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Sunday, March 31, 2002
file under "design autobiography" > My first real experience with print design came during my junior or senior year of high school, when I took Ms. Bennett's yearbook class. I didn't take yearbook because I had any profound interest in print design. I took it because it was reputed to be an easy class. Most days, we did very little or we checked out from school (it was a closed campus) and went out to sell ad space, which generally ment we'd try to sell ads for a few minutes and then go to a local burger joint for an order of fries and Dr. Pepper. If that ruse wasn't availible, we'd grab a camera and go take pictures of local landmarks and such, or anything that was on the shot schedule.
But I did lay out some pages for the yearbook. And we layed them out old-school: on some large graph-paper style forms. You'd mark out your design in pencil, number your photos on their backs, and figure out (with the crop tool) how much each needed to be enjarged or reduced to suit your design. Then everything for that spread went in a large envelope and got checked and then sent to the publisher. Desktop publishing may have been alive and well in 1988, but it hadn't made it's way to Hunsville, Arkansas (population 1,394) just yet.
Ms. Bennet had one (and, as far as I know) only one design principle. And, to her, it wasn't a theory, it was a fact: keep all interior space equal. It wasn't a bad principle, in fact. If you lined your pictures up along the gutter, and went for a fairly circular design, keeping the space between the images equal would give you a fairly tidy design with a minimum of work.
Sometime a few years later, I got a copy of Aldus Pagemaker (yes, Aldus--Adobe hadn't bought it yet). I think it was version 4.0. I used it to make press kits for local bands I knew and to lay out J-Cards for cassette tape compilations. But this was all for fun. I thought I might get good enough at it to get a job laying out ads somewhere, but I was in college working toward being an English professor, so design was interesting and useful to me, but not a career goal.
Then the web happened. I was still an undergrad English major (soon to be an English grad student). And I thought the web was the coolest thing that had ever happened. I downloaded a copy of NCSA's A Beginner's Guide to HTML and started coding up my first homepage. I coded it entirely with Pico via a telnet connection to my account on the university server. It was the typical web page of that time: blinking "under construction" text, gray background, no images at all, random list of links that you might (but probably won't) find interesting--just a shout out to the world.
I was awarded a teaching assistantship by my graduate program. And I understood from the beginning how useful a web page could be for teaching, even if you only used it as an archive for handouts and other things handed out in class. So I coded up a homepage for my English classes. And that marks the beginning of my entry into the field variously known as "educational technology" or "educational technologies" or (more recently) "education technology", though I didn't know it at the time. In fact, I didn't know it until much later when I'd all but finished my M.A. in English and found myself living in Philadelphia and interviewing for a job as a technology coordinator for the public school system. It was then that I found what I thought would be the perfect job for me--one that combined equal parts computing, education, and media. So I went back to school and earned an M.Ed. in the field that still can't decide what to call itself. And I, before I was quite finished with it, found myself working in the field.
But people in my field come in several different flavors. Some--in my program, quite a large percentage--seem quite afraid of the ins and outs of technology itself. They prefer either to theorize about it or groom themselves for administrative positions where they can oversee the implimentation of technologies they don't fully understand. Then there are those of us (myself included) who enjoy the ins and outs of technology and try to keep our skills comparable to those in other branches of IT. This is something of a conundrum from me, because I think a lot of good could happen in education if technology coordinators had a stronger, more computer science oriented skillset as well as a broader knowledge of what's going on in IT outside of initiatives that only concern educational technologists.
But I'm getting off topic. I meant this to focus on design. And, in recent years, that term keeps getting broader for me: encompasing 'look and feel', usability, and functionality at all levels. It started for me, like it must have started for many designers, with print. Then came static web pages followed by several schemes to eek more dynamic functionality out of them (call it the server-side scripting phase). Now it's moving on to learning how to roll client/server apps that use interfaces other than web browsers (even though web-based interfaces are still the bulk of my work and, I think, often the best solution to a wide range of problems).
