Fin

I’m back again. I realized that for anyone reading this blog, that the final product of the class is probably of interest to you. Sorry for my short-mindedness but, here’s the link to our magazine http://issuu.com/knockknock/docs/knock_knock. The site is really great and displays documents with a cool flash program that makes it look like a real magazine (ex. glare, page turning etc.). I hope yall enjoy it, I’m quite pleased with the result. This is my last post until I find another reason to share something. Till next time
- David

Este é o Finale

So this post will be my last for the class and this one’s goin’ out to the next students to take Ezine. Now, the image above is intended to be an illustration of my time. So bear with me on this. The snow powdering the ground here is like the cloud of creativity and ideas that coats most things in Ezine. In order to get the best ideas you have to carefully brush layers away leaving just the perfect amount on top. The trees here represent all the obstacles and different parts of your magazine that you must overcome or create. As the trees here come together to form a forest, the pieces of your magazine must come together to form, well, a magazine. Like the sun here, these bits and pieces will be obscuring the final product. As you get closer to that tree the end may seem even more obscured until you peak your head around the trunk and catch the first glimpse of sunlight and if your magazine is successful you’ll get to bask in that glow. If not… well, I hear lots of girls are going for the whole twilight thing.

Well, that turned out better than I thought, if a little cheesy. Now some more stuff for next years students. Ezine in the end is fun. Now it may not always seem like it. You will do things that seem stupid or pointless and sometimes they will be just that. However, in many cases if you just take a minute to think about it openly, you may come up with a great idea for your magazine. I know that happened to me a few times. There will be points during the course where you’re really excited about the class and others when you absolutely hate it. Sorry, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so deal.

Group dynamics will play a big part in your experience in your class. You don’t have to be with your buddies, in fact, I wouldn’t recommend it. Try and get with someone you think has a sense of design or is very creative. I’d also recoment having someone reserved to help balance them out. Conflicting ideas force innovative solutions to be made which usually results in a new way of designing (which is cool). Its important for you to form both social and working relations with these people. You have to be able to laugh with them as well as be able to honestly criticise their work. Don’t take it personally if something in your design isn’t up to par with your partners expectations and certainly don’t get so wrapped up over a single point of design that the rest of it goes to hell. Finally, indulge in the eccentricities of your partners. You’ll be surprised what you find and how it might relate to your magazine.

On a final note, you just have to stick with this course and you’ll have fun. Don’t burn out on creativity at the very start and always voice your opinion (this means you should always have one). Let’s see. You probably shouldn’t shout about how hot your partners brother is, even if it is hilarious. Might also want to avoid using words like “fru fru” when describing a partners design, lest they take offense and design the opinion piece from hell. Don’t draw comics of Ms. Richey, her boyfriend will own you with a response comic strip. And, uh, yeah… Go ahead and take a look at the rest of the posts on this blog, they should give you some sense of the different twists and turns Ezine will take you on (also some of them are just comical).

Well, that’s it for now. To anyone reading this blog that’s not about to take Ezine, there might be more to come. Who knows? I’ve enjoyed writing these for the most part and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them.

Until I write again,

Adjo

This is Helvetica

Note: Before you start complaining about how you’re not reading Helvetica and Times New Roman, I am referring to the type I am writing in NOT the font you are reading, unfortunately. You can thank WordPress for their font changing ways.

Yeah, I’m back. Now let’s talk typefaces. What is a typeface? Typeface is synonymous with font. Every printed word you see has a typeface. For example, I am currently typing in Times New Roman. Typefaces are everywhere and they do much more than allow you to read a word. Typefaces carry their own mood and convey their own ideas. Take Helvetica for example. Helvetica is honored for it’s simplicity and readability. Its neutrality allows it to conform to use for almost any purpose. It is the most common typeface, seen everywhere from subway station signs to the window supplies of high end boutiques. On the other hand Times New Roman is a very classic font. Great for formal documents but terrible for titles and posters. But I’m straying from my point. The purpose of my blog today is to explain what role typefaces have in communicating their message.

