Tag: infodesign

Videoplay Exercise

Assignment Description: Students create a 30 second video using iMovie, Movie Maker, Premiere, or other video editing software using still images and audio. The intent is to “play” with different aspects of basic video editing  including titles, transitions, clip trimming, manipulating audio, etc., in order to familiarize themselves with the tools. Since this is an exercise, the theme/storyline is up for choice.

Click on link below:

Video Exercise for AAD 585: Multimedia for Arts Organizations from Evelyn Thorne on Vimeo.

Reflection: My video is obviously longer than 30-60 seconds. I didn’t really have a concept of how short a time that really is till I started making the video. My idea was far too large. I will have to keep this in mind next time I create a video. I don’t consider this my best work, but partly because I do not like Movie Maker. Every time I went to fix something, it threw everything else off. I don’t know if this is common for all movie editing software, but it was very frustrating. If I wanted to adjust the music, all music following was now off timing. This deterred me from fine tuning the video because I didn’t have the time to continually fix everything. However, in the end, I think it’s a fairly good first attempt. I might have gotten carried away with the slide transitions, but I felt the video was corny enough to justify them.

Showcase ePortfolio Narrative and Webmap

Showcase ePortfolio Project Narrative

Assignment Description:

Students describe the intents and content for  their showcase ePortfolios, addressing what they will include, where they will get the content, types of media used, overall architecture/structure of the site, and how they envision user interaction. This is a precursor to mapping the site.

Narrative:

I want my showcase to be simple, easy to use and visual. I looked over all of the 2nd years’ showcases and Katrina Ketchum’s is my favorite. It has a nice sleek and consistent design. I especially like how she laid out her resume: very succinct and visual. I also noticed that she provided some information about her internship and research instead of saying “more info to come”. I’m going to try to emulate these choices in my showcase. I also like Danielle Walter’s showcase, specifically for her home page. Most people have their home page as their about page, but Danielle had this lovely photographic home page. I think I’m going to post my biopic video as my home page and then navigate people to the about page to learn more about me.

All of the pages of my showcase will have a header with my name, my personal branding words (Community Organizer, Creative Leader, and Conscientious Storyteller) and the quote: “Earth without art is just eh.” Below this will be the menu with just 4 options: About, Professional, Portfolio, and Contact. The professional page will have a drop-down menu with the following: Resume, Internship & Practicum, and Research. As I mentioned, I plan to post small statements of interest for my internship and research, so that those pages at least have some information. I believe this will help the site look more professional as I continue to work on my internship and research. For my portfolio, I am planning to include a lot of links to my other sites including my writing blog, ELAN social media, AAD Art World project, MetaphorADay twitter, Portlandia of the Free blog, published articles and eventually a podcast. I will also add PDF links to my favorite creative and academic writing. Since I am more focused on writing than visual art, I thought I would just have a little header of images that include some of my design work or photography. Lastly, I will have a simple contact page for people to email me. I am planning on creating a Linkden account so that I people can contact me there as well!

Showcase ePortfolio Project Webmap:

Assignment Description:

Students create and/or revise a flow chart/webmap that reflects the content categories/information chunks and the subset information that falls within each main chunk. Maps should be annotated with brief descriptions of what is to be included in each content chunk and where/how the content will be collected and/or generated.

Click link to see PDF:

Showcase ePortfolio Webmap


 

Final for Info Design: Graphic Standards

Assignment Description: The Graphic Standards represents a culmination of students’ logo design, collateral pieces and other presentation specification around their organizations brand.

I created my Graphic Standards for my imaginary organization Grapes of Craft. Click link to see a PDF of the standards.

 

Graphic Standards

 

Reflection: After creating my Graphic standards, I realize how important it is to set margins when designing your collateral. I didn’t really pay attention to margins when I made my collateral, so I had to go back and fix everything. However, it was still difficult to make everything fit neatly to clear measurements retroactively. This is a good lesson for the next time I design something: always think about measurements from the beginning. I also redid my Display Ad to match my Graphic Standards. I enjoyed writing the requirements for the standards because it made me focus on aspects I had forgotten about like bleeds or type of paper. In the end, I am proud to have this final product of my design work this quarter.

 

Final for Info Design: Presentation

Assignment Description: Students shall create a presentation based on their flowchart.

I created a Prezi for my field guide website. Click full screen to see it larger.

 

 

Reflection: I really enjoyed using Prezi. It is a very intuitive product, so it was very easy to create a presentation event though I’d never used Prezi before. I especially enjoyed the Google images feature, which allowed me to easily plug in pictures (as you can see in the Informal Art Practices slide). I think the most difficult thing about Prezi is fitting all your information into such small slides, especially for the circular slides. I did have to use Powerpoint to create the graphs and then save them as jpegs, so I could plug them into Prezi. I tried my best to make every slide visually interesting and concise. I really feel that Prezi was the perfect choice for my website. It allows people to get a quick overview of the results of my survey with a quick interesting visual presentation. This also made me distill all my information down to these small slides, thus helping me filter my findings.

Powerpoint Topic and Flow Chart

Assignment Description: Students will use Microsoft  Word SmartArt Graphics option to create a flow chart of their Powerpoint presentation. The purpose is to introduce and work with Information Architecture and create a hierarchy of flow of content to be contained in the Powerpoint presentation.

I chose to make a flow chart for the website I will be creating for my fieldguide of the AAD Art World for my Art in Society class.

 

Art World of AAD Students: A Fieldguide Website

Click to see larger:

 

Fieldguide Website flow chart

 

Reflection: This was actually a very helpful exercise. I had no idea how complicated and extensive this website was going to be until I mapped it out. Now I realize how much work I actually have to do. It also helped me sort through all the data I’ve collected and visualize how it would be laid out. I could see how this would be very helpful for website design. Now to actually go create this website!