In design, you start with a problem you want to solve. Then you apply the tools at your disposal (and "at your disposal" usually means "those that you know how to use reasonably well or that you can learn reasonably fast"). So, I suppose, the goal for any designer is to gain new tools and new proficiency with the tools you already possess. That's my goal anyway. It started with graph paper, then desktop publishing software, then HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. Now, finally, it's meant moving into object oriented programming with Java. Who knows what's next.
[0 comments]
file under "design autobiography" > My first real experience with print design came during my junior or senior year of high school, when I took Ms. Bennett's yearbook class. I didn't take yearbook because I had any profound interest in print design. I took it because it was reputed to be an easy class. Most days, we did very little or we checked out from school (it was a closed campus) and went out to sell ad space, which generally ment we'd try to sell ads for a few minutes and then go to a local burger joint for an order of fries and Dr. Pepper. If that ruse wasn't availible, we'd grab a camera and go take pictures of local landmarks and such, or anything that was on the shot schedule.
But I did lay out some pages for the yearbook. And we layed them out old-school: on some large graph-paper style forms. You'd mark out your design in pencil, number your photos on their backs, and figure out (with the crop tool) how much each needed to be enjarged or reduced to suit your design. Then everything for that spread went in a large envelope and got checked and then sent to the publisher. Desktop publishing may have been alive and well in 1988, but it hadn't made it's way to Hunsville, Arkansas (population 1,394) just yet.
Ms. Bennet had one (and, as far as I know) only one design principle. And, to her, it wasn't a theory, it was a fact: keep all interior space equal. It wasn't a bad principle, in fact. If you lined your pictures up along the gutter, and went for a fairly circular design, keeping the space between the images equal would give you a fairly tidy design with a minimum of work.
Sometime a few years later, I got a copy of Aldus Pagemaker (yes, Aldus--Adobe hadn't bought it yet). I think it was version 4.0. I used it to make press kits for local bands I knew and to lay out J-Cards for cassette tape compilations. But this was all for fun. I thought I might get good enough at it to get a job laying out ads somewhere, but I was in college working toward being an English professor, so design was interesting and useful to me, but not a career goal.
Then the web happened. I was still an undergrad English major (soon to be an English grad student). And I thought the web was the coolest thing that had ever happened. I downloaded a copy of NCSA's A Beginner's Guide to HTML and started coding up my first homepage. I coded it entirely with Pico via a telnet connection to my account on the university server. It was the typical web page of that time: blinking "under construction" text, gray background, no images at all, random list of links that you might (but probably won't) find interesting--just a shout out to the world.
I was awarded a teaching assistantship by my graduate program. And I understood from the beginning how useful a web page could be for teaching, even if you only used it as an archive for handouts and other things handed out in class. So I coded up a homepage for my English classes. And that marks the beginning of my entry into the field variously known as "educational technology" or "educational technologies" or (more recently) "education technology", though I didn't know it at the time. In fact, I didn't know it until much later when I'd all but finished my M.A. in English and found myself living in Philadelphia and interviewing for a job as a technology coordinator for the public school system. It was then that I found what I thought would be the perfect job for me--one that combined equal parts computing, education, and media. So I went back to school and earned an M.Ed. in the field that still can't decide what to call itself. And I, before I was quite finished with it, found myself working in the field.
But people in my field come in several different flavors. Some--in my program, quite a large percentage--seem quite afraid of the ins and outs of technology itself. They prefer either to theorize about it or groom themselves for administrative positions where they can oversee the implimentation of technologies they don't fully understand. Then there are those of us (myself included) who enjoy the ins and outs of technology and try to keep our skills comparable to those in other branches of IT. This is something of a conundrum from me, because I think a lot of good could happen in education if technology coordinators had a stronger, more computer science oriented skillset as well as a broader knowledge of what's going on in IT outside of initiatives that only concern educational technologists.
But I'm getting off topic. I meant this to focus on design. And, in recent years, that term keeps getting broader for me: encompasing 'look and feel', usability, and functionality at all levels. It started for me, like it must have started for many designers, with print. Then came static web pages followed by several schemes to eek more dynamic functionality out of them (call it the server-side scripting phase). Now it's moving on to learning how to roll client/server apps that use interfaces other than web browsers (even though web-based interfaces are still the bulk of my work and, I think, often the best solution to a wide range of problems).
