umwfa12s2 – Assignment Bank

Downtown Safari!

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This week our main assignment was the Design Safari! We were asked to take photos of anything that demonstrated one of the design concepts. (color, typography, metaphors/symbols, balance, unity, etc.) I decided to take photos of shop signs downtown and apply the design concepts to them.

The sign for Goolrick’s Pharmacy is extremely simple. It definitely demonstrates minimalism! Even though from a design perspective it is not at all creative, it really like it. The simplicity of it gives it a vintage feel in my opinion. This vintage-like appearance really works in the location of the pharmacy Downtown Fredericksburg) So maybe not so great designs can work out if located in the right place?

I love the use of COLOR in the sign for Horseshoes and Handgrenades.The sign for this vintage boutique really pops out at you because of the color use. There aren’t a lot of color popping signs downtown. Also, the horseshoe and the hand-grenade in the middle display unity, I love the way they come together! In addition, I noticed this showed balance. It is very symmetrical, even the two words are similar! Love this sign!

The Made In Virginia Store sign demonstrates typography and unity (or unified typography, if you will). I love the design of this sign because of the way the font of the words is all connected and intertwined. This is definitely a logo customers can recognize right off! It is as if all of the elements are working together to create a truly unique design!

The sign for Micah Ministries displays symbolism and minimalism. The Micah motto is “walk humbly with God,” the foot symbolizes walking and the first steps you must take to get back on your feet. And it displays minimalism because the design is obviously very simplistic, but it still looks great and catches your eye when you walk by. It uses a minimal amount of space to get the message across.

This assignment really made me think about design and what makes a design good! I loved tearing apart the different aspects of design and seeing what works and what doesn’t. I never realized how much thought must go into designing before this week or how many concepts really apply to design.

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Roadtrip Radio!

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This week we were required to do Design Assignment 50 worth 2 stars, we were suppose to come up with a bumper sticker, poster, or t-shirt to advertise our shows! This must be theme specific. I decided to create a poster!

We decided on a road-trip theme! Once you listen to our show other details in this poster will make a lot of sense, I just don’t want to give to much away before you listen to us!

I used GIMP to create my poster! I started out with a picture of a road surrounded by desert. I played around with the coloring on this photo. I decided to use the posterize tool, this tool reduces the amount of colors used and you can select which level you wish to use. I really liked this tool I feel like it makes the photo look more like a drawing. After I had the coloring like I wanted it, I added my text, I played around with the colors and font style. And then for a cool touch I added a glare in the clouds, my goal was to make it look like the sun was shinning through them. I am pleased with the outcome of my poster!

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The Melting Pot Melting Family

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From the “What is Culture?” assignment: Create image that you think this is culture for you. It is acceptable to use two more pictures if you want. (2 stars)

I found two pictures from 2008 when my Virginia cousins came to visit with my cousin’s then-girlfriend (now, since 2011, wife). It is a picture of my grandfather and cousin and his then-girlfriend at the Pali Lookout. The trees that overlap their heads are the palm tree and a more Christmas Tree-like one. I think this is an accurate representation of my cousin and his wife. His Asian family from Hawai’i and her White background from all over Virgina depicted in trees and where their roots (HA) are. Hawai’i is already so much of a melting pot that interracial marriages are really not a big deal. Their distance also symbolized their geographic distance. I think the main thing I was trying to get at here is that culture can be mashed together.

I used Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 6 to create this image cranking down the opacity of the overlaid trees that I used a magic wand tool of death for. The colors are a little askew and so are the proportions for the trees, but the trees are really dramatically different heights as well as the couple. Also, I used CS6 to adjust the lighting and contrast to give a more realistic view of the Pali.

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A Parsnip’s Wild Philosophy

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Submitted for no one’s approaval, another design example for the ds106 Minimalize Your Philosophy assignment:

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. :)

Okay, I am not going to claim this one as MY philosophy, but I had this idea, and needed to make a poster, and this was the closest assignment I could find (yeah, I could create a new one, but we have plenty).

Today on our walk around the country roads near their home, friends Barbara and Bill pointed out some innocuous nondescript green plants on the roadside. They had been mowed down, but there were taller stalked nes in the adjacent field. “Have you hear of wild parsnip?” No, I’m kind of a city guy.

