It’s hard to resist a good ds106 assignment submitted by a student- such as the ds106 Propaganda Posters by Daniel Zimmerman (who is taking zero prisoners in this class) Time to let out your inner Big Brother! Create a propaganda poster for ds106. Use your photo editing software of choice and write a message to inspire your fellow ds106ers. For example, I took a WW2 poster about increasing ammunition production, and turned it into a poster promoting tweeting. I found a bunch by searching Google Images on “vintage posters” and was drawn in by the superhero look of a set of Kick Ass Posters from Affein Heim Theaters This was some quick Photoshopping; it will take me longer to describe then to do it. I used Popular Std font to put the “1 0 6″ on the head- each a separate layer so I could rotate. For the 6, I ...

I’ve been daunted by the ds106 Spreadsheet Invasion assignment where you are charged with creating an animation using the software designed for… sales reports, etc. It is, ironically, the first Design Assignment. And one that is least frequently done. But thankfully, it was my student Tiffany who undertook it bravely in her Tale of a Flower version that pushed me over the hump of inertia to try this. So here, I tell in a rather horribly inaccurate fashion, the process of Geology that form sedimentary rock (invasions of inland seas, rivers, and desert environments over time) and uplift/eroison processes that shape canyons. I did this while idling time yesertday at BWI airport, wine was involved (Malbec, I love relaxing at Vino Vola). A lady at the next time working on NUMBERS in her spreadsheet must have been tsk-tsking me coloring in cells. There is a fair bit of slop, I ...

It is about time we had a Bag in Charge we can trust, which is why I am on board to elect BAGMAN for President! My contibution is this campaign poster for the ds106 assignment BAGMAN Campaign Poster. Although not of the same political ilk, I was compulsed to reach back for another unlikely candidate, Richard Nixon in 1960: I found this at the Learn California site which has info on the Nixon Campaign: As radio and television gained popularity with the voting public in the 1940s and 1950s, image and media exposure became increasingly important to waging successful campaigns. Companies subsequently sprang up across the nation offering campaign management services. Richard Nixon hired two of the most preeminent and innovative of these companies to run his California campaigns for his 1960 presidential bid. I did this one in Photoshop CS5- some of this might not have been easily done ...

Some notes, links, and goodies for tonight’s class. Tracking Participation Blog Comment activity: find your method of tracking. Try Liz’s idea to star in Google Reader Flickr Activity: Monitor your own comment activity http://www.flickr.com/activity/replies/ Twitter Activity for UMW Section 2: … Continue reading →

Last year in ds106 I built a few of my assignments out of the movie Dirty Harry — and having seen this movie just last night, I am just shifting to another classic San Francisco cop, Bullitt. I did this for the Bad Guy Business Cards design assignment — and completely missing that it said “bad” guy, cause Bulitt is anything but bad. Oh well, there needs to be a good guys card in the mix: Apparently, street gangs in Chicago, like the Hell’s Devils, used to have calling cards (see the gallery: http://bit.ly/pyuOEl). This makes me think that poor marketing gives evil-doers a bad image. Help some of them out by creating business cards for them. But not the Joker – that’s too obvious. He is the ultimate of no nonsense cool. He sees the in effectiveness and the preening of the superiors, but doe snot sneer as much ...

Oops, I got in my mind to do a ds106 design assignment, and ended up doing a visual one! Oh well, it’s done. This is for the Four Icon Challenge (which to me should be design!): Reduce a movie, story, or event into it’s basic elements, then take those visuals and reduce them further to simple icons. This is a movie I just watched (which means I could remember some iconic details). No fair guessing if you saw my tweet last night or were in the same room as me. NAME THAT MOVIE! I had dreams of tracing te visuals I found. Hah. So I nabbed some from various places online, reduced them in PhotoShop to fir within a 100px square frame, and layered it on top of or converted with the Note Paper sketch filter. For framing it is just a 4 pixel inside stroke. I think Jim and ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by maher berro It’s been an explosive week of creativity in Section 2 and I am excited to see that most of the class has kept on their Daily Creates … Continue reading →

I’m setting up an example of how I might do my weekly recaps if I were a student in my ds106 class (cough) (cough). I am doing the same work my students are doing. Daily Creates Our task this week was to do one every day! I got 7 out of 7. These were challenging as at least two seemed to dwell on the past or required some making rather than taking of the photo- I ended up using old photo for the memorable moment, but re-processed it to make it different. My favorite is the bicycle shot0- the black and white provided by Silver Efex plugin really makes it pop. For these assignments Feb 6, 2011: TDC 29: Photo of Something Upside down never seen that way Feb 7, 2011: TDC 30: An image of a place you lose things Feb 8, 2011: TDC 31: Happiest or most memorable ...

