Max Beatty

On to MaxBeatty.com

2010-02-03T12:35:00.002-05:00

This site is just a place holder. If you want to learn more about Max Beatty and read his blog go to his main site – http://maxbeatty.com . You can also find him on these social networks:

Thanks to Komodo Media for these awesome social icons.

Done with Digital Art

2009-05-04T23:46:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-03T18:00:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-24T11:59:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-09T22:50:00.000-04:00

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

2009-02-20T19:12:00.000-05:00

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.

Steal My Work from Flickr

2009-02-18T16:32:00.002-05:00

After a surprisingly warm and positive reaction to my artwork today in class from my fellow D210 classmates, I wanted to make an announcement about stealing my artwork in case any of them wanted a copy or wanted to use it elsewhere. I've uploaded everything so far into a Flickr set entitled "Digital Art" and tried to give every piece a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Go. Steal. Remix. Reissue. Do art!

Practicing Digital Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

2009-02-15T20:47:00.000-05:00

The word on the tubes is that bokeh is quickly approaching as the next design craze like rounded corners, reflecting logos, and diagonal stripes. I found a nice tutorial from Abduzeedo on how to recreate the photography effect in Photoshop. I used some new colors released by the Pantone Color Institute for Fall 2009.

Here's what I came up with after struggling a little with the tutorial:

I originally thought I was going to use the effect in my self portrait assignment, but now I have a different idea involving playing cards. More on that development later :)

Abstract Art Project: Frustration

2009-02-09T15:13:00.002-05:00

"Use more than one digitized images to create a single composition that representing an emotional state, such as sadness, happiness, embarrassment, and ecstasy." I chose frustration

Abstract Art

2009-02-08T23:16:00.004-05:00

When I want to learn about a new topic, I use Wikipedia. Here's a little bit about what they had to say about Abstract Art.

Abstract art (also called non-objective art) uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[2]
Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be only slight, or it can be partial, or it can be complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.
Both Geometric abstraction and Lyrical Abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.[3][4]Abstract art (also called non-objective art) uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[2]
Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be only slight, or it can be partial, or it can be complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.
Both Geometric abstraction and Lyrical Abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.[3][4]

I thought they could do a better job summing it up than I could. Since this is such a visual topic, I thought I'd search Google Images for a few examples. Here are few hotlinked examples (probably illegal):

Museum Tour Notes

2009-02-06T23:09:00.003-05:00

On Wednesday we went on a tour of the IU Art Museum to look at some portraits. Here are my notes:

The first portrait was of St Nicholas from the 16th century. It was very general and biblical. It was interesting it didn't have any sort of background.

The second portrait was of a woman from the late 16th century. It was very similar to the St Nick. You could tell she was educated because she was reading a book, a sign of wealth back then.

The third portrait was of Young Daniel. It was the first portrait with a light source which helped show some of the emotion. It was very detailed and used earth tones.

We moved on to two busts that had very fancy hair but not the greatest material. The choice in material makes you think they weren't absolutely wealthy, but that they had some money.

I started to focus on more cultural clues as we continued looking at more portraits. Clues such as the color of their cloths and if they were reading signified their affluence.

The final pieces we looked at were pretty unique. There was a cubic head, a dada head with zippers for eyes, a disproportionate family portrait, and a huge woman I took a picture of.

Project 1 Supporting Material

2009-01-26T01:19:00.001-05:00

I've really been struggling for ideas for this first project that's a composite image of "an imaginary event, place, person, thing, etc." My original proposal was to do something with album art maybe scattered across a desk, but now that really doesn't sound too interesting. I also had an idea of having someone walk down a hall that's covered with album covers sort of like the iTunes screensaver on mac.

