How can you be #4life without over 600 blog posts about ds106?
I’ve been urging my students to give each other more constructive feedback via blog comments; but this idea if challenge, coming form a student, not me, is soemthing I have to get behind: http://twitter.com/doodle_muse/status/255896877772464130 Ok, Haley, let’s ee if this works. The challenge is to make 7 constructive comments on 7 different blogs in a […]
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As we move into audio week, I wanted to whip together a quick example of a ds106 assignment just in case students are having trouble in Audacity. I hit the random button a few times in the audio assignments and ended up on Theme Verse: […]
There are the paths of links that maketh up the web and then the paths of experience that make up another web. Sometimes it just gets tangled up in a ball of serendipity that really is not all that important in the long run, yet still tickles me. Today’s ds106 Daily Create was contributed by […]
I like how my students are learning how to create their ds106 design graphics in GIMP by no means the easist software to use. Sometimes they get frustrated and revert to ones they know or just drawing things on paper and taking a photo.
The point of this class is for students to become creators, and sometimes this means making a choice between trying some quick and easy web generator graphic tool or doing it the hard(er) way in software. To become a more versatile person with media, in the long run you will be better off knowing how to make your own graphics, because they will do much much more than the one off easy apps.
I saw this morning my student was up agains the GIMP wall
http://twitter.com/laurstray20/status/254954559825403904
Beyond not knowing exactly what the issue was, its not easy to explaining something like GIMP in twitter. And then I fund something that is wonderfully simple in Photoshop (adding an outline stroke to text) takes a few more steps in The GIMP. So I wanted to make sure I knew how to do this and try and explain it (late) to Lauren.
First, one thing I notice in this new version of GIMP that it did not list many fonts, On Mac OS X I found a video that helped (you have to identify your fonts folders in the app prefs).
Okay, so Lauren’s design was to take a cover from Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham and replace the “Eggs” with Viruses– she got frustrated and went back to using MS Paint.
So let’s crack open The GIMP and see if we can walk through the process. First step is locating a base image, using google image search:
What do you do when not sure which ds106 Design Assignment to do? Spin the random chooser. Seems like a good thing to do, hence this little bit of design work. The assignment this is for is Name That Single: Create a design for a favorite song by using just simple designs and NO WORDS…Basically […]
Hey kids, do you know what tomorrow is (well it already is in New Zealand, those futurists). Yes, it is October 6. What’s special about that? October 6… is 10/6 meaning a day to celebrate ds106 So tomorrow, your make a photo showing your 106ness, maybe you in your kickstarter t-shirt or make something that […]
Submitted for no one’s approaval, another design example for the ds106 Minimalize Your Philosophy assignment: Pick your favorite quote OR make up your own phrase which describes a philosophy that you try to live by. It can be about love, friendship, family, education, culture, health, charity, etc. Design a minimalist poster depicting the concept. Extra […]
It was time tonight to do some ds106 design assignment, this time a Triple Troll Quote. the classic ds106 assignment game of mixup and mis-attribution: Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the […]
Another problem with taking the quick short cut route of doing ds106 assignments is generally the text tools are limited to slapping text on top of photos. I am seeing a number of the early work my students are doing is that are not really looking at how the text interacts with their design.
If the text is just typed over the picture, it will look flat, often it is not as readable due to conflict with the background, and frankly, it ends up looking not designed.
I’m beginning to wonder if when asked to designa poster, if students are really thinking about say, how movie posters look?
Let’s say i am working on some assignment, maybe it is designing a book or album cover, and I use a photo of my friend Bryan Alexander. I can use many tools, but I choose pixlr a free web based editor I see a numnber of students are using — and woah, I am impressed, it has layering tools and thus can do many things I want students to be doing in their graphics.
But if all I do is toss some text on top of Bryan, it looks cheap:
There are all kinds of problems, it clashes with the background, the color is not really working well with the color in the images. it looks like it is slapped on. This is not designed.
What can we do?
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Pete Prodoehl I truly love the evolution and use of the ds106 assignment collection – we have almost 100 assignments to choose from each in the Visual and Design sections, all of them created by ds106 participants, and even rated by them for difficulty. […]
