Last week I was in the ocean on a photography ship, but this week the ship landed on the shores of an undiscovered place. Me and my crew disembarked and named this place Design Island. We scavenged the land and encountered strange creatures as we explored the jungles. We took notes of our encounters in safari journals and shared them with each other, discussing what we learned. We are now recapping our first week in this intimidating, but beautiful island.

Design Safari

We learned about the elements of what makes a certain design effective. We then captured these elements in places where they occur in everyday life. I ended up finding examples about Balance, Typography, Unity and Rhythm. Go check out my dangerous safari adventure!

Design Assignments

These were a pretty cool way to utilize what we learned in the Design Safari. All of my design assignments were created in GIMP (since It’s the design platform I’m most familiar with) The ones I did were a mix of 3-star assignments, 4-star assignments, and I think there was a required 2-star one in there somewhere. However I REFUSED to touch any of the 1-star ones. Although 1-star assignments would’ve been easy to complete within a few min, I would feel like I wasn’t being challenged enough.

With that said, check out the ones I completed and explained how I made!

>DS106 Propaganda
>One Story/ Four Icons (Answer at the bottom of this Weekly Summary)
>PSA Billboard
>MLP Trading Card (This one was my absolute favorite and is now in my “Best Pictures” photoset!)
>Really Reality TV

Daily Creates

My daily creates this week were

>Sunday: Take a Picture of Something You Made
>Tuesday: If You Could Be Any Pastry…
>Thursday: Fondest Memory
>Friday: Caption a Photo to Make it Say the Opposite

I don’t really remember doing these…I’ve been so busy working on all of the design assignments for this week. Maybe I dont remember them because they all took 15min or less. Oh well, they’re still really fun to do! I think my favorite is the photo of the Bologna and Cheese Croissants because they were delicious! My 2nd favorite is the caption photo of the dog wanting to go for a walk in the park. I took a random Creative Commons image and added something that a dog looking that snazzy would never say. I used a caption creator from a site called  Frabz.com to give me the basic meme font.

Radio Show Progress

At the beginning of the week our radio show group was a bit scattered and we had no idea what sort of show to do. We were scrambling to find a reasonable time to get our group together, and we ended up creating a Google Doc to share our ideas on paper. The first thing we successfully came up with was our show’s title, Digital Dynamite. Currently we are trying to unanimously decide on a logo to use for the broadcast. We ended up narrowing it down to 2 logos:

Ugh! They were both so good that it was hard for even me to decide! However, in the end there was one more logo design that was thrown into the mix, and this one was a keeper.

This logo was a combination of the 4 designs we all submitted. It’s simple, but still has a bang to it!

Our show’s topic is called “What Makes You Dynamite” and it’s going to ask each one of us what makes us “dynamite,” discussing that time when we felt inspired to do or be something; the fire to keep us following our dreams. This topic is in its embryonic stage and may change when we start hearing from other team members.

And so ends Chapter 6 of the DS106 novel. Just like last week, I went around to the other blogs to see how everyone was stacking up to graphic design. By the looks of things, it looked like everyone had a good handle on the assignments. I’ll admit, this week was pretty sweet because of all the Gimping, but it also seemed longer than normal. Sometimes I would think I was finished with everything, until I’d realize that I forgot to do an extra Design Assignment or haven’t finished a Safari.  I’ve said this once before, but the checklist is my absolute best friend every week! Now that I’m looking at the checklist again, it was actually shorter this week than last week. Huh…then why did this week take so long? Maybe it was because I’ve been constantly doing midterm papers for other classes. I’m so glad that Spring Break is around the corner! I’m running on 35% brain power…