A Stick Figure Hitches a Ride

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I saw the assignment Stick Figures And Sticky Situations and thought it’d be a humorous project to tackle :)

First, I had to find a photograph.  My iPhone is currently full of them because I usually don’t take the time to download them to my PC unless space gets really tight. Because of that, I had this picture left over from a walk I took at a temple near my job. I think originally I just wanted to capture the beauty of the scene, but looking at it today it looks like those old ladies are gossiping about me taking the shot. :p

One of the reasons I thought this might be a good photo to use for this assignment was the fact that there was a path!  It’d be an easy place to superimpose a stick figure and could be done creatively to interact with the two women. At first I was going to have the figure peeking out from behind one of the women, but I realized that it might be more humorous to have him actually clinging to the back of one.

In the end, that’s what I did and I think it turned out alright :) The stick figure looks cuter than I thought it would when I started.

Been a long crazy unit, but this is my farewell post to Fear and Loathing Online!

- Paul

ps- See you guys a week from Monday! Going to America :) My parents will get to meet my boyfriend of two years and I’ll be able to eat Taco Bell.  Exciting!

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Word Play

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After seeing Yue’s creative “Fish” entry for the DS106 Word assignment, I decided I wanted to give it a try too.

At first I wanted to ‘Tangerine’ with the ‘T’ as a stem and the rest of the word circling it, but sadly it looked too much like a melon. I then tried ‘Temple’ and made something that was ‘ok’ but was really much more of a small Christian church inspired design that I didn’t think represented the word temple well.

Finally, I came up with the idea to do the word ‘Bible’.  I’m an avowed atheist, but I thought it’d be a fun word to do because the two B’s could act as pages. That’s ultimately what I did in GIMP. To make it seem more like an open book I used the perspective tool to make the B go upward and then copied it, pasted it, and flipped it to make the other half. the remain letters, ile, didn’t inspire me much so I just put them in the center. The font I chose was “Modern No. 20″ which was primarily for the letter B, loved the font.

When I first started on this assignment I actually thought I could do a more interesting design. I was a bit surprised at how long it took and how many ideas I went through before I came to something that was decent.

Also, I did myself too :)

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Debian: An Examination of its Web Presence 1997 – 2012

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1997
1999
2001
2009
2011

Assignment: Entitled ‘Way Back Time Machine‘ (ds106), it tasks students with looking up their favorite websites and seeing how they’ve changed from the earlier years of the internet using the tool of the same name, Way Back Time Machine (tool).

Initially I didn’t know what website I would choose. Some of the websites I wanted to do, such as Firefox’s, were too new and some, such as Google, would be too generic.  Instead I chose to look at the website for Debian Linux.  This Linux distribution began in 1993 which meant their web presence would have a much longer history than other popular websites today. Above is the gallery of images I took which all represent major changes to the website. Here are some comments:

1997: Debian’s first website is very simple and simply composed of a graphic logo and text.  The design is not at all focused on looking good, it’s only meant to show information.

1999: This new look was a marked improvement over its predecessor and brought in a lot of new design elements. It doesn’t simply show information anymore, but actively tries to present it in a more aesthetically pleasing way.

2001: A very subtle change, but you can observe rounded corners on the top and side navigation bars.  The logo for the project has also changed and is now centered.

2009: Eight years later the layout remains much the same, but does have wider spacing between navigation areas and content.  Looks rather outdated for a site in 2009, although the graphic prominently displayed looks modern and nice.

2011: Finally, in 2011, the website layout was changed.  Perhaps as a 10th anniversary gift to the old layout they finally put it out of its misery. This new layout is still minimalistic and very white, but they’ve finally ditched the ugly ‘serif’ font that had remained with the site for 14 years! Even though the design is simple, I feel this website is serviceable and fairly modern looking, something that couldn’t be said about it previously.

As of today, the layout is the same as 2011. Although I’ve never used Debian*, I still enjoyed taking a look back at its web presence history and seeing how the project represented itself. Very glad that I chose a website that wasn’t mainstream and that I wasn’t familiar with, it made for a much more interesting “Way Back Time Machine” adventure :D

- Paul

*Linux Distros I’ve used: Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Go Linux!

 

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Debian: An Examination of its Web Presence 1997 – 2012

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0 votes, average: 0.00 out of 50 votes, average: 0.00 out of 50 votes, average: 0.00 out of 50 votes, average: 0.00 out of 50 votes, average: 0.00 out of 5

1997
1999
2001
2009
2011

Assignment: Entitled ‘Way Back Time Machine‘ (ds106), it tasks students with looking up their favorite websites and seeing how they’ve changed from the earlier years of the internet using the tool of the same name, Way Back Time Machine (tool).

Initially I didn’t know what website I would choose. Some of the websites I wanted to do, such as Firefox’s, were too new and some, such as Google, would be too generic.  Instead I chose to look at the website for Debian Linux.  This Linux distribution began in 1993 which meant their web presence would have a much longer history than other popular websites today. Above is the gallery of images I took which all represent major changes to the website. Here are some comments:

1997: Debian’s first website is very simple and simply composed of a graphic logo and text.  The design is not at all focused on looking good, it’s only meant to show information.

1999: This new look was a marked improvement over its predecessor and brought in a lot of new design elements. It doesn’t simply show information anymore, but actively tries to present it in a more aesthetically pleasing way.

2001: A very subtle change, but you can observe rounded corners on the top and side navigation bars.  The logo for the project has also changed and is now centered.

2009: Eight years later the layout remains much the same, but does have wider spacing between navigation areas and content.  Looks rather outdated for a site in 2009, although the graphic prominently displayed looks modern and nice.

2011: Finally, in 2011, the website layout was changed.  Perhaps as a 10th anniversary gift to the old layout they finally put it out of its misery. This new layout is still minimalistic and very white, but they’ve finally ditched the ugly ‘serif’ font that had remained with the site for 14 years! Even though the design is simple, I feel this website is serviceable and fairly modern looking, something that couldn’t be said about it previously.

As of today, the layout is the same as 2011. Although I’ve never used Debian*, I still enjoyed taking a look back at its web presence history and seeing how the project represented itself. Very glad that I chose a website that wasn’t mainstream and that I wasn’t familiar with, it made for a much more interesting “Way Back Time Machine” adventure :D

- Paul

*Linux Distros I’ve used: Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Go Linux!

 

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