Multimedia Production: February 2007

Monday, February 26, 2007

Hypertext Fiction Assignment

Here are the links for the Hypertext Fiction assignment.

Stuart Moulthrop, pax: an instrument
http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/pax/

Shelley Jackson, my body / a Wunderkammer
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/jackson__my_body_a_wunderkammer.html

Judd Morrissey, The Jew’s Daughter
http://www.thejewsdaughter.com/

Electric Sheep Comix, The Spiders
http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/

Electric Sheep Comix, Delta Thrives
http://www.e-sheep.com/delta/

Geoffrey Ryman, 345
http://www.ryman-novel.com/

Talan Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia
http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr11/11mem/

Juliett Martin, oooxxxooo
http://www.julietmartin.com/oooxxxooo/Answer.html

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Principles of Good Web Design

Here are links to some pages with very useful information on web design:

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/principles_and_elements_of_design/

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/designing_for_the_web/

http://www.digital-web.com/types/design_in_theory_and_practice/

Friday, February 23, 2007

HTML Tags Illustrated

A little on the corny side... ok, very much on the corny side.

http://haha.nu/misc/html-tags-illustrated/

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Dreamweaver Assignment

The following assignment is due Wednesday, February 28th.

Create a simple photo album in Dreamweaver.

Along the top should be a HEADER GRAPHIC that is attractive and will appear on all of the pages that follow. Header graphics are usually about 600-800 pixels long, but there are fewer rules for this than there used to be due to larger screen sizes.
There should be a SPLASH PAGE -- the first page the user sees upon entering the site. This page usually does not have a whole lot of text, rather an image that tells you what the site is about.
There should be a MENU BAR somewhere near or in the header graphic. The menu items will be Hame, Gallery and Contact.
There should be a GALLERY PAGE. For this, find a series of 12 or more photographs. Create "thumbnails" of each of the pictures. These are usually smaller versions of the picture, often square. Arrange them attractively in some sort of shape. Below each thumbnail should be a short caption describing what the larger picture will be.
Make a LARGE IMAGE PAGES for each of the images. On the individual image pages, there should be a long description of what the image is below it.

Some examples of sites you can use:
Cute Overload
Blog of Old New York pictures
Celebrity website
The results of a Google image search
Etc.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

We'll be performing these things on Wednesday, perhaps carrying over into Friday. I'll bring in some treats or whatnot to snack on during performances, though I'm not sure what the food policy is in that room. Anyone else is also invited to bring something in (quiet food).

You should be sure to bring in PROPS for your play. If the prop is something absurdly impossible to find (like a baby) use a substitute (like a beach ball). You really have to make your story clear for the audience.

Also, you have to let the audience choose which way they want to go in terms of the next scene, like in the movie -- "later that day," "meanwhile," etc. (You can use whatever time elements you want -- "last year," "two hundred years later," etc.). I would keep a chart or something that you fill in during the performance to keep track of which scenes have been read already.

And remember that the Lulu assignment is due Friday. I would try to get it done before that in case you run into problems. I won't answer questions about Lulu on Thursday night. I still have to figure out that Adobe Acrobat problem, but if any of you want to give it a shot today in class, please try.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Fireworks Resources

Following are links to several sites that offer tips and tutorials on Macromedia Fireworks (now called Adobe Fireworks). Several of these sites also offer tutorials on Dreamweaver and Flash, so we'll be referencing these sites quite often.

A few are geared toward Fireworks MX and so might cover features that are not available to us. Others seem to be based on earlier versions of Fireworks, but the principles are still the same. A few are pretty amateur, while others are professional resources.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Hypertext Movie

We're going to look at David Clark's "Meanwhile" in class on Monday. If you want to watch it ahead of time, feel free.

(There's one scene that might not go over well if you are in an office, not that there is nudity; it just sounds suggestive.)

http://www.habitatstudio.ca/~cmendis/meanwhile/

Book Covers / Thinking with Type review

For those of you who missed my class on book covers, here is the link to the various images that we looked at. Some of these images are quite small, so put on your glasses:

http://www.arras.net/book_covers/

Following are the pages we reviewed from Thinking with Type:

23, example of 19th century advertisement poster
27-29, type as program, type as narrative
34, anatomy of letters
48-51, hand drawn typefaces
52-53, logotypes
55-57, screen fonts, anti-aliasing
64, example of initial cap in Medieval ms.
80-85, tracking and kerning, alignment
94-95, hierarchy

Free Fonts!

Following are some links to sites that offer free fonts for download. These are for Mac and PC for the most part. Keep in mind that you can't install new fonts on the Stockton computers; these are only for use at home.

Also, on occasion a font file will not agree with your computer. Don't download too many and install them all. Just download one or two that you want to use in your image, and if your computer starts acting funny, uninstall the font. (I've never actually had trouble with a new font, but on older Macs this was sometimes a problem.)

This is actually just the top 6 hits on Google, so I'm guessing there are tons more free font sites out there. If you find one you like, let us know!

1001 Free Fonts:
http://www.1001freefonts.com/

Dafont.com
http://www.dafont.com/

Simply The Best
http://simplythebest.net/fonts/

Free Fonts
http://www.free-fonts.com/

Font Freak
http://www.fontfreak.com/index3.htm

Font File
http://www.fontfile.com/

Class Websites

The following are your Stockton web spaces. You can upload your web designs to these pages, as well as store files here (instead of using your flash drive). The directions for uploading are as follows (for Windows):

From home:

click on the "Start" menu
at the run prompt, type: ftp://loki.stockton.edu
you will get an error message; just click "OK"
right click on window that appears and choose "Login as"
on the login screen, type in username and password

From Stockton:

open the Utilities Folder on the desktop
open "Upload files to your Stockton Webspace
on the login screen, type in username and password

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Basic Typography

Here's a nice, one-page "how to" on typesetting:

http://platea.pntic.mec.es/~jmas/manual/english/textos_impecables.html

Monday, February 5, 2007

Book Cover Assignments

We are putting the CD project to the side for the moment. Of course, you are encouraged to complete your cover design, but it's more important at this point to work on the book covers.

Here's what we are doing this week:

Wednesday the 7th:

Bring in a Word document with the contents of your projected book
Bring in ideas for your book cover
Read Thinking with Type and be prepared to talk about book cover design

Friday the 9th:

Have a rough draft of your Word document prepared as a PDF
Have a rough draft of your book cover

We will be uploading these to Lulu. You will each create an account. It will be your responsibility to create the book over the next week.

Multimedia Production