So, after nearly three weeks away for a conference (and panel comment), a new talk for a Civil War Round Table, and a family trip to California, I’ve finally returned to DS106 work.  These means that I’m woefully behind as the rest of the class has moved into audio assignments.  I’ll catch up as I can, first by doing some of the Design Assignments from Week 4.  This one is for Postcards from Magical Places.

The assignment reads (corrected for typos because I can’t help myself):

Design the front and back of a postcard that might be sent from the location of a movie or a work of fiction. Both sides of the cards must be created as graphics.

The front should use graphic design elements that provide a sense of place or use the classic motifs of old postcards (“Greetings from ______”), both pictures and text. The back of the post card should contain a stamp and postmark that fits with the theme of the movie, as well as an addressee and a message that fits the plot as well.

The modification that we had from Alan and Martha was that the image was supposed to come from the DS106 Minecraft server where there is some absolutely amazing stuff created by DS106 participants.  Unfortunately, the server was down when I went to it, so I ended up taking an image from a regular Minecraft instance.  But that was pretty boring, so I added an image I took on a recent trip to Legoland California.  [I took the Minecraft image as the background, and then, using the Quick Selection tool in Photoshop, removed the material in the upper right of the Lego version of Mount Rushmore, allowing the Minecraft background to show. This is all after some resizing of the two images so they matched.]

I then added some text, using a phrase that should be reminiscent on one commonly seen these days to those of us in Fredericksburg, and is an approved font from that institution.  The result was this:

For the second side, I created the stamp from the image of Lego Jefferson.* The expensive postcard price is an homage to the founding of UMW (as well as a tease to a relative who always scolds us when we spend more that the needed price on postcard postage).  The postmark is a stylized font in Photoshop and refers to the location of Legoland, as well as UMW.

There are a few other nods, if not homages, in the letter and address.

* I think the thing next to his eye is supposed to be a Q-tip cleaning Washington’s ear, but given the past month at Mr. Jefferson’s University, I’m interpreting it as something wiping away TJ’s tears.