I have been wanting to make a good attempt at Annie Belle’s Switch up the Mood ds106 assignment: Color, lighting, saturation, contrast, and many other factors all play in to taking a decent photo and making it fabulous. This assignment is to change the mood or tone of a photograph by altering the contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, exposure, etc. You do not have to change all of those things about the photo, but you can if you would like to. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to take it to the extremes, and don’t be afraid to be subtle. Familiarize yourself with your editing software, whether it’s Photoshop, GIMP, Picnik, or any number of other editing platforms. Most of all, enjoy what you are doing! Yet I wanted more than just going black and white for a gritty feel. I ended up using as my “pre” image a photo of the Cadillac ...

I liked Christina’s effort to fat cat a Sandra Bernhardt painting – she mentioned wanting to get the cat in the hands in place of the goblet but running into frustration in GIMP. I knew how to do it in … Continue reading →

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog My variant of the ds106 Parent-Child Headswap assignment, in this case I take some liberty to swap a photo of me and my icon dog, Mickey. The original photo is from August 2001: cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog This was done in Photoshop, I am planning try and start doing some work in GIMP so I better understand tools my students are using. I used the magnetic lasso selection to choose each head, cut it and past it to new layers. I flipped each one horizontally to get the orientation right, and then the Transform->Scale and Transform-Distort tools to shape the heads. It took a bit of eraser/brush to clean up the selection fringe, and some magic brush on the background layer to fill things out. You know what they say about pets and their ...

Part of your class participation credit in ds106 is commenting on the work of other students in the class (you are doing that, correct?). But with 26 blogs in this class, and a few hundred more on the main ds106 … Continue reading →

Say it Like the Peanut Butter has been a long standing popular ds106 assignment- capture a key moment in a movie in the form of an animated GIF. Over the summer I did some experiments with using my own photos to generate animated GIFs, and I am making this into a new ds106 assignment. Photo it Like the Peanut Butter For this assignment, generate an animated GIF of a real world object/place by using your own series of photographs as the source material. I have already written up a few blog posts with my method; the key is taking a series of photos with little or no movement of your camera – a tripod is strongly recommended, but I have gotten away with ones done with multiple shot mode on my Canon DSLR. The first one I spotted in Nashville as I was fascinated by the reflections of the Cumberland ...

Get out in front of this meme or get out of the way! Beyond Cat Breading lies the bizarre space of Jim Groom Breading: This started with the almost incomprehensible Cat Breading ds106 assignment: The latest bizarre trend blowing up Facebook mini-feeds everywhere? Cat Breading. (Think LOLcats, but with a trippy twist—each adorable kitten has been adorned with a slice of bread, which encases their little feline face.)” From this article in Complex’s Pop Culture section So, what do you have to do? Simple: frame a cat’s face with a piece of bread and take a picture of it. Now the Cat Bread Purists will likely insist the true art requires real cats and real pieces of bread, no Photoshopping. Phoooey. As Jim was describing this assignment to his ds106 class tonight, I was watching on the live stream, and it occurred to me that the most appropriate things to ...

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog A quick one for a new #ds106 assignment created by one of my students: Comic Book Effect Take a picture and experiment with the “Halftone Effect” in some photo editing software to create...

Inspired by Ben Rimes post today I wanted to take a spin at the ds106 Warning Design assignment: Lots of things today have warning labels. Create warning labels for things that exist only in movies or your imagination I felt that as a weapon of planetary destruction, the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator wielded by Marvin Martian would definitely need some warning labels. That thing is dangerous. The users manual is about 800 pages long. Marvin is lucky he does not blow his Martian head off. The real device was rather simple, almost just a stick of dynamite. I did a google search on the device and landed on the complex device from a tumblr blog. Building this was just some PhotoShop layering. I placed the device at the center. For each callout, I just copied a selection, pasted to new layer, and resized. Then I overlaid the items with text ...

Actually we don’t. We need more fake reality shows. San Francisco: Flip This Mayor There must be something in the water at Oakland’s City Hall which makes people stupid. San Francisco’s unemployment rate stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average and the third-lowest unemployment rate in California, as city officials say the number of tech jobs in the city nears levels not seen since the first dot-com boom. ——————————————————- Tune in for the drama in city hall, as city officials labor hard to prove their are “creating jobs”. Mayor Stan Usual was elected on a split opposition vote, and has no mandate. He is dealing with a water issue, but it is not stupidity, but lead. As the tech industry dries up, before the tumbleweeds are spotted blowing through SoMa, city council people have developed a new job sceme involving portable structures made from aluminum cans. Who will win ...

