First Day Back...

Good discussion this morning, nice to see the book by Lawrence Zeegen brought in by Chris. I really like his style and actually accidentally came across one of the people he talks about in his book – Secrets of Digital Illustration: Simon Oxley. He presents his work in a really interesting way and his website is definitely worth a look -www.idokungfoo.com. Nice to hear something from everyone. I’ll look forward to the presentations this afternoon.

Social Media Bits

Hi everyone, I hope you are all having a good break. I’ve found out about a few interesting websites recently which I thought I might share with you. The first is twitter, take a look:



The second is muxtape.com – a simple way to create and share mixtapes.

It’s hard to keep up with all these new developments in social media websites etc. so if anyone knows of any more please let me know!

Fun fun. Also, has anyone found anywhere interesting to go on Secondlife at all?

The Power of Words

Hi guys, thanks for all of your comments on my Constructive Criticism blog post, some very interesting opinions and points raised.

I’ve just come across some quotes in my research which I thought might be appropriate to post, on the subject of the power of words.

“Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.”
-Buddha

“Without the force of words it is impossible to know men.”
-Confucius

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
-Rudyard Kipling

“Give me 26 lead soldiers and I will conquer the world.”
-Benjamin Franklin

“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”
-Mark Twain

Another quote I really like and came across a while ago whilst doing research for the Design Futures project is from The Post-human Condition by Robert Pepperell. It’s a bit off topic but you might find it interesting-

“It is a deficiency of humans that they require others to tell them what they already know. It is only then that they will believe it. The Post-Human avoids excessive scholarship, preferring to spend one hour thinking rather than ten hours reading.”

Enjoy!

If anyone has any more interesting quotes please leave them in a comment :-)

D&AD Project Website

Hello! Hope everyone got all their bits in on time. The link to the site I created for the project is www.dandad.lucyirving.com. I’d appreciate any feedback on it, if you have time.

Also, the link to the site where you can get cheap educational software and graphics tablets etc is - http://www.education-store.com/stores/news_stories_view.do?pubID=5869

Hope you all have a good Easter.

The Last Week of the D&AD Brief

I’ve just mounted up my boards. Took me a while! Spray mount isn’t the nicest thing. I’ve done two lots of one A2 and one A3 boards. They look like this:




I’m also finishing off displaying my work on a website and writing my rationale etc. I will post the link up here when I’m done. I think the photo’s I’ve taken make a lot more sense when you read my rationale as I’ve done so much background research. I hope they make some sort of sense though!

Constructive Criticism

Some interesting questions have been raised this week:

Is it ok to “slag someone off” in your blog? Have we yet earned the right to comment on the work of practicing professionals? Is it alright for lecturers to invite people to speak without forewarning them that the students will be posting on their blogs about these people and that these blog posts will be accessible on the internet and readily found by Google?

As we all know it’s incredibly easy to criticise, but to be able to write intelligent, constructive criticism is a sought after skill and rare to find. Perhaps taking more care and consideration over what we write and put out there for the world to see would be a good idea. People have fought and died not only for our freedom of speech, but also for our freedom not to speak and to sit back and carefully consider things before we open our mouths. What does everyone else think?

Manipulation of Photography

I went into the local photo place down St James’ Street over the weekend and found out the prices to develop my pictures 8”*6”. They seemed quite reasonable, about £10 more than online though; but around 4 days less to get to me. Weighing up the risk I will probably get them developed at a photo place in town; the cheapest that I can find. If anyone knows of any cheap and good places in town please let me know.

I’ve still got a few more shots I want to retake and I need to manipulate a few of my images. If I have a chance when I have everything done I may try out some 3D techniques, placing 3D objects into the picture using 3D Studio Max. Michael showed me how to place an image onto a plane in Max and then place a 3D image in front of it. You can then create a camera to capture the image, but you need to be careful to keep it at a high resolution.

My aim is to create around 12 (max) interesting, original and honest (is any photograph truly honest??) images to illustrate the many facets of dementia. I need to weigh up carefully how much digital manipulation to use on these images as I don’t want to manipulate just for the sake of manipulation. The question I need to ask myself, when manipulating any of the images is: will this manipulation add to the quality and message of the image?