Assignment details available at:

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

Messi has been one of the greatest football player. He has been representing his country, Argentina, for many years.  He has announced that he is going to retire from international football. I am not in favor of this decision as I believe that he is still too young to retire. He has a lot of football left in him. I mean come on he is just 29. Is this the age to retire from anything? He has had a great career and can still extend his career. Scoring a few more goals won’t hurt I guess. He has millions of fans around the world who want to see him playing. Many petitions have be initiated by his fans to request him to take his retirement decision back. I am going to search for such a petition and sign it. In fact I am going to sign many petitions.

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Assignment details available at:

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/legalisation/

I am not someone who like to enjoy all the times but I am also not a boring person who hates to enjoy. The main idea behind choosing this image is that marijuana is not a bad thing in itself. What makes it bad is its misuse. Therefore I am in favor of a legalization of marijuana. I believe that each one of us has to show some responsibility. For example is the irresponsible use of Alcohol good? No, it is not. Therefore, marijuana is not bad in itself. Instead bad people have given it a bad name. so who is in favor of legalizing marijuana?

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Assignment details can be found on the following page:

http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/bring-your-pet-to-school/

I designed this image with the help of Photoshop. Photoshop is one of my favorite photo editing tools. I am not that expert in it but still I know my way around it.  Here is my story that goes with this photo.

I have designed this image as part of bringing my pet to my school. There has got to be cat teachers. Therefore this is my cat who can got a degree in business administration and is here to talk to us about some business tips. She has been giving lectures on different avenues. I thought that why not I bring her to my school so that she might want to try and get a permanent job here. This way she can accompany me every day to my school and us humans can benefit from her knowledge. I hope that all her students are as happy to have her as she looks happy in her suit.

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I started off thinking I would take a darker take on this Digital Storytelling class assignment, a visual assignment called the “Make Your Own Spubble”. I took an old photo of myself, taken by my friend Dil a couple years ago (during which she had an obsession with so-called “emo” culture), which she had turned into greyscale for dramatic effect. As you may have noticed, I love black and white photography for this very reason.

However, I was in a great mood, so I decided to do a different take and follow the suggestion to make the “spubble” (a portmanteau of “speech” and “bubble” in this case, not the Urban Dictionary definition) add humor to the photo, which was obviously especially challenging in this case. I first decided a splash of color would help lift the aesthetic mood, so I selected an intense red outline for the spubble, then overlayed one of the rather limited options for spubbles available on Google Drawings. I thought the curly edges, usually indicative of thought, made sense in this case since the photo shows me not speaking.

I didn’t like the way it looked with a solid white background, but a transparent bubble wouldn’t look right either, for the letters would not have been visible in black or white against the many greys of the background…I learned that this is an advantage of black and white when words need to be superimposed on an image. I resolved this issue by making the bubble semi-transparent white, just light enough to see the black letters.

Overall I think it went surprisingly well. I may recreate this photo later, but with greater attention to detail than in the original, and with consideration of the photography tips we’re currently learning. In particular, I may want to do this photo from a different angle, giving more power to the perspective, as recommended by David duChemin, or use Jason Eskenazi’s photography in WONDERLAND: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith and analysis in Storytelling and Visual Literacy as inspiration for a more geometric composition of the figure.

Summer always worsens my persistent cabin fever and wanderlust, especially for the seaside with its unique charm. I don’t know if I can wait until August for my “Vitamin Sea” after scrolling through all these beautiful pictures on Pinterest! But at the moment I am trapped inside, working on my projects for Digital Storytelling. Which is why I immediately chose the “You In Collage Form” Assignment from the Visual Assignment Bank, thinking of the vacation ideas I was pinning earlier (to see some, check out my travel-themed Pinterest board “Dream Passport”).

I was inspired by the casual layout that Pinterest provides to structure each board, arranging the different sized Pins so that they snap into preset spaces of varying standard sizes. However, after trying five different online collage makers, I could not recreate that effect. So I found that my best approximation was making a “PowerPoint” (actually using the Google Drive software’s Google Slides, free online with a Gmail account) that is sized to be a 3′ x 4′ poster so  I could fit everything in. If printing posters weren’t so expensive, I would actually love to print it. Then I simply added photos via url, which works seamlessly with Google Chrome’s menu option “Copy link address” and probably just as well with other browsers. I resized photos to optimize their clarity, as well as based on the importance they had, and arranged them around the frame of the background. The only involved photo-editing was turning the picture I chose for the center black and white, and cutting it into the shape of a heart, so it would stand out from the rest and break the block-y appearance it had. Finally, to make the background a little more subdued, I increased the transparency of the background image 10%, centered it, and made the slide color dark blue. And voila, a fun collage that tells you something about me.

Still wish I was going to the beach though.

For my fourth and final visual assignment of the week, I have completed the celebrity quote assignment. I chose Kim Kardashian solely due to the fact that I could have some fun with the image.

There is an ongoing debate in the media about the Kardashians and why they are famous. Most people fall in the category of knowing that they did not become famous because of any talents that they have. You can’t deny that they have used their platform to make themselves endlessly wealthy and got luckier than most of us will in our lives. Well Kanye West, Kim Kardashians husband, does believe that Kim has talent. Directly quoted from the man himself, “In my industry, beauty is a talent. You know, ‘What is she talented at?’ She’s talented at being beautiful.” That about says it all. If beauty is a talent, someone let me know where  I can go to cash my check.

To make this assignment, I again used Aviary.

I grabbed the most beautiful picture of Kim Kardashian from the internet and uploaded it to the website.

I used the edit tool bar to add a textbox and selected the best Kanye quote I could find to match the image.

No disrespect to the Kardashians, their show in slightly entertaining and I wish I got rich out of no where as well.

For my third visual assignment of the week, I completed the car lust assignment. I’ve never been a huge car person. There hasn’t been a car I’ve dreamed of having forever or aren’t cars that I see that I can’t live without. Up until recently I drove a 2004 Rav4 that was a good car and got me from point a to point b. Last month, I got a 2015 Nissan Rogue and I am obsessed! Before getting the car I had never actually been in one or known much about it.

This is the rogue in graphite blue. I love the color. It is just enough of a blue to not be plain but the gray tones make it neutral and not obnoxious. The interior is black and tan. The black steering wheel and front dash makes the interior so slick and clean looking. The car as updated back-up camera and radio. One of my features in the car is the blue tooth. When enabled, I can play music from my phone through the car, make and receive calls, and other commands. The shape and size of the car are perfect for me. I love mid-sized cars. I don’t like feeling low on the road in a regular Sudan so this car is a good height.

As you can see, I am absolutely obsessed with my car.