In design, you start with a problem you want to solve. Then you apply the tools at your disposal (and "at your disposal" usually means "those that you know how to use reasonably well or that you can learn reasonably fast"). So, I suppose, the goal for any designer is to gain new tools and new proficiency with the tools you already possess. That's my goal anyway. It started with graph paper, then desktop publishing software, then HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. Now, finally, it's meant moving into object oriented programming with Java. Who knows what's next.
[0 comments]
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
We (the wife and I) recently enjoyed spring break (she's a student and I work at a university) so we, among other things, watched a lot of movies, to wit: Zoolander (big stupid fun), The Smokers (awful), Don't Say a Word (predictable, but not bad), Ghost World (long and slow, but pretty good), Focus (a very good film), and (because I'd never seen it) Single White Female.
[0 comments]
We (the wife and I) recently enjoyed spring break (she's a student and I work at a university) so we, among other things, watched a lot of movies, to wit: Zoolander (big stupid fun), The Smokers (awful), Don't Say a Word (predictable, but not bad), Ghost World (long and slow, but pretty good), Focus (a very good film), and (because I'd never seen it) Single White Female.
[0 comments]
Saturday, March 23, 2002
One piece of mail I always enjoy from the gov'ment is my social security statement. It's just fun, in a darkly comic sort of way, to see how much cash I'll qualify for when I retire or if I become disabled tommorow (two things I admit I don't think about much). I searched Google and found a companion web site for my statement. Pretty fun that they even have one (and dig that imagemap--how modern). But check this out: if you roll over a link in the corny image map, you'll see that they're running PHP! How very hip of them! I was supprised as hell to see an open source technology running at the heart of the Microsoft dominated US government.
[0 comments]
One piece of mail I always enjoy from the gov'ment is my social security statement. It's just fun, in a darkly comic sort of way, to see how much cash I'll qualify for when I retire or if I become disabled tommorow (two things I admit I don't think about much). I searched Google and found a companion web site for my statement. Pretty fun that they even have one (and dig that imagemap--how modern). But check this out: if you roll over a link in the corny image map, you'll see that they're running PHP! How very hip of them! I was supprised as hell to see an open source technology running at the heart of the Microsoft dominated US government.
[0 comments]
Thursday, March 21, 2002
Onfocus has a spiffy new design. Moveable Type 2.0 is out. I downloaded it and will (when time permits) migrate to it.
I've spent the whole night working on my latest freelance project. Among other things, I coded a bunch of image rollovers by hand (something I hadn't done in a long, long time). It was good for me, though it reminded me how much I really hate JavaScript. Anyway. The site's not live, so there's no link yet. But it should be up fairly soon. I've got the whole thing laid out now. I just need to pour in the content.
Watched a solidy good teeny-bopper scarry movie called Joy Ride. Recently caught Gray's Anatomy and Pricilla, Queen of the Desert (both very funny)
[0 comments]
Onfocus has a spiffy new design. Moveable Type 2.0 is out. I downloaded it and will (when time permits) migrate to it.
I've spent the whole night working on my latest freelance project. Among other things, I coded a bunch of image rollovers by hand (something I hadn't done in a long, long time). It was good for me, though it reminded me how much I really hate JavaScript. Anyway. The site's not live, so there's no link yet. But it should be up fairly soon. I've got the whole thing laid out now. I just need to pour in the content.
Watched a solidy good teeny-bopper scarry movie called Joy Ride. Recently caught Gray's Anatomy and Pricilla, Queen of the Desert (both very funny)
[0 comments]
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Remembering Year Zero >> I watched The Killing Fields last night. I also caught One Day in September. The older I get, the more I'm interested in history and amazed by how little of it I know in any detail. The Killing Fields concerns the events in Cambodia (under Pol Pot) during the Vietnam war. One Day in September is a documentary of the Munich Olympics of 1972, during which the Israili team was kidnaped and executed by a radical Palestinian group. Two sobering but thought provoking and high quality films (and, yes, I know that was a fragment, but I've earned the right to use them when I care to).