Well, as it turns out, wild parsnip creates these bright yellow flower heads

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by wackybadger

but if you contact these plants at all, they will burn your skin and leave scars. It is labeled as a dangerous plant.

Can you think of a more clever evolutionary strategy to be left alone? Create attractive flowers but then easily poison anything that touches it.

SO I decided to make a poster of this.

In PhotoShop I used the image above, and simplified it by using Image=> Adjust-> POsterize which reduces the color set to a smaller number, and turn a photo into something more abstract like a print. I played with the slider and ended up on something like 11 levels.

In landscape orientation it did not look like a poster (nor did it leave room for words), so I rotated in 90 degrees.

The text “Survival Strategy” is Gil Sans Ultra Bold, because, it is big and thick. I used Layer=>Effects=>Stroke to put a 3 pixel outside edge to the letter, a good effect for making text stand out.

The lower text is Mistral, which I liked because it looks kind of hand drawn and more ominous. The black text was not really looking good on its own, so I used Layer=>Effects=>Outer Glow to put that yellowish haze around the letters.

Poster done!

Again, this IS NOT MY PHILOSOPHY! Just had fun with today’s learning moment.

Learn more about Wild Parsnip… I think it gives our Corn Overlords something to worry about

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Lackadaisical

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adj. Lacking enthusiasm and determination; lacking life, spirit, or zest; carelessly lazy; languid.

From the WORD assignment: Pick one word. Select one single typeface, and communicate your word. Do not use colors or any other graphical elements. The goal is to select a type face that represents the meaning of the word, and if needed manipulate the font using different sizes, bold, italics, counterform (spacing) etc to visualize the word. (2 stars)

I used dafont to find A La Nage and Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 6 to manipulate my letters. I have loved this word since the sixth grade where I “created” the lackadaisy for my foreign land. This word has been kind of lazily interspersed in my daily vocabulary, but it exists. This is the short story of the lackadaisical word who can’t even spell himself but at least he completed his own word.

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Melindastry

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I created myself a tapestry.

The assignment where I create a tale with a tapestry: Go to Bildwirkerey von Bayeuxbe where you will find the “Historic Tale Constrvction Cit”, a web-based app inspired by the Tapestry of Bayeux. Follow the directions to create your own tapestry story, then be sure to share it with us! (1 star)

I am in a Greek Art class and so we’ve been doing a lot on stories on surfaces. Tapestry is obviously not one of them, but I still think that this reminds me a little more about how the minotaur came to be. Actually, this is a lot like the pre-story of the minotaur. The perspective of the figures is flat, the layering is not as dynamic and is used to show a movement of people who are frantically responding to a ferocious bull. Maybe there will be more tapestries to follow!

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Rob Is Hard To Spell

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At least when it comes to finding the letters in your surroundings! I couldn’t find many places that had R-O-B-E-R-T hidden in the area, so I just went around and cropped letters off of different signs.

I was going to post all of the pictures that I used so you could see what I worked with, but then I realized, we’ve made photo sets on flickr…why don’t I embed one and it won’t take up so much space?

BAM! Pictures.

Working with GIMP has been getting a little less frustrating…not because it no longer sucks, I’m just learning to cope/accommodate for it’s suckiness…Nonetheless, I’m not letting it get the best of me and I’m continuing to pump out design work! From those pictures, I put them together and spelled my name:

I didn’t want to have a lame white background, so I took another one of my photos with a good backdrop and ATTEMPTED to angle it against the wall…well that didn’t exactly work because I couldn’t get it right and then every time I tried my computer would freeze up because the file size was so large. It probably could’ve been blended into the photo a little better, but I think me and the GIMP had enough of each other for one night. One thing I’m realizing is…I want photoshop. I want a new computer. I want a nice camera. Christmas is right around the corner, anyone interested in helping out a broke college student?

10/15

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The Little Caption of Corgis

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After seeing this assignment, I knew I would find a cute derpy corgi and make him cuter. I also decided to make a little tutorial on how to make this with the text and box. This corgi caption is based off of this meme, in case you didn’t catch that.

