What’s HE doing there??
This assignment is called ‘Wait, where’d that guy come from?‘ And in the current day and age, how could I possibly resist putting poor Obama in front of who knows how many NRA advocates? I couldn’t quite get the layers to work right for this one, so I instead erased the surroundings of Obama’s head and made a separate layer of his own head so I could scale it properly and place it carefully. A bit more difficult than it looked, this was still a whole lot of fun. 
Old School Style
All of my design assignments this week were found through clicking the Random button on the assignment repository pages. Not that I did every assignment I came across. I pretty much just clicked, waited a minute to see if I had inspiration, and clicked again if I didn’t, or got to work if I did.
This one struck an instant chord with me. One, because no one else had done it yet. Two, because, well, I remember this time period all too well.
I did a Google Image search for Old Windows Desktops and came up with the broken screen (perfect for depicting an old computer, I thought!). I then used layers to create the grey border and the white typing space for the Twitter window I’d created. And then, I entered in the text boxes individually, playing with the colors each time, then moving the text boxes around until they fit neatly within the space and worked well together.
So, for your enjoyment: The Wayback Machine! Old-school style!
Re-branding – Micron should pay me for this.
This is from the design assignment called Re-brand ‘em. I took the advice from underconsideration.com and simplified the logo a bit. Since Micron uses circular wafers, I incorporated the circular shape of those into the colors Micron generally likes to use for their products. I made an oval shape and filled it and made that a layer underneath of the text layer for the word itself. I think it came out looking pretty neat.
The truth about Winston Churchill…
My defamation of my good buddy Winston here is in honor of the True Lies Design Assignment. Churchill is way too easy to pick on, really. My honest opinion of him is that he was one of the awesomest, most intelligently sarcastic yet effective world leaders ever (or at least ever documented). But I figured his sarcastic insults towards everyone else made him a worthy candidate to be insulted himself. This was done in GIMP. I basically upped the light on the image of Churchill, and tried to create a design of equally-sized boxes aligned together in a particular way – using the Unity design element, particularly utilizing similarity, proximity and alignment to make the boxes of text jump out in an appealing manner. I stuck with black and white to keep the old feel that the black and white photo already gave it.
This week, my teammates and I met in Dupont Hall on UMW‘s campus to continue working on our radio show. Haley took the reins for the overall scripting of the show, and Daniel made sure he had the audio recording while all of us together just brainstormed our way through the original format we’d put together last week, and did our best to hammer it out into a comprehensive script to follow.
Each one of us will be creating our own fake commercial for the station, our own bumper, based on our character in the show, we’ll each choose a song and turn it into a short audio clip for use on the show at various times, and of course, we’re each contributing our voices and a character that we will be playing in the overall show. We’re also all still working on the idea of how to create an efficient bumper that will be no more than 3-5 seconds long, but will signify the passage of time, to allow us more flexibility while creating the show. Coming soon, the actual recording of the show itself. *dun dun DUN!!!*
We’ll continue to meet together on Tuesday evenings, probably until the project is due. It’s been nothing but a total blast thus far.
Maybe this is a good place to share my Radio Show poster, eh?
Should they go in????
I made this in GIMP. It’s not at all what I had pictured in my mind, but then again, this is all pretty new for me, and I’m pleased with what I was able to accomplish at least. I snapped a shot of a local radio station, edited the van to change its name to our radio station’s name, imposed the positives and negatives of the spot on the roof of the interior of my car, with the big question waiting to be answered just inside the car window. I got a lot of advice from Alan‘s blog post on using GIMP.
Of course, this takes 2 of my required 15 for the week.
Every week that goes by, I think OMG it’s really been another week and I’ve learned so much. I think everyone can agree with me that we learn so many skills in this class, I absolutely love it! So week 6 is over.. I think every sunday I’ll be surprise that yet another week has gone by. This week was filled with 4 daily creates, design safari and the contribution to the assignment page3, and 15 stars worth of design assignments!
Daily Creates
My 4 daily creates for the week are bellow, you can also click the link for more detail, whatever tickles your belly!
The daily assignments this week really allowed me to get creative. I loved the assignment about creating a floor plan about the house we grew up in. This really made me think about my childhood and all of the amazing times I had, and also it reminded me of how amazing my family is, and how far we’ve come from where we lived in Peru to where we are now.
Learning about design was new for me. I did not know that there were so many different components to a picture, or an advertisement or anything. I guess I never really broke down the picture into individual elements. I learned the importance of how color sets the mood, of how typography can use words to send a more meaningful message than a picture could, and how dominance and unity can really bring out the beauty in a picture.
Unity
This picture shows unity by combining the different elements that make the ocean into something that is whole.
Dominance
Not only is a male peacock the definition of dominance, but I think that the colors in the picture really dominate the picture, and the bright blue body is really puts all the colors together.
