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No class on Thursday, April 18

I just wanted to post a reminder that we are not meeting on Thursday. You have the time to work on your final spread for Connect Magazine.

I have posted the instruction sheet for the final assignment in the assignment list on this blog: Major Project 3.

50 ways to become a better designer

This is an article from Computer Arts Magazine, a UK publication.

What is design? Design is both the process and the final product of an endeavour to fulfil a personal or professional brief. Whether you are creating a piece of graphic work, a website, or a design for a new product, the underlying principal is the same – the creative process is everything.

Bad design results from faults with this process – poor planning, ignoring the conventions of the media, poor technical skills or poor communication. So how can you streamline your working methods? How do you go from haphazard doodler to a well-oiled design machine? Listen to the experts.

7 habits of successful designers

I found this post in the online magazine boxes and arrows.

Talent Isn’t Everything
by Chanpory Rith on 2007/04/09 | [12 Comments]

Here’s a common myth: To be a successful creative professional, all you need is talent. It’s a nice myth to believe in. “Talent” suggests a divine or evolutionary genetic gift, so if you’re blessed with the talent gene, you’re special and can be a cool creative person. If not, you’re destined to be an accountant.

”... this myth of talent has very little to do with the success of a junior designer.”

After working three years at MetaDesign and since starting my new position at Dubberly Design Office, I’ve noticed this myth of talent has very little to do with the success of a junior designer. Instead, I have found that those who survive and last more than six months practice these seven habits:


1. Work quickly. Produce a lot.

2. Attend to details.

3. Be versatile.

4. Make an effort to learn.

5. Anticipate problems.

6. Set goals.

7. Display a positive attitude.

Design Meltdown

I just found this interesting reference site for designers. Check it out.

A planning resource

Graphic designer Ron Reason's package planner might give you some useful ideas as you continue to think about the components of the final assignment -- the page(s) you are planning for the story you chose that will be published in CONNECT magazine. Take a look at the items on the left side of the form; they should spark some ideas for you.

http://www.ronreason.com/images/PackagePlannerRonReason.pdf

Sunday, April 1 lab hours

Just a reminder the lab will be open to you on Sunday, April 1 from 5 to 10 pm. Linda Quigley and I will be available to help with your assignments during that period.

The assignment is due at the end of class on Tuesday, April 3.

The assignment is posted on this blog: Major project 2

A new blog from the Society for News Design

The Society of News Design is a resource students should learn about. This blog is their latest venue for communication. Check it out:

SND Update Blog

Eric Volz links

Last week we were brainstorming about ways to cover the Eric Volz case. Here are the primary links that tell his story for reference.

Friends of Eric Volz

Free Eric Volz MySpace page

Online Vision coverage

The Professional Organization for Editors of Magazines' top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years

This is a link to the ASME's Top 40 Magazine Cover. This site has great reference material. Remember there is nothing new under the sun only rearranging everything that has come before. So look for inspiration.

Reminder about Sunday, March 18th

Just a reminder the lab will be open to you on Sunday, March 18th from 5 to 10 pm. Linda Quigley and I will be available to help with your assignments during that period.

The assignment is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, March 20.

Photography resolution

I've found a couple of good tutorials on image resolution. Read them, but don't get stuck on the math. Try to understand the concept, and we will talk about it more on Thursday.

Tutorial 1-photographer J. Nevins

Tutorial 2-Vivid Light guide

Tutorial 3-"Dummies Guide to Resolution"

Cornell University has a site that explains resolution, file formats, and compression.
Link

Thanks to Michael Krouskop

I enjoyed class Thursday, and was delighted to hear about Michael's varied career as a photographer. Here's a link to his Web site so you can see more of his photography:

deluxelight.com

blue eyes magazine

This is another very interesting documentary photography site. I find it inspiring.

LINK

--and one more from a consortium that includes the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

LINK

Best of Photojournalism

This site has winning web, still, and video photojournalism.

Careers in photojournalism

This is a good resource from the National Press Photographers Association.

LINK

Assignment for Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007

Right click title to download.

What is photojournalism?

Mark Hancock, a newspaper photojournalist, asks and answers the question:

What is a photojournalist?

A journalist tells stories. A photographer takes pictures of nouns (people, places and things). A photojournalist takes the best of both and locks it into the most powerful medium available--a single frozen image.

Photojournalists capture "verbs."

Read more of his insights here

Top 10 Internet Tools for College Students

Here is a helpful link for you: the top 10 internet tools for college students.

click here

NewsVine

I just discovered a new news website that has great interactivity. It is much nicer to look at than google news, but has some similarities.

www.newsvine.com

design=reporting 101

Check out Jamila Robinson's Web site. As the home editor and a home designer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she has great thoughts on news and design for newspapers. Go to her handouts page and download some of her tips.

Brush your teeth with your other hand

"To shift your brain, brush your teeth with the other hand." Josh Awtry, assistant managing editor for presentation at Salt Lake City Tribune, says to do such a routine task in a new way can be translated to many other things in your life (except shaving!) particularly thinking about telling stories in new ways. Interesting. THINK.

SND conference

OK, you thought we were just being nice by giving you this nippy February day to work on your assignment for Tuesday? You're wrong! We are in snowy Lansing, Michigan, at a Society of News design conference. The first session was "ALTs Rock" -- ALTs being alternative story forms. The second was "The Short Form Gospel,"again looking at new ways to think about story and to present it so it's both informative and interesting. We are learning a lot of really cool stuff we will bring back and share with you. As we hear about cool links I will post them.

Here are the first two--

Design Hawg
Josh Awtry

2/06/06 assignment/lecture

lecture
assignment

Design Magazines

I have placed some Communication Arts and How Magazines on the bookshelves in the Vision office. Feel free to use them, but please don't take them out of the office.

