BiBi Card

I originally thought that this project would be a piece of cake; re-creating a 3.5 x 5 BiBi card. Boy, was I wrong. That's not to say that this project was impossible or even incredibly challenging, it was just very tedious, maybe more so than it needed to be. I can't really complain though. For this project we have to re-create the front and back of the BiBi card on Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign. At first, before I did both of them, I was complaining about the fact that we had to do them twice, in 2 different programs. I figured, we had already used Quark once, so what can't we just do InDesign for this one? It turns out that by doing this project in Quark, even though I had used the program before, many of the shapes I had to make and effects I had to do were completely new. Although I was very reluctant to make it again in InDesign, I am glad I did, since I was able to learn how the program works, for the most part.

Although tedious, due to the extensive measuring to get the card just right, I found Quark Xpress much easier for me to understand. I was able to make the cards quickly and really focus on making them look as identical as possible. When I went to InDesign I had some issues. There were no real serious issues I encountered, since the How-To book really, really helped, but I just found InDesign generally more confusing. I thought that Quark was very straightforward in the way it presented the things you were able to do, but InDesign made it more complicated than necessary. Maybe I felt this because I had gotten so fond of, and used to Quark, that when something in InDesign was different, it was therefore unnecessarily more confusing.

Besides the obvious frustration between the two programs, I actually found this project incredibly helpful. Because I spent so much time on both programs, I now feel I have a much better understanding of how they work, for future reference. Although I have to say, Quark is definitely my favorite.

My Passion... SoundSlides Rationale

Although I procrastinated on this project and was therefore more stressed and crunched for time, I actually really enjoyed the process. For this project, we had to write a 2 minute narrative about a passion of ours, record the narrative, cut the sound and also incorporate music and ambient sound bytes. We then had to compile the sound into SoundSlides along with pictures that supported our narrative.

Although I liked this project and felt it taught me a lot, I had some issues in the beginning. Originally, I was going to do my project on cooking, something I am absolutely passionate about, but soon realized that I wouldn't have enough time to take 25+ good pictures and receive sound bytes. I then decided to talk about my other passion, travel, since I had a large assortment of pictures from my trips readily available. I had a really difficult time with the narrative. I couldn't quite figure out how to talk about my passion without talking about myself and my travels. After much revision, I ended up just explaining the wonderful trips I went on and how wonderful they were. I might have talked about myself more than we were supposed to, but I couldn't figure out a better way to talk about travel than to explain the experience I have and the places that people could potentially go. Once I had the narrative down, I eventually found a way to record my sound through my camera on my computer. It sounded fine on my computer but once I transferred it to Audacity in the Mac Lab, there was a lot of white noise in the background. I ended up figuring out how to remove the background noise, which made a great deal of difference. I learned a lot about how to cut and compile sound and add different effects, I was actually very proud of myself when I finished.

Most of the pictures I compiled were digital but some had to be scanned. I didn't have a hard time getting pictures, I just had a hard time cutting down the pictures. I have so many, but it was difficult for me to fit them all along with the narrative, sometimes I would talk about 2 different sites very quickly and other times it would be slow and have to stay on one picture for a while. I tried to organize it so the pictures were cohesive with the sound and tried to make sure that there were no pictures that were up for too short a time or vice versa.

For the most part I am very happy with how the project came out and I am mostly happy with how much I learned when it came to editing and creating sound. That was really the best part of this whole project.

SCRIPT:

I spent my 11th birthday on the island of Capri in Italy; spent my 16th birthday in England being sung to by 4 Turkish men; and spent by 18th birthday in the Czech Republic. Needless to say, I caught the travel bug at an early age.

I was 10 years old when my parents decided to take me to Italy. We filled our days visiting the Trevy Fountain, the Collesium, the Sistine Chapel, and seeing famous artwork such as Michelangelo's Pieta and Leonardo DaVinci's The Last Supper. Our nights were filled with busy restaurants and delicious food. Spending my birthday on the island of Capri, surrounded by the gorgeous blue waters, the sweet chirping birds, and the rushed, yet beautiful fluency of the Italian language sealed my love for travel.

After exploring Italy, I wanted to explore the rest of the world as well. When I was 16 years old, may family and I travelled to England and France. We explored the quaint English markets, rode in a double-decker bus, and picnicked under the Eiffel Tower. Two years later, I took the most incredible and educational trip of them all, travelling to the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, and Poland. Each country had something memorable about it, whether it was the Dancing House in Prague, the thermal baths in Budapest, the Concentration Camps in Poland, or the Hundertwasser House in Vienna. Everywhere we went in Europe had its own personality and taught us so much about the world we live in. Each one has provided me with memories I will never forget.

