Done with Digital Art

Yesterday, I finished the joke of a class they call “Digital Art”. It attempted to cover Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash in 16 weeks and failed miserably. We were required to produce 3 images, 1 website, and 1 animation that had to be based in Flash. If you are a professional, you don’t get (or need) three weeks to produce an image in Photoshop, a static HTML website in Dreamweaver, or a basic tweening animation in Flash.

You can check out my portfolio of the semester’s worth of work along with some side projects I threw in there. They aren’t the greatest pieces, but I think it shows some growth from two years ago when I took a telecommunications class that covered the same material (and a lot more). I got featured for my work in T284 and have been on the class site as an example of previous semester’s work.

Putting the two courses’ syllabi side by side reemphasizes how big of a joke FINA D210 was. I feel bad for the kids in there who needed to learn how to use those tools but had a really poor instructor. There need to be more Norbert Herbert’s in the world. I now realize how lucky I was to have him as an instructor.

One of these days, I’ll pick through all these portfolios and put one on my personal site. One of these days… but for now I'm done using this blog. To see more content from me, subscribe to my personal blog.

Flashy Flash Flickr Fun

I had an assignment in my digital art class to create some sort of animation to go along with one of three 30 second audio clips the teacher gave us. As always, I wasn't too inspired so I did what any lazy artist does- reuse and recycle. Just last week, I was actually teaching a class on Flash and one of my examples to them was an imitation of the flickr animated gif for when something is loading. I reused it (over and over actually) in my latest assignment and am pretty happy with how things turned out.

Here's what I showed my class how to do:



If you want to see how simple it is you can flickr animation FLA. Now see if you can tell where I used it in my assignment:



I know it's not the most awesome animation in the world, but I don't even know if we're getting a grade on it. I was just amuzed/impressed I was able to reuse a simple animation and turn it into something more complex. I'm definitely showing my class how they should be taking my simple (stupid) class examples and turning them into cool things for their own projects!

Animation

I came across this animation today on Kanye West's Blog and really liked it.

“The Seed” is a short film made by Johnny Kelly about nature’s life cycle. He used a mixture of stop motion papercraft and 2D drawn animation. It was commissioned by Adobe to promote their Creative Suite 4.

You can see the making of the video here

The Seed from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Dreamweaver isn't dying- it's dead

Yesterday, I read a great write up over on PC Pro about how Adobe's Dreamweaver is dying off as an option for designers looking to make the switch from print to web design. I couldn't agree more! Like they point out, the web is no longer static meaning you can't run a site by building it one page at a time. You need dynamic content that builds itself, which Dreamweaver can't help you with.

Using Dreamweaver or another HTML/CSS page-based builder is slow and more work than a content management system (CMS) like Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal. Maintaining a static site is a pain because every time you want to add on or change something you have to do it manually across multiple pages. If I want to add a page or change my 'About' link to say 'Bio', I just have to do it once with Wordpress and my entire site is changed. I would have to hunt down every link to my 'About' page on a static site and change each and every link.

What eats at me is that Dreamweaver and these static page creation techniques are still all that is taught at the college level (at least at IU). I'm currently in a class learning Dreamweaver while also teaching a class about Dreamweaver. When I'm the student, I politely tell the teacher I'd rather code by hand in TextWrangler, but when I'm the teacher I have to stick to the curriculum provided for me. Neither of these classes are even bothering to cover the basics of HTML and CSS which is even worse! Point here, click here, drag this- presto you're a web designer...

The other computer science class I've taught goes over HTML and CSS, but to no real depth beyond what you can get through in an hour or two on W3Schools. They at least tell students not to use GUI editors like Dreamweaver. Actually, it seems this semester they are allowing kids to use them based on what someone I tutor told me. Tsk, tsk.

Where are the classes on Content Management Systems? How about a class just to learn to create a database driven site built with PHP? It's a good start to know the ins and outs of HTML and CSS, and definitely to get a basic understanding of JavaScript, but I think it's time for academia to take the next step and apply these basics to what students actually use in the real world. They should know HTML tags to create semantic blog posts, CSS to create a flexible theme for their CMS of choice, and know enough JavaScript to create an image gallery or AJAX contact form.

I met with someone last week who was cold calling sororities and fraternities to gain web design experience. He was a college graduate with a degree in graphic design and based his entire web design knowledge in Dreamweaver. Because he relied on it as his only tool, he had no idea what it meant to connect via SSH or that the entire site he wanted to edit in Dreamweaver was built in Flash. I rest my case on why Dreamweaver is dead and those who use it outright aren't far behind.

Web Art Is Framed In Your Browser

What isn't web art? Anything your browser renders is web art in my opinion. From the CSS+XHTML compliant layout, to the interactive Flash portfolio, to the favicon that brands every domain. It's all web art. Web design is web art. The effective combination of typography, colors, and images rolled into one usable interface displaying information is the goal for every website. Thinking that something displayed on a web page is web art is like not seeing the forest for the trees.

For my example of web art, I'm going to use my newly created favicon for my site:

It's small, simple, meaningful, and not only brands my site but myself as well. If you want some awesome web design galleries, here are a few I came across the other day:

• Top 35 Web Design Galleries


• WPCandy for Wordpress Designs


• Beautifully for CSS+XHTML

I'm really excited for the last half of this class because I love web design and am always looking for excuses to roll out work.