Then just a minute ago I reread the 'imaginary' part and thought about a 'Thugz Mansion' composite based on 2Pac's line:

Tell the homies I'm in heaven and they ain't got hoods
Seen a show with Marvin Gaye last night, it had me shook
Drippin peppermint Schnapps, with Jackie Wilson, and Sam Cooke
Then some lady named Billie Holiday
Sang sittin there kickin it with Malcolm, 'til the day came

Maybe I'll make a composite of those artists' faces or album covers in a way you might think 'Thugz Mansion' like the 2Pac Resurrection album cover.

Tomorrow in lab I'll have to narrow it down to one of these ideas. I'm still unsure how I'm going to spend 12hrs a week working in Photoshop on one image like the guide said to, especially when the images are just 800 x 600 most times.

Although I'm sure this violates some sort of copyright law, I was planning on using album art ripped from Last.fm and my iTunes library with tools like Gijsco's Last.fm Desktop Generator. If I plan on going with something with a little more setting like a real desktop or hallway, I'll probably look through free stock photo sites.

I'm a little nervous about how this first project is going to turn out. I'm not much of an artist and already having a creative block so hopefully everyone else in the class won't show me up too badly.

Making It Easier to Follow My Digital Art Classmates

2009-01-21T15:46:00.002-05:00

Last week I started blogging for my digital art class along with the rest of my classmates. Our teacher put together a page of links to everyone’s blog, but I didn’t find that very helpful so I took it a step further by creating an OPML file I could easily import into Google Reader.

I’m lazy so the first thing I did was google for an OPML generator. Bingo! The Feed Show had a nice little goodie to create an OPML file full of RSS feeds. It allowed me to enter the URL to the blog list and returned a list of everyone’s blog. I went ahead and created the OPML file filled with just the URLs, and then manually edited the XML file to add on “feeds/posts/default” to the end of each xmlUrl. It imported perfectly into Google Reader and now I can read everyone else’s entries for digital art.

I wonder if the professor thought about doing this so it would be easier to read and grade our entries. I’m offering up the OPML file for everyone to download so anyone can follow along. If you need help importing it to your reader of choice, leave a comment and I can try to help!

Digital Art: Introduction

2009-01-13T21:50:00.003-05:00

I'm excited to be blogging about digital art this semester for Fine Arts D210. Little does my professor know that I already try to maintain a regular blog on my personal website. Unfortunately, she won't let me use that for this class so I'll be crossposting entries here and there. I guess if anything I'll get more exposure and even drive my own link juice :)

For my classmates, I'm a senior Informatics major focusing on cyber security and telecommunications. I have no formal art background. In fact, the last art class I took I failed (in 8th grade). Since then I've fallen in love with web design and consider myself well read on the subject. As most of my studies have been on what's under the hood, I've spent my own time researching web trends that encourage intuitive interaction.

Last year, I headed the GameZombie.tv web team that won a Webby award, and also had my logo selected for the 2009 Little 500 races.

When I think of digital art, I don't think of just a plain image that could be printed and hung on the wall. It should be "hands-on" and responsive since the digital platform allows for that added depth. I'm most inspired by very interactive websites usually powered by Flash and websites that are effectively simplistic. These are usually produced by marketing companies, design studios, and individual designers. I tend to like very clean designs but also very grungy, dirty, graffitied looks. I also love typography and logos!

When I find the time, I love to read through the couple hundred design blogs on Google Reader. Here's where I got started and they have a download link to an OPML to directly import them all. Until next time-

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep"

Scott Adams

PSA How To Successfully Recycle Music

2008-12-15T23:10:00.001-05:00

i310 Viral Video Project. If we get 1million views, we get an automatic A+!

Google Mobile App for iPhone, now with Voice Search

2008-11-15T09:20:00.001-05:00

American Stories, American Solutions

2008-10-30T01:29:00.001-04:00

Inspiring stuff!

Letterman - NPR's Sarah Vowell on Sarah Palin - 10/06/2008

2008-10-10T15:40:00.001-04:00

She's smart and smarty!

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regret

2008-10-08T01:48:00.000-04:00

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Stop sending mail you later regret

I threw in my two cents here: Email sobriety check?