[0 comments]
Remembering Year Zero >> I watched The Killing Fields last night. I also caught One Day in September. The older I get, the more I'm interested in history and amazed by how little of it I know in any detail. The Killing Fields concerns the events in Cambodia (under Pol Pot) during the Vietnam war. One Day in September is a documentary of the Munich Olympics of 1972, during which the Israili team was kidnaped and executed by a radical Palestinian group. Two sobering but thought provoking and high quality films (and, yes, I know that was a fragment, but I've earned the right to use them when I care to).
[0 comments]
Monday, March 18, 2002
God bless Flashtools.net >> As any of you who've spoken with me recently know, I've been working like mad on a video project and a CD-ROM project to, among other things, distribute it. The process has really increased my Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Flash skills. As i mentioned in an earlier post, I had originally though of using Macromedia Authorware (a program I used a lot in grad school for CD-ROM development) to create this CD-ROM. But I've grown increasingly frustrated with Authorware for quite a few reasons (it's slow, it's barely functional on older machines, it's programming logic is awkward), but even if that had not been the case, Aware is really too much gun for this job. So I decided to do it all in Flash via their cool little "flash player" and/or "projector" files (by which you can distribute your flash app as a standalone executable).
As I got deeper into the project, I kept running into quite a few limitations with the flash player. Since you can't really embed quicktime movies within flash files, I wanted to be able to send a command to Windows to execute the .mov file with QuickTimePlayer. Unfortunately, while the Flash player does let you execute other applications, it doesn't let you specify any arguments or files to be processed by those applications, which makes it fairly useless (I mean, how often do you really need to give the user the option of fireing up Notepad with a blank screen?). So I started surfing around and found all manner of expensive, proprietary applications which would extend Flash's functionality in the ways I needed. But there was no time for any of that.
Then I found the coolest thing in the world: flashtools.net. The author has created a suite of small, freely distributable exe's that you can use with Flash Player in order to give it the added functionality it needs to be a viable CD-ROM authoring tool. With these you can launch files with their default applications, pass arguments, connect to URLs, make FTP connections, navigate the file tree, control application windows, and do tons of other things I haven't had time to mess with yet. But, thanks to these lovely apps, my Flash Player-based CD-ROM can now do all the things I had planned for it to do (and very elegantly, to boot). So I'm just posting to say thanks and to spread the word. It's a really good world when people help one another out by creating useful tools and distributing them for free.
[0 comments]
God bless Flashtools.net >> As any of you who've spoken with me recently know, I've been working like mad on a video project and a CD-ROM project to, among other things, distribute it. The process has really increased my Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Flash skills. As i mentioned in an earlier post, I had originally though of using Macromedia Authorware (a program I used a lot in grad school for CD-ROM development) to create this CD-ROM. But I've grown increasingly frustrated with Authorware for quite a few reasons (it's slow, it's barely functional on older machines, it's programming logic is awkward), but even if that had not been the case, Aware is really too much gun for this job. So I decided to do it all in Flash via their cool little "flash player" and/or "projector" files (by which you can distribute your flash app as a standalone executable).
As I got deeper into the project, I kept running into quite a few limitations with the flash player. Since you can't really embed quicktime movies within flash files, I wanted to be able to send a command to Windows to execute the .mov file with QuickTimePlayer. Unfortunately, while the Flash player does let you execute other applications, it doesn't let you specify any arguments or files to be processed by those applications, which makes it fairly useless (I mean, how often do you really need to give the user the option of fireing up Notepad with a blank screen?). So I started surfing around and found all manner of expensive, proprietary applications which would extend Flash's functionality in the ways I needed. But there was no time for any of that.
Then I found the coolest thing in the world: flashtools.net. The author has created a suite of small, freely distributable exe's that you can use with Flash Player in order to give it the added functionality it needs to be a viable CD-ROM authoring tool. With these you can launch files with their default applications, pass arguments, connect to URLs, make FTP connections, navigate the file tree, control application windows, and do tons of other things I haven't had time to mess with yet. But, thanks to these lovely apps, my Flash Player-based CD-ROM can now do all the things I had planned for it to do (and very elegantly, to boot). So I'm just posting to say thanks and to spread the word. It's a really good world when people help one another out by creating useful tools and distributing them for free.
