Hey kids, do you know what tomorrow is (well it already is in New Zealand, those futurists). Yes, it is October 6. What’s special about that? October 6… is 10/6 meaning a day to celebrate ds106 So tomorrow, your make a photo showing your 1...

Submitted for no one’s approaval, another design example for the ds106 Minimalize Your Philosophy assignment: Pick your favorite quote OR make up your own phrase which describes a philosophy that you try to live by. It can be about love, friendship, family, education, culture, health, charity, etc. Design a minimalist poster depicting the concept. Extra challenge: Try to include a unique element that makes it YOU. Don’t forget to explain your thought process. :) Okay, I am not going to claim this one as MY philosophy, but I had this idea, and needed to make a poster, and this was the closest assignment I could find (yeah, I could create a new one, but we have plenty). Today on our walk around the country roads near their home, friends Barbara and Bill pointed out some innocuous nondescript green plants on the roadside. They had been mowed down, but there were ...

It was time tonight to do some ds106 design assignment, this time a Triple Troll Quote. the classic ds106 assignment game of mixup and mis-attribution: Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure. From the official site: How It Works 1) Get a picture of someone people idolize. Obi Wan Kenobi, Barack Obama, Captain Kirk — any beloved public figure will do. 2) Slap on a famous quotation from a similar character from a different book or movie. Pick something close enough that a non-fan might legitimately confuse them. If you’re using Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, you’ll probably want to grab a quote from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica. 3) Attribute ...

Another problem with taking the quick short cut route of doing ds106 assignments is generally the text tools are limited to slapping text on top of photos. I am seeing a number of the early work my students are doing is that are not really looking at how the text interacts with their design. If the text is just typed over the picture, it will look flat, often it is not as readable due to conflict with the background, and frankly, it ends up looking not designed. I’m beginning to wonder if when asked to designa poster, if students are really thinking about say, how movie posters look? Let’s say i am working on some assignment, maybe it is designing a book or album cover, and I use a photo of my friend Bryan Alexander. I can use many tools, but I choose pixlr a free web based editor I ...

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by Pete Prodoehl I truly love the evolution and use of the ds106 assignment collection – we have almost 100 assignments to choose from each in the Visual and Design sections, all of them created by ds106 participants, and even rated by them for difficulty. A downside is, well, some of them lend themselves to be done rather easily. Some of them, like What People Think I Do or Zombify Yourself are done simply by going to a web site and clicking a few buttons. You can satisfy the minimum of the requirements in an expedient fashion. Or we have seen many ways people have used a wide range of graphic editing tools to complete the Color Splash Assignment versus other students who complete the assignment using an iPhone app. Martha and I wonder how to deal with this not ...