“Never define your life in black and white because there’s so much hiding among the grays.” This is one of my favorite quotes of all time. Which ironically enough is why it’s my philosophy. I chose this picture to create my poster because I feel it just so accurately meshes with the quote both literally… Continue reading →
I find that as I write posts for my blog I am often caught deciding for whom the post is intended. Some posts are designed exclusively for my audience of K-12 educators. More recently, I have been creating a wide range of posts to demonstrate my progress through the Digital Storytelling (DS106) course. However, in some cases I try to share a “hybrid” post where it satisfies not only a requirement of a DS106 assignment but also has some ideas or resources that my K-12 audience of educators may find beneficial.
Such was the case in my recent post “Life-Long-Learning’ – What it means to me …”. Here, I attempted to share, in detail, the process that I went through to have a logo created through “99designs”. In my somewhat lengthy post, I was trying to share with my K-12 educator audience how I was able to acquire a professional blog header design and logo of which I was very proud. However, I was hoping that through my quoted description of my logo (composed of the collaborating child, adolescent, and adult), I was attempting to share with both the DS106 community and my K-12 educator audience the significance and philosophy behind my creative design.
However, what I neglected to do was to create a “minimalist poster” as to what “Life-Long-Learners” means to me. To rectify this oversight I share the following poster:
I trust that this “minimalized philosophy” poster, illustrated here as a single picture, will provide a welcomed equivalent to my usual 1000 words.
Take care & keep smiling 
This is for assignment Minimalize your Philosophy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/75437437@N06/6905167089/in/photostream
For this assignment i made a poster using photoshop to describe one of the phrases that i live by “ride to live, live to ride” just cause i live for snowboarding and love every moment of it
A philosophy of mine, is Henry David Thoreau’s quote seen in the picture. It makes you question what is important in life. He asks why we rush through life just to get to the next thing, and why we don’t ever just stop and enjoy where we are now. I think it’s a question everyone should be asked; we should just slow down sometimes and enjoy what we have.
For this assignment I used a textured background from Deviantart and added a photo of a tree. I wanted a representation of life, so I used the tree. Thoreau was also a big advocate for appreciating nature, and I think part of this quote is also to “stop and smell the roses,” metaphorically and literally. Again, I used Picnic to add text.
Linda McKenna, as a DS106 colleague, has an amazing flair for design. This is evident when one looks at the layout of her powerful blog entitled “Never the Same River“, together with her creative assignments that I have witnessed her submit and share as part of this amazing Digital Storytelling (DS106) course.
However, Linda is not laid-back to the point where she just picks and chooses typical assignments that others have prepared for the course. Rather she “pushes the envelope” and after great thought submits assignments that she has creatively crafted to challenge her colleagues.
Today, I will attempt to complete her “Design” assignment entitled “Minimalize Your Philosophy” which she outlines below:
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 challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don’t forget to explain your thought process.
Background
As a retired educator, I believe that I might qualify as a “Life Long Learner” and this favourite phrase might be what we hope all our students will become.
Like Linda, I struggled to find a domain name that I felt best represented attributes that my wife, who is also a retired teacher, and I shared. When I checked to determine if our proposed domain name was available, I quickly found that “lifelonglearner.com” and “lifelonglearners.com” were already taken. I had to unfortunately insert hyphens between the words so that “life-long-learners.com” was in fact a unique domain that I could register and purchase.
I started playing around with different logo ideas that I thought might best represent Life-Long-Learners. Perhaps the alliterative nature of our domain name might be represented by “triple L’s”. Our younger son, who has a “creative eye”, created this 3-D cube representing the three “L’s”. However, our son was quick to point out that this logo was only “a short term solution”. He suggested that once we had thought carefully about the logo design, and what we wanted it to portray, he knew of a rather creative process that we could explore. He hinted that, with a small investment of funds, we could tap into the creative talents of designers from around the world who would compete to provide us with a powerful logo to represent “Life-Long-Learners.com”.
My wife and I spent at least a month deciding what images we felt best represented the idea of “Life-Long-Learners.com”. We agreed that we did not want any cartoon-looking design but rather we wanted a professional looking logo. Furthermore, we felt that it was important that the design have an educational aspect to it since both our careers involved K-12 education. I hoped that we would be able to acquire a blog header logo and perhaps a similar design for an accompanying business card and/or letterhead.
A World-Wide Logo Design Competition
Once we had a clearer idea of what we wanted, our son suggested we investigate how 99designs.com might facilitate our logo development. For readers, who want to get a quick overview of how the 99designs contest works, I recommend you watch the 1 minute video found on their web site.
