grateful for the color palettes that are available. Essentially a color palette is series of colors that have been put together because they work well together. Each of the colors includes hexadecimal and RGB codes. It is even possible to export the entire palette and load it in to your image editor so all of the colors are easily selectable. For Freaky Friday, I went with the Sherbet palette.

Once I was satisfied with the typographic representation, I exported it as a PNG file. Prior to that, I had downloaded one of the covers from the Spacesick site and opened it in GIMP. The Freaky Friday PNG was then opened as new layer. The Maroon background, from the Sherbet palette, was painted as a layer over the original cover.

I decided to keep the original portion of the cover because I didn’t want to get that involved with building the thing from scratch. Also I didn’t have the time, energy or know how to give the cover the worn look that is so important.

In the end, I feel that I’ve moved the ball midway down the field and decided to punt on 4th and 2 on opponent’s 47 yard line. I should have gone for it, but didn’t

The Story: This is where I would like to explain the deeper significance for the film I selected for the project. Sadly, I don’t really have much of a story. It was the words of the title that led me to go with it. I do remember seeing the 1976 version of the film with Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris changing roles as daughter and mother for a day. I think I would love to see it again now because I am more and more drawn to the mid-70s aesthetic.

As for the 2003 version with Julia Roberts and Lindsay Lohan, I have nothing to say. I didn’t see it. Can anyone recommend it?

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Toucan Sam?

Friday, June 15th, 2012

Take one of your own photographs, one from Flickr Creative Commons or one from the DS 106 Flickr group and caption it.

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.

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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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Week 4 – The Creative Commons Poster

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

cc licensed ( BY NC SA )  flickr photo shared by WadeB

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:

Creative Commons Poster 2

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.





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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.

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Two DS106 design assignments

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Figured it was time I got some DS106 work up here, convincing myself and others that I’m not just at Camp Magic MacGuffin to play about building a British Embassy in Minecraft. Although fundamentally that is a large part of it…

First up: Lyric Typographic Poster (design assignment 529). I knew it had to be Eels, and I chose the opening lines from “Friendly Ghost” on Souljacker. People peg the Eels as a depressing band, but I think not.  The background texture is one of a load I downloaded for something else ages ago.
Lyrics

Next: Design an Invoice (design assignment 58) – described as “Create an invoice for a transaction that has happened in a film, TV series, etc”. I chose an invoice from Local Hero, one of those utterly wonderful early 80s Bill Forsyth films and quite possibly my favourite film of all time, ever*. It’s something I find myself coming back to again and again, especially at times when life seems less delightful. I’ve added some handwritten notes to preserve two lines of dialogue that need to be preserved, and I had to hand-create the logo in PowerPoint so have uploaded it as a PNG in case anyone else in the world needs to print out a Knox Industries logo and answer the phone with “Thank you for calling Knox Oil and Gas“.

Knox invoice.pdf
Download this file
Knox_industries
Anyway, happy ds106 everyone. #4life

* seriously, watch it some time. Here’s the first bit on youtube.

 

 

 

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Mission: ds106 – lyric typography poster design assignment

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

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

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

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.

Thom Yorke stencil art from a learning project

Thom Yorke stencil art from a learning project

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Picture Riddle Me This

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Come up with a riddle, or even an every day phrase, and use basic pictures or icons to lay it out.

Picture Riddle

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.

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Simple Gifts

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

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. 

Note: The original image came from The Noun Project (a fantastic source of free, CC licensed simple vector graphics) and was created by David Goodger. It is shared with a CC Attribution license.  

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To Dwell on Dreams

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

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 Philosophy assignment 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.

Dumbledore

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.

 

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