Edit: I choose the placement for the box simply because there were some hairy legs in the picture and they were distracting from the cuteness. I suppose thats a design element of some type. I choose the font color because it popped and the red in the tennis “berz” kind of matched. And the font I choose because it was pretty close to the one used in the original meme.

First, I duplicated the layer in case anything went wrong, I could go right back to the original:

Then, I renamed the layer by right clicking it and naming it Dupe and hitting enter. Then I created a new layer by right clicking Dupe and hitting New Layer:

Then, from there I selected the “rectangle select tool” (highlighted in the upper left of the tool box and drew a rectangle where I wanted my white box to be (note I did my work and this tutorial at different times, so they are different boxes and fonts and such):

Now I have a white box in the layer “Layer”!:

Then I selected the “Text tool” (most left column in the middle, capital “A”) and wrote in the white box what I wanted to say (note: using the text tool will create a new layer):

Then, to make it look a little better and polished, go back and click “Layer” with the white box. Above the layers, there will be a bar that says “opacity.” Drag the bar or click the arrows to make it look “polished” to your satisfaction (this is set to 57 in this example):

Voila! You’re done!

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Growth Growth

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(click to see a wee bit larger)

It was time tonight to do some ds106 design assignment, this time a Triple Troll Quote. the classic ds106 assignment game of mixup and mis-attribution:

Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure. From the official site: How It Works 1) Get a picture of someone people idolize. Obi Wan Kenobi, Barack Obama, Captain Kirk — any beloved public figure will do. 2) Slap on a famous quotation from a similar character from a different book or movie. Pick something close enough that a non-fan might legitimately confuse them. If you’re using Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, you’ll probably want to grab a quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. 3) Attribute the quotation to a third character, from yet a third universe. This way, nothing about your image is correct, and you’re trolling fans of all three characters at once.

So what the bleep is my image? I snuck in a Quadruple! This all started with a tweet by Audrey Watters following some twitter banter about Mitt Romney’s debate remark about pawning of Sesame Street to China:

.@kinlane and I are now debating if I can attribute Ed Abbey quotes to Oscar the Grouch. He’s right… Oscar is more urban

— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) October 4, 2012

The mention of Edward Abbey got me thinking about one of my favorite quotes of the irascible desert rat urban curmudgeon (I miss the words he wrote so much):

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

or a later iteration

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

And this lead me to thinking about the hysteria of Massive Online Open Courses and it all came together.

So for anyone who actually might still be reading here, the mixups are:

The quote is from Edward Abbey, who would have given a rats fart about MOOCs
The photo is of Coursera founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng
The quote is mis-attributed to the guy who got like 300,000,000 gazillion people to sign up for an A1 course, and for all major newspapers, magazines, is the founder of MOOCs much to the chagrin of our friends in Canada.
And just for a fourth leg to this troll, I put an edX logo on Ng’s laptop.

Cause as we all know, massive has nothing to do with growth.

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“The Ham Capital of the World!”

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This assignment is called “Where I come from.” It is design assignment 375 and it is worth 3 stars. The instructions were “Design an animated poster for your hometown. Make sure to include the text for the name and state of your hometown.”

Have you ever eaten a Smithfield Ham? I bet you have! They have been on America’s tables for generations. If you have, you’ve played a role in supporting my hometown’s economy and making Smithfield, Virginia “The ham capital of the world.” So thanks, I guess.

I remember waking up in the mornings and walking to the bus stop. Sometimes the Smithfield air would smell like ham or bacon, other times it would be awful! It would smell like gross, dirty, pooping pigs.

Oh boy! I also remember how I would always try to dodge the pig trucks driving through town. It was so sad to see and hear all of the pigs crammed into the trucks taking them to the factory. And not to mention that smell! YUCK.

When working on this assignment, I started off with a couple pictures of famous historical Smithfield buildings. I felt like the buildings were boring. Then it hit me: “Use a cute picture of a pig, after all it IS the ham capital!” Isn’t he just adorable! I had a lot of fun with this assignment, it allowed me to reminisce. I used the program Paint to place text boxes on top of the photo. I decided on Papyrus as the font because it reminds me of the font used in the Smithfield Foods logo.