Website

Discover Prague Website!

I found this website very easy to create. Although, aesthetically, I don't like how it looks, it really wasn't about that for this project. I just had to have the correct links, with headers and footers, and text on each page. The text, mostly came from our brochures.

The one thing I noticed about the brochures is that, it looks like you have a lot of information on a brochure, but when you move it to somewhere else it is not much at all. That is what happened to me. I had a lot of information on my brochure, but when I transferred it to my website, it looked like barely any information at all. Also, when I tried to make the website work through FileZilla, the links within the website didn't connect to the edited links. I ended up just saving it as new names in a new folder, which was probably more work, but it worked out fine.

If I had to do this again, I would definitely take more time to try to add more information and make it look more like a website, and not like a white page with text and links.

6 Panel Brochure

I actually enjoyed doing this project much more than I expected I would. It was interesting to have to formulate a nicely designed and effective brochure that could actually be used. I ran into a couple problems along the way, but otherwise it was pretty painless.

Mostly, I ran into problems with the pictures. It took me the most time to find pictures that were good quality and gave the reader a good idea as to what the city of Prague looks like. Once I found the pictures, it took me a little while to figure out how to format them so they would look aesthetically pleasing with the words, not like they were just stuck in there. I tried to go into Photoshop and make some of the pictures rounded, but I couldn't figure out how to keep them that way in Quark Express. Now, I think I have figured it out, but I have no desire to go back and change my finished product. I think the little pictures look just fine.

I ran into some problems with the text, though not as many with the pictures, it was just more tedious to format the text. Mostly, the problem was that I had too much information to fit in a 6 panel brochure. I wanted to make sure the brochure was easily readable yet informative. After much formatting and cutting, I think I got an effective amount of text. It has enough to keep the reader interested, but isn't a daunting list of facts. I also had to play with the color and opacity of some of the text boxes. Since I chose to make my backgrounds light pictures of the city of Prague, it was sometimes hard to read the text. I chose to do this for a background because I thought it was more interesting and gave the brochure more depth. I felt it was important for the people reading it to see how interesting Prague looks in order to make them more interested.

So, for the most part, this project was fun to do. Although the formatting was sometimes very tedious, I am very happy with my finished product.

Sound Slides

For this project, we needed to take our kiosk presentation pictures and put it into a video-type format with cut and looped music.

When I started cutting the music for the project, I was very glad with the song I had originally chosen. It had a good chunk of instrumental music that looped fairly well. I didn't want to use a very short clip that was looped because I was afraid that would get annoying and repetitive, so I was glad I chose the song I did.

It took me a little while to figure out the Sound Slides program and I ran into some issues. I was almost done with my presentation when I realized that the picture of the first slide that I had taken from PowerPoint, still had the music player symbol in it. I got rid of that in the PowerPoint program and saved it as a picture. I then uploaded the better picture but couldn't figure out how to delete the first one. I ended up just starting over because I couldn't figure it out. It ended up working just fine the second time around.

I didn't have that hard of a time with this portion of the project. I ran into a couple issues but think the finished result looks pretty good.

CD Release Poster

I'm going to be honest, I was not feeling this project and was not overly enthused about the way mine turned out.

For this project, we had to make a poster advertising a CD release party for the band we did the Kiosk presentation on. When I first started the project, I did not have a necessarily clear idea as to what I wanted it to look like, I just figured that once I started, ideas would come to me as they usually do. Unfortunately, because I couldn't quite grasp how I wanted my work to look, I didn't really know how to start or what images to look for.

My first draft of the poster, I started with a completely different look than what I ended up with. I wanted something eye catching but with a quirky look and utilizing my negative space. After working for over 2 hours on my first version of my poster, I got so frustrated that I was going to stop and come back to it. I just hated what I was making. I decided to look for other images just in case, and I stumbled upon the one I ended up using.

One of my biggest problems actually turned out to be the band's name. For a poster, I wanted the name to be big, but not overly stretched down and still readable. I tried putting it diagonally but didn't like how that looked. So when I got it to a decent size, I wanted it to stand mostly on its own so it stood out (being placed between the teeth on the picture also helped).