On Tuesday after class--from 12:30 until 1:30--I am working with anyone interested in learning more about Quark. Let me know after class if you are interested. We will be working in the Vision office on the Macs.

Some software, training sites

Quark tips and tutorials
The Official Quark site
Don't forget you can get student discounts on most software.
Creation Engine - my favorite online software store. They cater solely to the education market.
Lynda.com-A great training site for all kinds of software. You pay $25 per month and get unlimited access to training videos.
The organic grid - an article about grids and design.

Another interesting magazine

This magazine has some good design instruction. Most of the it is geared toward the web--but the color combinations will work in all design.

Smashing Magazine

Graphic Design Basics

Here are a couple of graphic design basics sites:
Photo composition site
Designing with color
Elements of Design

Design blogs/magazines

Ping Magazine
How Magazine
Communication Arts Magazine
Layers Magazine
Print Magazine
News Today
Graphic Design USA
Before and After Magazine

If you think you might want to be a designer, get a student subscription to Communication Arts Magazine ($39 for a year). It is a standard element in my graphic design library, and a source for great ideas.

Idea map steps

1. Write down your topic in bold letters.
2. Start blurting out any related concepts, phrases, and terms you can think of.
3. Use who, what, when, where, and why to help you generate ideas.
4. Don’t judge.
5. Don’t censor.
6. Jot it all down.
7. After you have finished jotting down all your ideas, identify the strongest themes.
8. Look for clusters of ideas.
9. Draw circles or lines to link related words and concepts.
10. On a new sheet of paper, reorganize your key themes into a “map” or “web”.
11. Now, jot down visual ideas that explain or illustrate the different aspects of the key concepts.

Idea mapping samples for downloading here

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Roll over each square and examples of the visual is displayed. This is a good tool to help you brainstorm story elements.
Link

Inspiration

There are many places to go for design inspiration. Here are a few:

• stock sites like iStock, flickr,Colors Magazine
  
• Design sites such as Under Consideration, Design Life Now
• Or interesting visual sites like Visual Complexity

News Map

This is the coolest visual I have seen for online news. Check it out.

News Map

To work, this site needs a flash plug-in. Get the plug-in here:

Download Flash plug-in

Stock photos

I mentioned stock photos in class. Here is an article from Anne Van Wagener at Poynter Institute about Stock photos. Go check out I-stock.


Stock Photos: A Cheap and Royalty-Free Disaster Plan

She agrees with me about iStock:

Istockphoto is my favorite source because there are thousands of images created by people from around the world. There's a lot of cultural and stylistic diversity available and most images are under five dollars. The site is very easy to navigate and search. And, you can earn money by selling your images on the site. But be sure to check your employer's policy. Most images created for a news organization become company property.
$1-$5

Class handout and assignment

Assignment for 1-18-06 (PDF)

Visual options handout (PDF)

[right click on the link and "save link as..." to your computer]

Angela Smith bio

Angela Smith grew up on the banks of Old Hickory Lake, just outside of Nashville, during the 1960s and ‘70s. Her family’s home was surrounded on three sides by cow pastures, which today have been subdivided and crisscrossed with asphalt. That rural environment and connection to the past gave her the foundation for a career that is now expanding to blend history and technology.

After she graduated from Belmont University in 1984 with a degree in English and communications, she spent 20 years working on the cutting edge of a huge graphic design technology shift as a designer and graphic production specialist. Six years ago, she decided to weave her new media and graphic design experience with her passion for historical understanding, using storytelling and documentary filmmaking as primary tools. To learn more about those areas, she is enrolled in the certificate program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She has completed a master’s degree in history at MTSU in May 2007, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in public history.

She’s taking an opportunity to use what she’s learning in hands-on teaching. Among the documentary film projects she has supervised with undergraduate students at Belmont and graduate students at MTSU are Belmont’s beginnings in the 19th century; the transition from Ward-Belmont women’s school to the Baptist-affiliated Belmont College in 1951; the Nashville sit-ins in the early 1960s, the history of RCA’s historic Studio B on Music Row; and historic preservation in the city of Murfreesboro.

She is also collaborating with fellow PhD student, Brian Dempsey, on a documentary about heritage tourism in the Mississippi Delta.

Linda Quigley bio

In the Summarium, a newspaper you’ve never heard of published at a north Alabama elementary school that no longer exists, Linda Quigley, then 11 years old, had her first byline in May 1960. In the next decade or so, she wrote for every student newspaper and local weekly in that little Tennessee River town, earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of North Alabama and a master’s in journalism at Penn State University. In her 30 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, she interviewed hundreds of famous people, from President Jimmy Carter to First Lady Tipper Gore to basketball superstar Kareem Abdul Jabar to French cooking guru Julia Child to NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume and a whole lot of writers, painters, musicians, hairdressers, mountain climbers, gardeners, undertakers, soldiers and moms and dads in between. They all had a story to tell.

As a reporter, she says, you tell people’s stories the best you can. Sometimes their story has been told a hundred times before and you have to find something different. Sometimes it’s the only time anyone will ever tell it, the only time a person’s name will ever be in the newspaper until they die. Even in an ever-changing media world, the day when you can publicly dignify one human being by telling their story to an audience of readers is as important as anything else you’ll ever do.

Now she’s in her seventh year on the media studies faculty at Belmont University. She hopes somebody she teaches this year, or next year or the next, will have as much fun as she did chasing those stories.

Visual Journalism post 1

In class Thursday we told you about some Web sites that have good visual journalism information:

Ron Reason
Poynter Institute design section
News Designer