The first role a typeface has is communicating the message in words. This is called readability, or how easy it is to read. Take an example from the film Helvetica. If you have a short message that you need to get across as quickly as possible, you want to use a font that’s highly legible. This is why simple fonts like Helvetica are used for signage in the public transportation system, people need to read and react to signs like “Watch Your Step” as quickly as possible and don’t need to waste their time or brain power to decipher a more complicated font. Store fronts also take advantage of Helvetica’s readability to quickly communicate information about their store in the hopes of catching the attention of a passerby. However, a more complex message screams for a more complex font. The more complex the font, the more time people will spend reading and thinking about your message. It forces them to slow down and absorb the information.

The next role of a typeface is to set the mood of the page it is on. As discussed in the article Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will by Emily Steel, a typeface must be appropriate for the information it is presenting. The example used here is Comic Sans. Comic Sans could be appropriate for use in a product targeted at children. However, Comic Sans is not appropriate for formal documents. “It can be analogous to showing up for a black-tie event in a clown costume.” A designer in Helvetica comments on the use of the font in a Coca Cola ad saying “It’s plain and simple. The message is clear. Drink coke period. End of story.”

The final role of a typeface is to illustrate the message it is trying to convey. A typeface can do this using its appearance or its placement in a space. For example if I wanted to have a typeface that said fast I would angle the lettering and have lines coming of the back of the test to give the sense of motion. I would also use a simple font that’s quick to read. If I were designing the cover of a heavy metal CD I would use a grungy, hard to read, satanic looking font because who understands what they’re saying anyway. If I were designing the title of a story about a person who overcame struggles to make a better life, I might design the title so that it forms a stair step shape to allude to the steps the person took to move forward and up.

My last remarks about this topic are here to address the sentiments expressed in both Helvetica and Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill that certain fonts should be banned or dissuaded from use. If a font is popular, it will remain so whether or not it looks good. To quote the article, “You can’t regulate bad taste.” If a font is being used it’s because somebody somewhere thought it looked good and did its job. As long as these fonts continue to satisfy the wants of the user they will be used. In the mean time, we can all hope for a future filled with people with a better taste for design.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Photography

This Pulitzer Prize winninng photo was taken by Deanne Fitzmaurice 

Before I knew the story behind this photo, I found it to be very powerful. The look on the girl’s face is very memorable. They are enraptured by the actions of the boy seated above them. It is very much like a storytelling. The boy doing the speaking seems to have been disfigured by something but the girls don’t seem to notice one bit. To me this seems like there’s a much deeper connection that the boy is making with his audience.

Now that I’ve read the story behind the photo, let me relate it to you. The boy is Saleh. He was severely injured by an explosion in Iraq. Through international efforts he was brought to America with his father. During his recovery he began going to classes at an elementary school. Saleh is in the storyteller’s chair sharing stories of Iraq that fascinate the other children in the class making them overlook his disfigurement. This sort of acceptance back into a normal situation is what the story is really about.

This photo emodies most of the story. The photo shows that the boy has been injured and some of the distance this has  created between him and other people. However the photo also shows the girls who have discovered the person behind the injuries. Finding a way to live and overcome these injuries and re-assimilate into normal life is what the story is all about.

رقم سبعة

Woo hoo, the first weekly blog entry in quite some time. It almost seems to soon to be writing again. Today I’m going to be talking about yet another blog, The Slot (www.theslot.com). The Slot is the creation of Bill Walsh a witty copy editor. He points out grammatical mistakes, often with good humor. Being a bit of a grammar snob and sarcastic myself this blog is entetertaining to me. So today I’m going to talk about a couple of his posts.

The first post here is about abbreviations used for statenames used by the postal service vs. the abreviations used by newspaper. Newspapers tend to use abreviations such as Calif. or Mich. for the sake of clarity since many people don’t know postal abreviations. For example AK could be Arkansas, but in reality it’s Alaska. While people should really know the postal abbreviations, it’s the copy editdor’s job to make sure that everything is as clear as can be. As if his point wasn’t clear enough, the post is illustrated with a drawing of a newspaper and the text “Ceci n’est pas une envellope” (this is not an envelope). This sort of clever irony is quite entertaining.