Typography
Carlo’s Bakery has a way with words! The typography they used in the image created such a visual for me. I really did fall in love with one bite.
Color
The color used in this bottle totally creates the image of mellowness for me. I think that the black and white picture really tie everything together.
My pictures can also be found on the assignment documentt.
Design assignments
Assignment 1 / 3 stars
I decided to Photoshop myself into a new poster. I had to mess around with Photoshop for a while in order to figure out how to actually crop a picture by the figure rather than cropping straight lines across the image. I thought it was really cool when I saw the end result.
Assignment 2 / 2 stars
For this assignment we had to use a word that represented the word in a way. We couldn’t use color or anything but the word. I decided to write the word backwards, backwards. I thought it was pretty ironic!
Assignment 3 / 4 stars
This assignment was a lot of hard work. I decided to do 4 stars in order to challenge myself a little bit. I wrote elements that represented me and chose a background that also shows my love for the ocean. It was an interesting assignment because I used both Photoshop and Powerpoint to create this and crop and make different shapes, but it was also challenging to pick things that represent me!
Assignment 4 /2 stars.
This is my poster for my radio show. I used spooky font to go with the theme, and chose a picture of Autumn to show what our show is about. We are doing a spooky/autumn theme. I also discuss on my blog my contribution to what I’ll be doing for my show. I can’t wait until our radio show is done so all of our hard work can show!
Assignment 5 / 2 stars
I decided to make myself a cartoon! Photoshop was a great aid in this, but I had to do a lot of work in order to get my end result looking just how I wanted it to look!
Assignment 6/ 2 stars
This assignment was about creating a Valentines day card. I love the one I created. I put a lot of work into it, and I love the quote that goes with the heart!
This week I definitely experimented with Photoshop so much more!! I learned how to do so many things including how to crop a picture and inserted it on another one. I knew how to do that, but I didn’t know how to crop the picture to the frame I wanted it. Anytime I tried cropping it drew a little box around the picture and asked me to fit whatever I wanted into the picture to chop of the rest, but that wasn’t going to work for me. I had to do a little research and finally figured out how to delete the excess and actually give the picture the frame I wanted. Also, my iPhone came to the rescue again, maybe it’s time to actually fix my camera or maybe even get a new one.
This week again taught me a lot about photography, art, and anything visual really. Design is a big part of anything visual and it’s something I had taken for granted. I really enjoyed this week. I mention this on EVERY weekly summary but i really enjoy the things I’m learning in this class and every week I look forward to see what new skills I’ll acquire!
This week we were required to do 15 stars worth of Design Assignments.
Here is my first assignment (worth 2 stars and the requirement this week) Ds106 Radio:
For this Assignment I simply used the Program Paint and Microsoft Word. I just copied and pasted different images that I got off the internet and from word, compiled them all together. And Viola! Here it is!
Here is my next assignment (worth 2 stars) Cartoon You:
I used the web page PicMonkey to edit my photo. I decided to use the edit Posterize to give my picture a kind of old cartoon magazine feel.
Here is my other assignment (worth 2 stars) The Horror Of MOOCs:
For this assignment I used the web page PicMonkey and I took a image of a old horror movie poster I found online and I applied different photo effects to it. The main effects that I used were the Day of the Dead and the Zombie effects.
Here is my next assignment (worth 1 star) Make A Normal Photo Of A Friend Imagery Of Horror:
For this assignment I used a Web Page called PicMonkey where you basically can upload any photo and put crazy effects on it. For this photo of my friend Ashley I choose to use the different Halloween-Zombie effects.
Did you guys know that I was actually the scuba diver in Nemo? Yeah, it’s not really a big deal or anything…
So for the assignment “Wait, where’d that guy come from?” We were suppose to Photoshop something or something into a picture where that object didn’t belong. I went snorkeling in the Caribbean three years ago and I decided to Photoshop myself into the Finding Nemo promotional poster! For this assignment I used Photoshop to delete part of my image that I didn’t want in order for it to blend in with the poster a little better. I had familiarized myself with Photoshop, but I was not sure how to actually delete the parts of the images I didn’t want. I tried cropping it at first but it didn’t look right so after some research I finally learned how to outline the picture I wanted and deleted the rest!
This assignment was worth 3 stars.
The word assignment was to create a word, and only use the word to describe what it was. This assignment was worth 2 stars, and I decided to use the word backwards by writing it backwards. I thought this was a nifty idea, and kind of ironic.
One of the design assigments I chose was What’s inside of me? This assigment is worth 4 stars, and I chose to do it because sharing the different components of what makes me as a person was very important to me. People should know the different things in my life that matter the most, and it also gives them more of an insight of who I am besides what they read in my blog.
To do this assignment I mixed powerpoint with Photoshop. I created different bubbles to represent the important things in my life. This assignment really made me put things in perspective. I had to think about what were the most important things in my life, and also how each individual component make me the person I am today.