We began by creating a design brief which helped to identify the components that we wanted in our proposed “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog header. We then submitted our brief and paid up-front for the design and the related services. We felt that this investment was reasonable because, if at the end of the week contest we felt that no designs were what we wanted, all our money would be returned other than a service fee.
During the contest week one should be prepared to enter into a very engaging, collaborative process. We had creative designers from all over the world including Afghanistan, India, the Philippines, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, begin displaying their proposed designs based on our brief. Some logos could be immediately rejected while we provided feedback, by ranking the vast majority with from 1-5 stars, indicating how pleased we were with the way the blog header was developing. In addition to providing the star ranking feedback, we were also engaged in additional messaging as we suggested subtle changes and asked for slight modifications as certain designs evolved. At the end of the design week, we were very pleased with the more than 75 innovative designs submitted and the dozen or so that we short-listed. Being somewhat anal, I prepared a PowerPoint slide presentation, which included each of the possible short-listed design choices on a different slide. We then invited several educators to form a judging panel. Each member viewed each design, on its own numbered slide, and wrote down a 1-10 ranking value. After all the potential designs were reviewed, we tabulated the panel results, and then through much discussion determined ranking on our the top three.
Our wining “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog header design was created by a very talented young woman, known as “ola-nik“, who is a Fine Arts instructor in the Ukraine. Needless to say, we were very pleased with her creation and her willingness to make modifications to the design as it beautifully evolved.
Logo and Philosophy
Although, one may scroll back up to the top to see our “Life-Long-Learners.com” blog banner, I thought that it was important that readers be able to read both our interpretation and view our logo in close proximity. To better understand the meaning and philosophy behind our logo, I have quoted directly from my earlier April 15, 2010 blog post entitled “The Meaning of Our New L-L-L Logo“:
I am so pleased to showcase our new “Life-Long-Learners” blog logo. Obviously, the implied message in our title is that learning should continue throughout our cradle to grave adventure. As the font emphasis increases in the three words “Life”, “Long”, and “Learners”, so too should our knowledge continue growing during our lifetime. However, it is our new logo which appeals to the educator within me. The logo illustrates the three stages in our human development – child, adolescent, and adult. Learning should continue through each of these individual phases. More importantly, the logo portrays that through communicating, collaborating, and “putting our heads together”, each individual can benefit from the ideas that others share. Together, we can become true “Life-Long-Learners”.
Our header logo would not be complete without including our motto “Ancora Imparo!” This remarkable phrase was made by Michelangelo long after he had sculpted the marble statue “David” or painted the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. At 87 years of age, Michelangelo uttered “Ancora Imparo!” which translates to “Still, I am learning” or I am still learning”. Imagine such a profound statement being admitted by this artistic genius who recognized that, even in his latter years, there was still much more to learn. As such, “Ancora Imparo!” seems to be a very fitting motto for our blog and a mantra for all “Life-Long-Learners”.
An old adage states that “A picture is worth 1000 words”. Without a doubt, our “Life-Long-Learners.com” logo and my related gravatar, convey much behind their minimalist design.
Now … if I could only learn to minimalize my writing style.
Take care & keep smiling
To make this image, I used basic shapes in Microsoft PowerPoint and put it together with the text. It was fairly simple.
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 challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don’t forget to explain your thought process. :)
Design Assignment 365: 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 challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don’t forget to explain your thought process. 
SAPERE AUDE (Dare to think)
The three dots representing ellipses… linda3dots is my handle that I often use online. It signifies thoughts in progress. Again, what could have been a very simple project turned into hours of laboring over the size, color, placement, adding shapes, subtracting shapes, etc. etc. etc. I finally ended up with this final version.
The dark and gray portion on the left represents a box and the absence of thought, then the dots emerge out of the box and get gradually get brighter as they move to the right. The shadows behind the dots connect each dot to the next, suggesting the idea that each new thought is connected to the previous thought. I wanted to communicate that the process of thinking is sequential, and the dots are gradually transformed rather than popping up on their own by accident.
I thought about just having the circles touch each other or overlap each other slightly, but neither design looked interesting enough. So I thought of adding the drop shadows that would connect the dots. Then I also wanted to add the idea of thinking outside the box. I played around with many different shapes and positions but finally decided to just divide the background into two sections and have the dots emerging out of one section into the other.
I used Photoshop CS4 and used only the basic ellipse tool and the rectangle tool. The drop shadows were added to each layer by selecting “fx” option at the bottom of the layers window. I would be happy to share anything else you many have questions about, so just leave me a comment below.