You can set up your flickr account so you cna compose and publish a blog post directly from one of your photos. In this screencast (created with the free tool screenr), I show you how to do this (and in … Continue reading →

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Photo Challenge You hopefully have a camera with you! You have 20 minutes to complete this challenge, to take and post your best photos to satisfy the following. You are … Continue reading →

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I made this as an example for a new ds106 Visual Assignment, Splash The Color- this is the effect of accentuating parts of an image by reducing it to black and white, and then re-coloring or restoring the color of parts of the photo. See examples from Photobucket or many groups on flickr. Color splash is a technique to emphasize details- you remove all color from a photo, and then restore original color to a single object, e.g. a green apple on a table. Think of the Girl in the red dress from Schindler’s List. You can do this in a number of ways with photo editing software or using mobile apps. The answer lies in the Google The tags for this assignment are: VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments340 I’ve come across a few variations on how to do this, the easiest (how ...

This week we move into the part of the course where we are doing a lot of creation, starting with photography and visual stories. (a) Photography For the next two weeks, get in the habit of doing photographs everyday; make sure you are carrying a camera and using it regularly....

Week 3 of ds106 was full of action, from digging out of the rubble that hacker Emre5807 caused to working through the readings of Tim O’Reilly on Web 2.0 and Bryan Alexander on Web storytelling. The flow of activity in The Daily Create has been impressive, especially now that we have our students in the mix. I’m liking the bit of doing a weekly recap, as a way of mini reflection on what one did with these in a week. TDC28 (Feb 5): Withut saying any words, make a 10 second ringtone with your voice I had some ideas for this one, including trying to replicate the old sound of a modem, but Jim Groom’s kids were eager to help me out with this “Jungle Beat” recording (can you imagine kids not wanting to make noise into a microphone?) TDC27 (Feb 4): Take a picture that represents or expresses something ...

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by PMC 1stPix I really dug the idea Tom Woodward put in for a ds106 Writing Assignment called “Police Beat” Essentially, identify an innocent seeming song that advocates some odd/criminal behavior and reformat it as a police report style article. tags: WritingAssignments, WritingAssignments328 Here is a report that came in on the wire from Quartzite, Arizona. ——————————— 8< ----------------------------- Quartzite AZ Police Report ID 65-4345E12 Arresttee’s Name(s): Joseph Henderson, Loretta Martin Charges: Possession of Marijuana (A.R.S) 13-3415; Disorderly Conduct, Outstanding Warrants Date/Time: Friday, February 3, 2012, 8:44pm Location: 56 Lizard Lane, Quartzite, AZ 85346 Reporting: Sergeant Willi Fremont At 8:15PM, QPD received an anonymous call about suspicious persons galavanting along Central Blvd. who wer tipping trash cans at the Burger King on Central and Cowell St. Officers Fremont and Martinez responded to the scene on foot from their beat on ...

I was listening to ds106 auto DJ and came across the fun I had with Rowan Peter in Melbourne as he pleaded that George Siemens go down under yo go ice skating. I recalled us conceptualizing the entire Canadian team (Downes, Siemens, and Cormier) to come perform a MOOCS on Ice show. This seemed to deserve a visual. Rowan Peter Promotes Skate with George cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog For the graphic above, I had to do in Aviary, which actually provides a decent amount of editing (layers, selection tools). And the reason for doing this? None worth mentioning. Because I can. Now, how do I make this a ds106b assignment? UPDATE (Feb 4, 2012): Because Rowan Peter asked for it, I made this into a visual assignment “Play in the Big Leagues”: It’s easy to idolize professional sports, its uniforms, its code language, its ...

Fine art, indeed, this limited edition original painting is available for auction coming soon. This is my bit for the Fat Cats Make Art Better ds106 assignment contributed by Annie Belle who is just rocking the class so far. The instructions, if you please… Using this site: http://fatcatart.ru/category/klassy-ka/ as a platform for ideas, and using Photoshop (or something like it) as your tool, place a fat cat into a photo of a classic art piece. The goal is to make it convincing: make the art become on with the cat. Most of all, enjoy! :0) And remember, fat cats make art better. (Tags for this assignment are VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments334) I use “classic art” in its most literal sense, for what gallery is not complete without a large painting of Dogs PLaying Poker? For this one, I found the base painting on flickr (search “dogs poker” in compfight.com) cc licensed ( ...