The next post talks about retronyms, a term that may have become used as the word evolved. For example, before electric guitars, acoustic guitars were just guitars and before roller skates, ice skates were just skates. Unfortunately some people have taken such terms to certain extremes. Walsh cites two examples, the first coming from the packaging of some item he had purchased. The item had been marked “wet ice”. Now we’ve all heard of dry ice, but most people still find the word ice synonymous with “wet ice”. Web editors have come up with another term, “unique visitors” to describe how many individuals have accessed a site, but not how many times each one visited. This isn’t a “unique visitor” count. It’s the difference between the number of visitors and the number of visits. His example here is that if you said that 4 visitors came for dinner last night, you wouldn’t think that 2 people came, went out for a smoke and came back in to make 4 “visitors”. Once again I can’t help but laugh at this because it makes so much sense. Don’t invent new words to describe things that already exist and don’t need clarification. Duh.

ナンバー6

Well, now it’s really been a long time since I’ve posted, but this should be interesting. The following quote comes from a Wired feature on design. If you’re interested the full article can be read at http://www.spd.org/2009/02/post-1.php.

Given fewer resources, you have to make better decisions.

To me, this sort of statement is applied to all areas of life. Constraints are what have enabled people to come up with solutions all across time. When your resources are unlimited you are often driven to just do the first thing that pops into your mind with no questions asked. Constraints however mean you can’t just do whatever you like. You have to find the most effective and most efficient means of solving the problem. This produces a much better product and you get more bang for your buck.

Designing under these sorts of conditions, I find myself producing some of my best work. Taking this saying to heart is something everyone could benefit from. When it comes specifically to designing my electronic magazine, I believe it has the potential to improve my designs. For the time being things do feel very free and unrestricted to me, but as I impose more and more restrictions to myself in order to fit the overall design of the magazine, the more I see the design evolving into something better. A design I thought was awesome last week suddenly seems to have many flaws that need to be addressed. And so, for me  and my electronic magazine, I feel like the restrictions we put on ourselves in terms of the quality of our magazine will be more important than any restrictions we have in terms of resources.

Nr. Fünf

Alright, so it’s been a while. Quite a while…. Oh well. In light of my absence, I’m going to share a few words to you about wireless networking. Now, we all know what the boxes look like, connecting our computers together and allowing internet access without a cable. But how many of us also have to deal with flaky service? Wireless networks are notoriously good at crashing for absolutely no good reason. It’s like they have a personality. “I’m just gonna stop working now, can’t say there’s anything wrong, I’m sure it’ll clear up in a bit.” And that’s all you can do, those boxes don’t tell you anything. You can’t fix them. All you can do is wait for the d*** thing to start working again. Minutes, hours… Tech services don’t know what’s wrong and customer service is worthless. Who’s going to end this madness? When will wireless routers be good enough to work or at least tell you what the problem is and allow you to attempt to fix it?

Next on the table is wireless infrastructure. Not long ago cities like mine were boasting that they would soon have free wireless networks covering the entirety of the downtown area. Now, years later, this dream has still not become a reality. What’s the hold up? Routers are relatively cheap and there’s no lack of places for the city to locate them. Router technology is ready to support this kind of system. Some systems link routers together and have signal booster stations to allow greater coverage and provide the data stream with the option to choose the fastest and most reliable route to your computer. This kind of free access should be readily available and would change the shape of cities greatly.

Finally, I’m going to do some ranting courtesy of my friend, Calvin Ling. Not long ago Calvin purchased a Netgear wireless print server. He followed the set up instructions to the word. It did not work. Computer savvy as he is, Calvin tried many things to attempt to bring the router online to no avail. He contacted Netgear’s customer services office many times and spent numerous hours trying to solve the mystery preventing the router from working. Not only was the service terrible, but no one could solve the problems. After weeks of hassle Calvin was finally forced to return the Netgear device and proceeded to purchase an Airlink print server. It worked perfectly after the first set up.