[0 comments]
Sunday, March 17, 2002
One more story about the incredible stupidity of fundamentalism. Fear any religion which tells you death (yours or someone else's) is pleasing to god (via rc3.org).
I just noticed that I'm linked in the blogs file on dangerousmeta!. Very cool of him. I love that site.
[0 comments]
One more story about the incredible stupidity of fundamentalism. Fear any religion which tells you death (yours or someone else's) is pleasing to god (via rc3.org).
I just noticed that I'm linked in the blogs file on dangerousmeta!. Very cool of him. I love that site.
[0 comments]
Friday, March 15, 2002
Lately, when I have a little time to kill, I try to pick up the basics of a scripting language that I haven't used (or haven't used very much) before. Earlier this week, I messed around a bit with Bash. I'm fairly familiar with it anyway, since I use that shell constantly, but I don't often write full-blown scripts for it. Earlier tonight, I was flipping through a Windows 98 book a friend gave me and found a chapter on scripting Windows. So I experimented a bit with VBScript (and, wow, what an ugly language it is). Still, it's good to know a bit of each, since I work around both Linux boxes and Windows desktop machines (I even learned a little AppleScript once upon a time, but I can't really remember any of it). It's suprising to me that, rather than creating a proprietary language, companies like MS and Apple don't just enable something simple like Perl or Python to work on their machines by default. I suppose, now that Mac OS X is out there, you can use whatever you want. And there are Perl platforms that will run on Win32. But, by default, all you have is VBScript and Microsoft's corruption of JavaScript (which, I suppose, was fairly corrupt in the first place). Lately I've also been learning a bit of ActionScript (Flash's language, based on JavaScript) for a project at work. So it's been a week of experimentation with new things.
[0 comments]
Lately, when I have a little time to kill, I try to pick up the basics of a scripting language that I haven't used (or haven't used very much) before. Earlier this week, I messed around a bit with Bash. I'm fairly familiar with it anyway, since I use that shell constantly, but I don't often write full-blown scripts for it. Earlier tonight, I was flipping through a Windows 98 book a friend gave me and found a chapter on scripting Windows. So I experimented a bit with VBScript (and, wow, what an ugly language it is). Still, it's good to know a bit of each, since I work around both Linux boxes and Windows desktop machines (I even learned a little AppleScript once upon a time, but I can't really remember any of it). It's suprising to me that, rather than creating a proprietary language, companies like MS and Apple don't just enable something simple like Perl or Python to work on their machines by default. I suppose, now that Mac OS X is out there, you can use whatever you want. And there are Perl platforms that will run on Win32. But, by default, all you have is VBScript and Microsoft's corruption of JavaScript (which, I suppose, was fairly corrupt in the first place). Lately I've also been learning a bit of ActionScript (Flash's language, based on JavaScript) for a project at work. So it's been a week of experimentation with new things.
[0 comments]
A nice little article in Salon explains what's good about open source (and the Mozilla project in particular) better than most geek sites ever will (via Mozillazine).
Adobe Premiere 6 tip: if you're using lots of still images, be sure they all have unique names. Otherwise, simply renaming the folder that contains your project file and bins can cause Premiere to remap (read: mismap) all of the like-named images, even if they're in different subdirectories, to the same image. I'll waive the consulting fee on that one. But it could save you many hours of work.
Bought a few books from the cheap bin yesterday. Haven't had a chance to read either yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
[0 comments]
Saturday, March 09, 2002
If you use a Mac and haven't made the jump to OS X yet, you need A-Dock, a cool little application/file/folder launcher similar to the OS X dock. A-Dock makes it really easy to switch between running apps or hide everything but your desktop. It has tons of features and you can customize it to no end (there are tons of skins availible too, I like "SharpTang").
[0 comments]
If you use a Mac and haven't made the jump to OS X yet, you need A-Dock, a cool little application/file/folder launcher similar to the OS X dock. A-Dock makes it really easy to switch between running apps or hide everything but your desktop. It has tons of features and you can customize it to no end (there are tons of skins availible too, I like "SharpTang").
