Final Project

Going through the never-ending bank of DS106 assignments, I came across the assignment Post-It Notes and Grocery Lists (3.5 stars). Since George Glekas is a serious businessman, he always needs to stay organized! I wanted to display the post-it notes in a virtual fashion on George’s desktop computer.

The categories I included on his post-it notes were: Appointments, Contacts, Important, and To-Do. Businessmen need to organize their lives too! To create this assignment, I downloaded pictures of a desktop and stickies and imported them onto GIMP, in which I resized the images and added the text for the lists. I really like how it turned out!

Notice that The Greek has no contact information whatsoever!

The second assignment I did this week was “Wanted Poster” (2.5 stars). I made this one kind of as a funny thing. I played it like Rawls found the wanted poster somewhere around the office and was super mad about it–because obviously he wants people to think he is straight even though he might not be, which is obviously something that I am playing up with this final project.

How I did it:

I used the link on the assignment page to make the wanted poster. I thought it would be funny if he was wanted for saying he is straight when he’s not because we saw him in the gay bar. I made the phone number a 410 area code because that is Baltimore so I thought that would be more realistic. I also said William “Bill” Rawls because it made him sound more like an old westerner who was wanted. I literally just had to type in the information and click the options that I wanted like burnt paper, western font type, etc. I had to try to generate it a couple of times before it would actually make itself but eventually it did. Then I just saved the photo to my computer and uploaded it to Rawls’s Flickr. Here it is:

For my first assignment this week from Rawls’s point of view I did “Post-it Notes and Grocery Lists” (3 stars). I saw Imran’s take on this assignment from Jay Landsman’s point of view and that made me want to do this assignment for Rawls. I figured it’d be pretty easy, especially since I have a Pinterest for Major Rawls, I could pull some of my ideas for food from there.

How I did it:

I opened a new Microsoft Word document. I went to the insert tab, clicked shapes, and clicked text box. Then I drew the size of the text box that I wanted, approximately sticky note size, and started thinking and typing. Then under the format tab, I clicked on shape fill and made it one of the colors that a sticky note would be. Then I did the next one using the same method. The font I used was Colors of Autumn which is something that I downloaded from dafont earlier in this class. I thought it would fit perfectly with what I pictured Rawls’s handwriting looking like. Then I screen-shotted the post it notes, pasted it into the same word document, and right clicked and saved as picture. Then I opened the picture in Office Photo Editor and cropped the photo to where it looked right. Then I uploaded it to Flickr. Here is the finished product:

Hi! So for one of the final assignments I decided to make a To-do list for Beatrice! This was worth 3 stars. I had  a lot of fun with this! It was really cool to actually sit down and think about what Beatrice might need to do during the week. So I got inspiration from Allison’s To-do list for her final project. So I first decided to use the Stickies app that comes with the Mac operating system.  I added the different stickies one at a time then changed the color from the default yellow to give the cluster some contrast. Then I went into Skitch (a screen capture application, similar to Grab) and caputred the stickie notes and uploaded it to Flickr. (Here is the original)

Then I went to plan what I need to write down in order for it to look realistic. I knew Beatrice would definitely be busy during the week between running the kids around after school and balancing her job. So I added the picture to trusty old PicMonkey and cropped it down so that it was a square. I did this so that I could upload it to Beatrice’s Instagram later. I used their text editor to add the text to the different sections. Once I was finished I uploaded it to Flickr straight from PicMonkey.

I included what she would pick up from the Grocery story in the yellow section. I included some dinner items as well as everyday items. Then I decided to include some of the upcoming appointments in the purple section that she and the kids might have in the next few weeks. In the blue section I put the things that she had to remember for that week in particular. Finally in the pink section I added things that the kids were doing this week.

Here is the final product! I had a lot of fun creating this assignment!

As we enter this final stretch of assignments for the final project, I try to incorporate more ways to reflect on Bunny Colvin’s actions and character. The thing he’s probably most known for is his establishment of Hamsterdam. This assignment to create a fake Newsweek cover seemed perfect for the occasion. I cut the Newsweek banner from an existing image, and pasted it as a layer. The cover image of Hamsterdam comes from a  screenshot I took of Season 3, episode 7 of The Wire. I insert the headlines using the text box tool, and made a border to help them stand out against the backdrop. The font used is Franklin Gothic, as I felt it matched the font often used by news magazines.

I made it a point to accurately reflect how a real news source would view Hamsterdam: a frightening disaster. Even though Colvin had the best intentions in mind, one of his biggest fears was that he was creating something bad. I created this cover with the idea of exploring his insecurities.

Difficulty Rating: 3.5 stars