To help the students in Prof. Lockman’s “Cyberspace and Society” class get up to speed with the digital storytelling portion of the course, I’ve chosen to demonstrate one of the more popular assignments from week 3 in this semester’s iteration of ds106 as led by Michael Branson Smith (mbransons). This image above is from the Four Icon Challenge. The challenge to you, dear reader, is to guess what film is represented by the four icons above. You are invited to make your guesses in the comment section below.
As is the case with ds106, it is expected to atribute the the sources of inspiration, information and resources that helped to complete the particular assignment. Following Ben’s lead, I headed over the Noun Project to grab the freely available public domain images seen above. The Noun Project itself is an amazing and curious resources. A word should be said about how I used the svg files I downloaded.
The svg file extension refers to vector graphic images. Manipulating such files was a new experience to me. Expert practitioners such as mbransons use a program called Adobe Illustrator with great facility as evidenced in this tutorial from the Summer of Oblivion.
Unfortunately Illustrator is not available in your computer lab. Even if it were, I doubt that Prof. Lockman could figure out how to use it well enough to explain it to you. For these reasons, I used a freely available web based vector editor called Aviary Raven. Opening a new document in Raven, I was able to upload the four icons and arrange as seen above. From there it was a simple matter to export them as a png (bitmap) file which was then uploaded to this blog.
It’s so simple in fact, that I think there is no way Prof. Lockman can bumble an in class demonstration this coming Tuesday. Between then and now, please have a look at at the Four Icon Challenge and think about the movie, or event you’d like to represent in four icons.
Also, please realize that you are not restricted to using icons from the Noun Project. You may draw your own or make use any other iconic images you can get your hands on – though we do suggest that they be images that have been made freely available for such purposes. Isaac for example came up with a humorous golf-themed image. The ever-amazing Leezlebub’s submission from last spring remains one of my personal favorites, though I must confess I still haven’t figured it out. And though Tom spoiled the challenge by including the movie title with his image – it still stands out as a bucket full of awesomeness.
The entire point is to learn how to use some new tools, create some art, and to have fun. I’m confident all of you will succeed with distinction.