[0 comments]
Wednesday, March 06, 2002
The university library of my alma mater finally lists my master's thesis in its online catalog, though it's been online here at wheatdesign for almost a year now. I'll have to drop by and see a bound copy, just for the pride of it. What's going on in literary theory these days, anyway? Should I feel guilty that I don't know?
[0 comments]
The university library of my alma mater finally lists my master's thesis in its online catalog, though it's been online here at wheatdesign for almost a year now. I'll have to drop by and see a bound copy, just for the pride of it. What's going on in literary theory these days, anyway? Should I feel guilty that I don't know?
[0 comments]
Saturday, March 02, 2002
Cold Snap It's snowing like crazy right now--a nice layer of ice underneath two or three inches of snow. The temp is supposed to get down to 20 below when you add in the wind chill. Wow! It's really pretty stuff, and it's supposed to stay through Monday (snow day!).
[0 comments]
Cold Snap It's snowing like crazy right now--a nice layer of ice underneath two or three inches of snow. The temp is supposed to get down to 20 below when you add in the wind chill. Wow! It's really pretty stuff, and it's supposed to stay through Monday (snow day!).
[0 comments]
Friday, March 01, 2002
Well, after a good round of testing, I've decided that maybe Authorware just isn't the right tool for this job. Since most of the interfaces I'd created so far are in Flash (I was using Authorware basically to stitch them together and distribute them), I'm now very seriously considering reimplimenting the entire project and distributing it as a Flash Player/Projector file. In fact, as I type this, I'm burning a demo CD so I can try out a Flash Player version of an important sub-section of the project on a few machines (preferably a few w/o flash installed).
I upgraded Authorware to version 5.2 (a free upgrade) but it didn't seem to fix any problems. In fact, I still had to resort to my little Quicktime hack from the previous post to place any Flash content with audio. Authorware's a complicated program. So there are undoubtedly ways of doing what I'm trying to do that will work. But the end product, IMHO, just isn't worth it. The Authorware runtimes are big and slow. If I knew a little more Java, I'd code the whole thing in that and use ZeroG to create an installer for it. But there's no time for that sort of work right now. This thing is out the door in a few weeks. I'm hoping the Flash Player route does the trick.
[0 comments]
Well, after a good round of testing, I've decided that maybe Authorware just isn't the right tool for this job. Since most of the interfaces I'd created so far are in Flash (I was using Authorware basically to stitch them together and distribute them), I'm now very seriously considering reimplimenting the entire project and distributing it as a Flash Player/Projector file. In fact, as I type this, I'm burning a demo CD so I can try out a Flash Player version of an important sub-section of the project on a few machines (preferably a few w/o flash installed).
I upgraded Authorware to version 5.2 (a free upgrade) but it didn't seem to fix any problems. In fact, I still had to resort to my little Quicktime hack from the previous post to place any Flash content with audio. Authorware's a complicated program. So there are undoubtedly ways of doing what I'm trying to do that will work. But the end product, IMHO, just isn't worth it. The Authorware runtimes are big and slow. If I knew a little more Java, I'd code the whole thing in that and use ZeroG to create an installer for it. But there's no time for that sort of work right now. This thing is out the door in a few weeks. I'm hoping the Flash Player route does the trick.
[0 comments]
file under > how to get around the fact that Authorware 5.1 is too stupid to import mp3s:
I've been working on a multimedia project using Authorware 5.1. The project is an enhanced CD (audio + data). Since the data side (the side that will contain the authorware app) can't see the cd audio side (which contains wavs that will work in any CD player), I have to have audio on both sides of the disc's partition. But I don't have room for wav files on both sides. It would be nice if authorware 5.1 suported direct import of mp3s, but it doesn't (and there's no excuse for it, really. Mp3s were wildly popular when 5.1 came out). I could upgrade to version 6, but I don't have the budget for it. Luckily, version 5.1 does support flash 5 imports. But I was having trouble getting it to import any flash file that contained audio (like the nice WinAmp-ish interface I created for my multimedia project). But I found this workaround: import the files as Quicktime movies (Insert > Media > Quicktime...). Works like a charm. Your flash gets imported and works just like it should.
[0 comments]
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