I liked the background picture but honestly, I don't think it worked for this poster. I just couldn't wrap my head around what I wanted the poster to look like, so I didn't end up with the greatest finished project.

In fact, I'm not very satisfied at all. In a way I wish I could do this over, just so I would have the chance to redeem myself. I'm just not happy with the outcome.

Kiosk Presentation: The New Pornographers

For this project we had to make a kiosk presentation on PowerPoint. We had to choose a favorite musical artist or band and have a full presentation with music that would run on its own. I have used PowerPoint before for various class presentations, so I didn't think it would be that different. I found out that there is a lot more to PowerPoint than pre-set templates (which we were not allowed to use).

For the first slide, we had to provide a title slide, with the band's name, our name, and some pictures (but no pre-set templates). I was lucky to have found the picture I did of the band, one that just blended into the rest of the slide. I wanted to make the first slide simplistic but still interesting.

For the second slide, we needed a bulleted list of interesting facts. I decided to use the picture I did because I thought it would be funny if it is a slide about who the band is comprised of and how they came to be, when you can't see their eyes. I added the picture behind the list because I didn't want the slide to have a little bit more to it.

For the third slide, I had to provide a CD cover and track names/times. The times and names had to be formatted so they aligned exactly. I found this a little more challenging at times than I had expected, because some of the track titles were too long to fit on one line.

For the fourth slide we need a 4 row table with words and images. Instead of listing the four CDs the band had released and showed highlighted tracks etc, I decided to show where certain songs from this "indie" band had been featured in movies or television shows. I also added some images of the original CDs the songs had been on so that at least some of their CDs were advertised a bit.

For the fifth slide, we needed a works cited with working links (something that took me a little while to figure out). I had so many extra photos and posters that I had found, that I decided to make a collage of them as the wallpaper for the slide. I also decided to make a small advertisement of the band's upcoming CD, since there wasn't really a place for me to mention it in the previous slides.

Overall I was very happy with my slide show. I was nervous about the animation, though at first. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to animate the show so I figured that I might as well have it animated with no one else's animated than being the only one with no animation. At first I thought it may have been cheesy but I think it ended up just adding a little more interest and fun to the show.

Social Networking

We have always tried to find better ways to connect to one another. At one time, it was through telegraphs and letters, then the telephone, then email. As technology advances, so does our desire to find new and different ways to keep in touch with out friends. This is called social networking; something that has grown exponentially in the past decade. While there are many different forms of social networking out there, three of them have made an extreme impact on society, especially ages 13+.

The first social networking site that seemed to explode onto the scene was called MySpace. MySpace was founded in 2003 by Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson, two friends who were inspired by one of the earliest social networking sites, Friendster. When MySpace first started out, bands became the predominant members, trying to get their music out to the masses. MySpace came with the idea of having “friends”, or people who can become “friends” with your profile, much like cyber fans. MySpace took off and companies took notice. Many companies looked to buy MySpace, most notably of which was News Corp Fox Interactive. However, MySpace slowly developed into a breeding ground for sexual predators and overexposure for some teens. As soon as these concerns arose, other social networking sites jumped in to take the reigns.

Facebook became the next big phenomenon, boasting to be the “world’s largest social network”, with over 400 million users. Facebook was originally only started to be a social networking site for colleges (first was Harvard University), and was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Facebook became the seemingly safer alternative to MySpace, making it more exclusive with greater privacy settings (when I first joined, I had to be invited on by someone in my network!). As Facebook grew in popularity, the founder began to extend the networking site to High School students, complete with newly established photo-sharing features. Eventually, in 2006, Facebook opened up to anyone that had an email address, whether in middle school or middle aged. It continues to grow and change, much to some people’s dismay, constantly, with new applications being created everyday. It has become the ultimate way to not only reconnect and stay in touch with friends, but to spend your time playing games or looking through photos.

Although Facebook is still considered the most popular social networking site, a new site has become very popular recently. This newly developing phenomenon is called Twitter, a social networking site where people can post up to 140 characters at a time. Although it was developed in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, it is only recently that is has gained extreme popularity. Twitter became the most popular way for celebrities and other social figures to connect with fans and update on their daily life. Just like MySpace and Facebook, a person can have “followers”, or people that subscribe to see every “tweet”, or post, done by a certain person. It is incredibly popular among celebrities (though there are some reports that twitter is losing its edge among social figures) and is spreading throughout the world.

