This assignment wants you to change or alter some kind of sign. Well, I really feel like this sign could be placed anywhere. This sign said “caution children ahead” but instead I made it say just “caution children”. I am not sure why I love it so much but I think it is great. This is a warning sign from all of the frustrated parents who are running on 3 hours of sleep and up to their elbows in dirty diapers!
I sometime do the opposite of this sign, it just interesting to know what is in the other side of that door or sign.
This week for ds106 we had to do ten stars worth of visual assignments. I decided to do cropped signs for two of my ten stars.
In this assignment you had to “change, alter, enhance the meaning of a sign by cropping out parts of it.” I wasn’t totally sure what type I was going to use until I can across this sign from Magic Kingdom in Disney World. 
Pretty uplifting right? Upon entering you get to leave the world of today and experience yesterday, tomorrow and the future. And who wouldn’t want to do that?
After cropping the sign it had a bit of a different message though.
So instead of sounding uplifting the sign sounds a little bit like you are going to die. Who would have thought you’d be able to come across something this morbid at Disney?
This image was for the assignment called Cropped Signs. The task was to take a picture of a street sign and crop out a portion of it to make it have a different meaning. I took this “NO U TURNS” sign. This may seem like a simple sign that says “NO U” but when I saw it as I was walking I immediately snapped the picture and laughed like crazy.
Being an internet geek, I’m familiar with the infinite amount of memes floating around online; the phrase “NO U” being one of them. This is just the phrase you say when somone is in the process of telling you off and you regress back to your childhood days by saying “No you!!” as if that’s going to effectively shut them up. Learn more about the “NO U” meme here!
Visual Assignment 129—Cropped Signs (2 stars). I’m finding these assignments a lot of fun. They really challenge you to look at things differently, creatively. The thinking about it, trolling for an appropriate sign and planning the execution was a little time consuming, but I was thinking about it all day, all week, looking around as a went about my days. At work, driving to and from work, every place I visited, every sign I saw, I was contemplating if it was crop worthy for this assignment. I knew this would be fun if I could just find the right subject sign. But I was challenging myself to just be able to take the shot, isolating the right words, without editing the photo later.
Today, I decided to take a walk around historic downtown Fredericksburg to take photos. For visual assignments, for daily creates, for fun. Along the way, I took notice of all sorts of signs, evaluating them skeptically for potential for this assignment. Store signs, road signs, advertisements, etc. It was hot and busy, and my camera was dying. I gave up. I got back into my car and made my way back through downtown to head home. Then it caught my eye! It was on the edge of an alleyway. After finding a place to park and walking several blocks back to the scene, I got the perfect shot! No editing, just using the megazoom on my new Canon PowerShot SX260. I love it!
Here is the whole sign for The Back Yard at J. Brian’s Tap Room at 200 Hanover Street, Fredericksburg, Va.
I doubt the owner’s would approve of my creative cropping of their signage as the new meaning, while funny, is not very hospitable. 
Now I can’t stop looking at signs in a new way…creatively, and a little twisted maybe, but fun nonetheless.
For this assignment, I actually carried my camera with me while taking out the trash. I photographed a few signs and then decided that I wanted to fix this one up. Below I will post both pictures. This photo is funny to me for two reasons. The first being, could the sign be referring to [...]
For some reason I was determined to complete this “Cropped Signs” visual assignment. I was just drawn to it – maybe because there was a lot of room for humor and not too much skill required. Photoshop, one day I will conquer you. But back to this, the original white sign read “Thru Trucks Prohibited” and the yellow one included an arrow head pointing to the left.
My idea for getting rid of the “Thru” and the arrow was just something that popped into my head as I imagined a town where trucks were the devil’s automobile of choice. So what did the townspeople do? They banned them of course! Oh, also forbidden in this town, Lady Gaga music. I don’t want to go into details but there was a meat-dress fiasco at last year’s senior prom. So no trucks. And no Lady Gaga. And absolutely no listening to “Bad Romance” while driving around in your truck.
And the first white sign worked for a little while. The townspeople were quite pleased. They drove around in their town-cars and mid-size SUVs content with their Gaga-less lifestyles. But one day, somebody crossed the line and rolled into town driving a *GASP* Nissan Frontier!
(You know, one of those weird “compact” pick-up trucks.)
The townspeople were shocked! How could this happen in their community? Their safe, Gaga-less community! How to remedy this situation? Oh of course – a yellow sign. A yellow sign that clarified the message of the white sign. Which trucks are prohibited? All trucks are prohibited! Underlining it just adds that tone of austerity the white sign was lacking.
Today, I did the following ds106 assignment:
THE ASSIGNMENT
In this assignment, we were asked to crop some words out of a sign in order to drastically change the meaning. It’s preferable to take the photo yourself rather than edit it afterwards. That was great news since I don’t know how the hell to do that anyway.
THE PROCESS
At Ontakesan Dorm, there are more signs than you can shake a stick at. The intrepid Dorm Manager, Aki, leaves nothing un-signed. There is no device, no matter how rudimentary, without operational instructions. There is a sign with aiming instructions (including a bullseye) in the men’s toilet, there are signs in your room, there are even signs on top of signs.
So this should’ve been easy right? Well no, it wasn’t. I couldn’t find anything good, until Alex, another guy who lives in the dorm, asked me why the hell I was walking around like I was looking for my lost puppy. He phrased it more politely than that, but I’m certain I looked strange slowly scanning the room with an increasingly defeated expression. He offered to help, and soon he came up with this idea. So yes, I admit it, I had outside help on this one. If it makes you feel better, I did search around for a good 10 minutes after he came up with it, and that’s when I find out I have about a 10-minute reserve of pride.
THE STORY
All that having been said, this probably was the best candidate in the dorm. The meanings are multitude*
1. Something inappropriate
2. There is someone dumb in the dorm manager’s office
3. WHYYYY CAN’T WE NOT BE SOBER?!?!?
4. Aki is awesome (While not explicitly expressed in this sign, it is an underlying fundamental truth of the universe).
*4 can be a multitude, for instance if you are a starving person offered 4 sandwiches.
** Actual text of sign: “Baking Tool in manager’s office”.
cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
Yeah, I am in it #4life and will continue to speak into the ds106radio microphone. Who wants any other sign?
(Another example for the ds106 Cropped Sign Assignment)
Original sign read "Life Ring"
cc licensed (BY) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog
It ain’t her past and it ain’t that Mary we are talkin about, It’s Mary who works night shift at the "1I Dine In" you know, uh, the one by Beavertail highway and the 357. Yeah, looks like the side was hit by a 2 ton pickup cause it was.
She is more Mary like the song by the Kix, she’s quite contrary indeed.
She’s pouring day old coffee to truckers and losy tourons, but catchin’ eyes with her sad smile from 5 to when take out ends at 3:30.
(An attempt at a ds106 cropped sign story)
Okay, its not great, but have been trying to find more signs that could be changed via simple cropping in camera.
The tags for this ds106 assignment are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments129
I want to emphasize the point when I made this assignment is that the old edits to the photos, if at all, should be cropping to change the meaning or words of the original.
