design assignment

For the visual assignment for making a missing poster for dr.oblivion, I thought it would be cool to try and make an old school milk carton wanted add for this assignment. I wanted to make it look pretty realistic, but ran into some trouble with the photo editing software on my friends computer because there was none at all. So I had to work with what I had with paint, and this is what I got. Once I get back to my computer I’m going to try and remake it to make it look better because I’m not satisfied with this right now, but I’m a little short on time so I wanted to get it submitted. For the visual assignment, I decided to use a mouse and a mouse pad because those are two pretty complimentary things that go together, as well as something thats an important aspect to #ds106 because most of us need a mouse to navigate around our computers (unless we use the trackpad on a laptop), so thats why I thought it was a good picture to use for this assignment. Hope you guys like them!

At the behest of Jim Groom, I have revamped the poster I created.  Using Old London – Alternate Font, I gave the new poster a medieval feeling, though my original goal was to mimic the Final Fantasy XII mark board postings.  I feel very good about this version

Even though I am becoming more and more suspicious that Mr. Groom is in the shed, I shall hope not as it is infested with flies and roaches. To be sure I am here, full of life. But no matter, what the people think is not of my concern. What Jim Groom thinks of course IS my primary concern. So I will play along with his game and go looking. For me. And my daughter.

Please download and print this flyer (PDF) and post. The #ds106 course must go on.

Update (June 23, 2011 8pm MST):

I noticed earlier that Teddy Broosevelt appropriated the image I made for this poster design in his design assignment. Now that’s fine with me, but I noted I would appreciate credit for the inclusion of my work. But of course I can’t escape how that immediately made me a hypocrite since I didn’t acknowledge the video from which I pulled the still image of Dr. O’Blivion in the first place.

And that reminded me that I need to also include my process when submitting assignments. At least that’s what I think Dr. O’Blivion would have wanted.

So here is the video still attribution:

This poster features a video still from “Dr. Oblivion Day 3 Broadcast” by timmmmyboy, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Now for my process

I played back the video from YouTube and used the full screen playback option. When I found the still image I wanted, I paused and took a screen capture by pressing COMMAND + SHIFT +3 on my Mac. I took the screengrab at full screen because my monitor is pretty large and this gave me more pixels to work with, even though they were at low resolution and had been stretched to fit my screen. I selected this particular frame of video because Dr. Oblivion’s pose calls to mind the myriad portraits throughout art history depicting scenes of benediction. I thought it would be fun to play with that idea.

Next I opened the screengrab in Photoshop and cropped it to a square image. I made several copies of the original image on new layers. I took some time with the pen tool to create a mask that isolated Dr. O’Blivion and the lower third from the rest of the image. I applied different filters on  different layers.

I added a radial blur with a zoom to the background books. Then I set that layer’s blending mode to Lighten to give the impression that Dr. Oblivion is actually emanating light, like a halo. I applied a Distort > Diffuse glow filter and used the mask to isolate the glow to the Doctor, again supporting the idea that he is somehow glowing. I added a gaussian blur to yet another layer to soften the books and make them recede more into the background. I used a brightness/contrast adjustment layer to enhance the still image contrast a bit, since some of the filters I employed started to make the image look faded.

I mixed the layer order and played with blending modes and opacity until I got more or less what I wanted.

I guess I didn’t write about this before for two reasons. First I kind of wanted to see if anyone would pick up on the benediction idea since I didn’t make it extremely overt. Second because I want to play with the idea more in light of the tone of some of Dr. Oblivion’s tweets and micro blog posts.

Anyhow, I hope I have now righted my own hypocrisy. I think it was obvious that I used a video still but I should still attribute the sources I include in my mashups so as not to present the work as though I made it without the benefit of the efforts of my fellow learners.