As technology grows and develops, there will always be the next new social phenomenon. As a culture, we are so obsessed with staying connected, though ironically, all the connection has become extremely depersonalized – go figure. These sites have many pros, especially according to the teenage age group, but also some cons. With any social networking site, or rather, with any website, there is always a chance for danger. It seems that as our desire to connect grows, so does our desire to retain our privacy.

(click on links for sources)

Animated Postcard

You need to answer all questions in THIS POST. Problems, etc. Talk about each stage.

Font Poem

For our second project, we had to make a font poem, using Photoshop. This project helped me learn how to use layers (since we eventually had to animate the poem). For my text, I chose an excerpt from the poem "A Love Story" by William Carlos Williams. I chose this because I found the language very descriptive and beautiful, so I wanted to compliment that with visuals.

At first, I just wrote out the whole text in one layer, in one text box, which ended up not being very beneficial to what I decided I wanted to do with the poem. I ended up re-doing this poem about 3+ times, first just creating one new layer to stretch the word WEIGHT, then I decided that each word or line I wanted to animate should be a separate layer. Therefore I did the project over a third time. I am fairly happy with the outcome, even though it really is all about type face and not shape of the poem. I tried that out at first but then felt that the poem was too beautiful to have any more unnecessary distractions.

The fonts I used were:

Abadi MT Condensed Light
OCR A Std
Koch Antiqua LT Std
ITC Ozwald Std
ITC Isadora Std
Hobo Std
Pepperwood Std
Organica GMM Std
Magnolia MVB Std
Klang MT Std
Cascade Script LT Std

Contact Sheet

This was a perfect first project. It helped me get comfortable with using Photoshop, since I had never even touched it before. I encountered some difficulties with this project, but I can go into that later. First, let me explain the project.

Row 1 (Resolution): For this row, I used a picture that I took of my friend Amy (which my sister says looks like an ad for Volvo). We had to put the picture into 4 different resolutions, 72 dpi, 300 dpi, 600 dpi, and 1200 dpi. With each increase in dpi, the image gets sharper. The difference in sharpness between 72 dpi and 300 dpi are very obvious, but the differences in the others are less prevalent, but still there. I wasn't quite sure how the resolution changes would effect this picture especially, because it was taken with cross-processed slide film, therefore it was scanned onto the computer and not taken digitally. Aside from that, it seems to have worked fine.

Row 2 (Format/Mode): For this row, we had to take a picture and format it into different color modes. I took a color photo (normally in RGB color mode), and put in into CMYK mode, greyscale, removing all color except black and white, and then duotone, which consisted of black and one other color. The photo I chose to use was one that my sister took when she was in the Czech republic. I chose it because I not only loved the colors, but the composition of the image itself. Also, there was another version of this picture that she took in black and white, so I knew that this version would look good in black and white/duotone.

Row 3 (Orientation): This has to be one of my favorite pictures of my sister and I. For this row we had to take a picture and crop it to change it into a portrait, a square, and landscape. I chose this picture, not only because I love it, but I wanted to use a picture with people in the center of it, so the cropping was obvious.

Row 4 (Cropping): For this row, we had to take a picture and close up on one thing in it, then gradually show more and more of the picture to finally reveal the whole image. I chose a picture that I took because I wanted to show one person, then zoom out (if you will) to reveal the rest of the picture and how it is really just the one person with a lot of space around her.

Row 5 (Content): For this row, we had to take an image and crop a section of it to make and abstract image and slowly reveal the rest of the image until it was representational. The image I chose to use was one that I took of the King Phillip Hotel/Apartment building, behind CVS. I chose it not only because I felt that the complete image looked very forboding, but because of the lines and angles of the picture. I had a little trouble figuring out a good crop to be completely abstract, but after some trial an error, I decided on a crop that, hopefully reads as abstract enough.

Row 6 (Purpose): For this row we had to take a picture and format it into different artistic modes. I decided to chose a picture my sister made that encompassed many lines, so that it would be interesting and easy to see the different artistic modes and formats. The artistic formats I chose were Fresco, Dark Strokes, and Neon Glow.

I really enjoyed doing this project. One reason is that I liked finally being able to learn how to use Photoshop, and also because I got to look at great pictures while doing it. I had some problems along the way, but I guess that is just part of the process.

My favorite photo in this project (although I like all of them) is probably this picture that my sister took. I just think it is a beautiful and very odd photo. She's just a great photographer.

Let's see if this works...

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