So, just to sum things up, wireless is a flawed world full of dissappointment, chance and lots of frustrated time spent waiting for nothing.

Numéro Quatre

Photo by Pavle

Skipped another week, but this one’s a fun one. So we’ve been working on our feature stories for a few weeks now and I’ve found a picture that I feel represents what the experience is like. The tracks represent all the different paths the story could go down but the key lies in the junction, like the butter zone, you have to hit it just right to send your story down the right path.

 

Antal Tre

Hello again everybody.

We’ve started working on our feature stories for the class now. My story is going to be about the 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. One of my group members, Sam, is doing an article on comedian Les McGehee. Losa’s story focuses on an extreme case of streaking at LASA last year.

For the feature we’re required to interview at least one person to include quotes from in our article. I’m a little nervous about the actual interview, although this won’t be my first one. Right now I’m more worried about finding someone to interview. Ms. Richey, my teacher, recommended Mr. Risinger. But Mr. Risinger felt that he was not very knowledgeable about the incident and recommended another teacher. So I’m getting a little worried about finding someone, but it’ll work itself out in the end. I guess I am also a little nervous about what questions I’m going to ask in order to get useful responses from whomever I interview. I guess my final fear is that I won’t be able to write fast enough to get down what my interviewee is saying and take notes on actions/surroundings but I may be able to make a recording of the interview to supplement my notes.

My current idea for the story is as mentioned above. In the article I want to discuss the genre of radio plays and how they reach out to engage the audience using the War of the Worlds broadcast as an example. The reason I chose this radioplay was because the public believed so strongly that the story was reality that people fled from imagined gas attacks and lightning in the distance caused by the “martian invaders.” The angle that I want to put on the story is a big fat why? Why was the broadcast aired, Why did they present it in the form of news reports, and why it illicited such a widesrpead public response.

We’ve been taught that the best form to write a feature in is “quote, transition, quote, transition” and so on. Since this broacast occured in 1938 interviewing people with firsthand knowledge of the event is a bit unreasonable, so I plan to use quotes from someone knowledgeable about the event and radio plays as wellas quotes from media printed in 1938. I also intend to include quotes directly from the transcript of the play. Again, there’s likely to be a bit more narrative in the article than in most feature stories but I believe the quality of the product will not be affected.

’till next week,

David

Numbah Two

He’s back with yet another post! Aren’t you excited?

While I was away, I’ve had my group assigned. The current idea for our magazine is “Comedy” with a focus on practical jokes. When I say comedy I don’t mean magazine is meant to be comical, but rather it is on comedy. Ideas for articles include features on the non-stop radio presentation of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds and it’s unintended casualties, the views of principals and other administrative faculty on highschool pranks and a satire piece “Inside the Mind of the Failed Comic.” Other ideas for the magazine include a how-to section, a comical photo essay, infographics on the most popular pranks, a general jokes/comics section, and well, you get the idea by now. To me this theme is both exciting and challenging. It may be hard to come up with really good stories but I think it is highly possible and that the end product will be well worth the extra work.

I think staying on task with this topic should be fairly easy to do, there’s nothing like kicking back and thinking of the craziest and most outlandish ideas for pranks, jokes, and gags. Motivation and ideas may come from reading comics, comedic stories, watching comics, reading papers like the onion etc. Media like this tends to be fairly engaging and the writing of said media tends to follow suit.

My goal for this magazine is to use a topic that is new and fresh and turn it into something that is really great. I think that this theme for practical jokes is going to be something that catches the readers eye and keeps them entertained as they read the magazine. I also feel like this magazine will make readers want to go to their friends with stories and ideas from the magazine. I want it to leave an impression on them and have them spread what ideas they pick up in it. The goal is to have each piece written or produced at a high level of quality and each page designed to both set the mood for the article on it as well as direct the reader to the “good bits” as well as deeper into the magazine.

Hopefully by the next time I’ll be posting here, we’ll be working on several stories and have the grand scheme of things much more layed out. Keep it cool.

David out.