The third assignment that I created for the week was a motivational poster worth 3 stars. My GIMP skills are improving! This was not too bad of an assignment after learning the other two. Definitely gaining speed with the program.

I first searched for a quote that I liked. I chose a quote that spoke to me as an entrepreneur and then found an image that I thought matched. I paired them and then found a font that I also felt fit. I think it is fun how GIMP makes you search for fonts by letter. There is no drop down menu where you just guess. Makes the selection much more thoughtful.

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/motivational-poster-2/

Assignment details can be found on the following page: http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/motivational-poster-2/
I thought of many ideas like fire preventions, walking on snow and some more but the one I believe is more relevant while living in cities is to say something about drunk driving. It has been a huge issue as drunk driving causes many accidents every year. But still there are many people who do not learn anything from these accidents and are careless. I have tried to request all my blog visitors to be safe and don’t drink and drive.
I have tried not to sound serious. Instead the poster is kind of funny but still portrays its message. This is kind of a mathematical equation. I means drinking and driving sums up t disaster. Many have added up to a disaster and many more would do the same in the future but we can only hope that drunk driving stops for good.

This assignment was a great stress release for me. I’ve had such a hectic week between work and the two classes I’m taking. I think it’s really important to stop and reflect that it’s okay that you don’t have your life together sometimes. Lord know, I do not have everything figured out in my life. And yet, I’m here just figuring everything out as I go. Life will be unpredictable so I think it would be impossible to always have smooth sailing. Basically, that reasoning was the inspiration for making this motivational poster.

Making this was pretty simple, I googled some templates for posters and I found quite a few. I landed on the site: diy.despair.com and I punched in the text and details I wanted. As for the photo, as we are studying minimalism this week, I searched for a simplistic and minimal photo. I visited freeimages.com to find a free, non-copyrighted image to use and I settled on the two mismatched footwear. I mean who hasn’t had that moment when they are in a rush and they accidentally put on two different shoes?

I love this motivation poster because it shows that it is okay to not have your life together. I think it can actually be fun and it sure keeps things interesting! It is great to have these easy, creative assignments in between the ones that take a lot of time and effort. It’s a great creativity exercise.

Assignment Rating:

My grandmother was a very wise and patient person. She had to be. She was the calm center of the hurricane that is my family. There was always some crisis that at least half the family had to get involved in that my grandma would patiently listen to, make the right noises from time to time, and get everyone’s heads to stop spinning around. She never got upset. She never yelled. She just patiently listened with a slightly enigmatic smile until the crisis was over.

Maybe it was her natural personality or her years of experience growing up in a loud, excitable Irish-Catholic family. Or it may have been that she had 90% overall hearing loss and couldn’t hear a word we were saying.

I have this strong memory of staying with my grandparents while we were moving from on coast to another while my dad was in the Navy. I was trying to show her how good I was at doing a cartwheel and I messed up. The grass in the front law was still wet and my hand slipped and I fell on my face and hit my chin pretty hard and bit my tongue.

It hurt and I was embarrassed when my family laughed at me and I just wanted to hide in a dark cave until the world ended. My grandma picked me up, took me inside, got me a washcloth with an ice cube in it to suck on and wiped away my tears. She told me about the time when she was my age and was learning to roller skate and tripped over a rock and fell on her face and scratched her hands and knees.

She told me that the only time you really fail is when you don’t get back up again after falling down and that the easiest way to make yourself get up was to look up at where you want to be before trying to stand up.

Wise woman that she was, she knew I was still too embarrassed to go out and face the people who had laughed at me. So she calmly guided me up a ladder to the roof, handed me the garden hose, and turned on the water so I could have some sweet, sweet payback on my sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Never laugh at a six year-old in front of her grandmother, even if said grandmother happens to be your mother and grandmother too.

Here is the poster I made for the Motivational Poster (3 stars) design assignment. Credits to Taylor Nguyen for the photo. Yeah, turf burns are no joke.

Behind the Creation

As I was scrolling through the design assignment bank on the ds106 website, I saw this assignment and immediately knew what I was going to do. The person in this picture who did the unfortunate dive then face plant is Robert Blake. He is a good friend of mine that I met this past semester since we both coincidentally took the same 3 Computer Science classes during the same section. He is currently a Junior at UMW and a very talented ultimate frisbee player for the UMW Men’s Ultimate Frisbee Club. We spent some long nights together working through painful projects and assignments for our classes. It felt just a bit better to share the late night stress with someone else rather than enduring it alone, so to thank him I made this motivational poster

The Process

To create this poster, I used the online photo editing tool LunaPic

I went to the “Draw” drop down menu and selected “Motivational Poster” to get started (how convenient right??)

This brings up this screen from where I can click on the “Choose File” button to locate the image on my local computer to upload.

After finding the image, it loads up below and I now have the option to set the text for the Title and Caption of my motivational poster. I put the desired text in these fields. There is also an option to change the background and foreground colors but I chose to leave these values as they were. I then clicked the “Create Motivational Poster” button which generates the actual poster.

The motivational poster is now created and I can view it in the image viewer. I scrolled to the bottom of the page where I clicked the blue “Save” button which allowed to save the motivational poster to my local computer.

Everyone needs a little motivation sometimes right? How about sarcastic motivation?… we can use a little of that also right? RIGHT! Everything is better when its funny. Creating a motivational poster for this design assignment was fun. I think it really brought some creativity out of me.

I donated blood all of the time. Well not ALL of the time, but whenever I am eligible too. I need some to survive as well. That is the entire motivation for this motivational poster. Don’t ALWAYS give 100% or you may not survive. One time when I donated blood, I thought I would die. I’m not afraid of needles or anything, and I usually do well after donating but that day was different. I was still in the Army at the time and was in a rush like always. That morning I knew I was going to go donate blood but I forgot an essential thing… BREAKFAST! So I walk into the donation center, I donate without a problem and I also leave without a problem. Fast forward to about 30minutes to an hour later. I am standing outside in 90 degree weather and I start feeling super light headed. My vision went away about 3 times, I started seeing those weird little black stars in my eyes. I internally was freaking out while also trying to hold my composure since I was still in uniform. With a super pale face I sat down on the ground. One of my co-workers came over and noticed that something was clearly wrong. He went and got me some water and I was eventually sent home to rest. Moral of the story is… don’t donate all of your blood but also just as important don’t donate without eating or you may end up needing blood yourself.

It’s obviously not always best to give 100%. Take it from Dracula ! Make your own motivational poster to give Dracula some motivation after donating his most beloved blood.

[3 STARS]

Made this DS106 Design Assignment and added a Coen brothers twist.  If you’ve ever seen The Big Lebowski, you’ll understand the context.  Very simple design using (gasp!) Microsoft Power Point.

You know, generally I dislike memes, including motivational posters, but I thought this was vaguely funny.

note: most people that play d&d (or other rpg) are of both average intellect and average social competence, heh.

also note, if you’re making a wizard character, night caps are silly! Silly wizards are of course the best type of wizards, but if you’re trying to be serious while you describe your character as having a night cap, then he isn’t serious!

By the way, it’s really easy to make a motivational poster, either with a simple program like paint with copy-paste, or by using an automatic website (which is what I did in my infinite laziness). I just used this site http://diy.despair.com/  which is pretty self explanatory, upload an image, write the caption, and you’re done.