Here’s my simple but personal valentine to the one I love.

Alternate Title: “Have you MADE your DECISION for CHRIST?!”

My participation in ds106 is getting a lot less linear as assignments come and go and I continue to grab hold of that which catches my interest. That's not to say I'm not participating, far from it. I'm 2 days in to the Daily Shoot project and I'm thinking I'll probably recap each week of photos here on the blog instead of a post every day since I'm using Flickr for the photo uploading. However the most recent madness of the past 2 days has been the birth of ds106.tv.

I have a confession to make. I’ve been playing around with a few of the more popular “web 2.0″ (God I hate that term, but I digress) sites in an attempt to recreate a story. And it’s a lot of fun. But I think I can do better, with your help. The Setup Continue the ...

ach frame of a video is extracted, and then averaged to a single color. Then they are all placed left to right and top to bottom on a large canvas. Here's my first attempt, the music video to Lady Gaga - Telephone. As a sidenote, music videos are great for short experiments involving video.

I'm a huge fan of Jason Salavon's work which typically involves deconstructing groups of images into an average. I started working on this with video before the holidays and ran into some roadblocks with the number of images I was dealing with turning my final image into mud. Darcy Norman has done something similar with his 365 photo project from last year, but split them up by month. Using his tip to work with less images helped me form my concept a bit more.

Mashing up the mash up? Now we’re getting crazy. Tom tells us to take a silhouette and stick an image from the movie inside it, while also making it monochromatic. Once I do that I can’t help but truly confess my undying love for Helvetica by rocking another hip hop lyric on top. The result ...

Project inspired by The Big Caption. Take any photo from The Big Picture and overlay with lyrics from a top 100 song.

I kind of like the idea of summarizing a movie with a few animated gifs, similar to the 5 image ds106 assignment. Here’s my take on a classic:

We need to learn the value of stripping things down, removing the cruft, making more with less. I could go on a pro-Apple rant about how they start simple and add only necessary functions with their products, but I'll resist. Stop adding features and start adding constraints. That's where beauty is hiding.

A constantly recurring theme I'm seeing in viral design work is the idea of mashups. You know, taking 2 unrelated things and putting them together for fun and mischief. Mashups seem to have many elements that appeal to our senses: The unexpected, humorous situations, cult classics and nostalgia. I've already seen a few mashups come across as ideas for ds106 assignments and I think that's great. It causes us to stretch, think outside the box, and create a new visual story for items and ideas that have already existed in our culture.

As we prepare to close out 2010 and start that annual ritual of forgetting to write 2011 on everything with a date field, it's a popular time to start a 365 project. These types of things are notorious for failing (and you know what? That's ok too) but they can be a great exercise in putting stuff out there and committing to publishing and shipping your work and not just drafting and refining it.

I mentioned previously that I'm going to be taking part in ds106, a free and open online course on digital storytelling curated (he hates to be called the leader) by Jim Groom. Tom Woodward has already put out some excellent assignment examples. Having a background as graphic designer is pushing me more towards design-themed assignments, but I'm looking forward to stretching myself in a number of ways. Here are some ideas I've come up with

Staring at this box and wondering how many times I've been here before. I've started and stopped and started Twitter again. Join a group on here, sign up for a mailing list there, commit to finally getting off my ass and creating at least once every few months. And then life happens and it takes the back burner. Some other time. I don't have much to add to the noise anyway.