Monicka's Blog

Photo Story

Monicka — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:57:26 +0000

Our little photo story about a friendly alien coming from space to visit two girls in ITB…..

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Sit down … relax …. and enjoy ……

Digital Creativity Lesson 7

Monicka — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:47:44 +0000

In today’s lesson we were working with actual photographs. We used the clone stamp tool on this motorbike photo to add one more motorcyclist and more people to the crowd (I decided to create 3 families of identical sibblings – just for the fun of it )

The next picture we were working on was an old photo of a girl that had a lot of scratches, fold lines and dust marks on it. We used the clone stamp tool (which is one of my favourites), spot healing brush and patch tool. Here are the two photographs for you to compare:

Me, Myself and I

Monicka — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:44:11 +0000

We got a very interesting assignment to create 8 drawings of our names showing our likes and dislikes (4 for each). This exercise was supposed to help us learn basic tools and process of designing. Have a look at the pitures below and try to guess what do I love and what do I hate

LOVE

I could come up with more ideas of things that I love… And what are they – did you guess right? (I love fruit&veg, nature, TV, cooking / eating and drinking, sunshine, tea / coffee)

HATE

So – what do I hate..? Smoking / cigarettes, spiders, rain and football..

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And to practice our Photoshop skills we got a task to turn one of the drawings into a digitalised image – I loved this task (even though it took a lot of time to complete it):

Digital Creativity Lesson 6

Monicka — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:48:21 +0000

In today’s class we recapped on last week’s work with pen tool and paths by drawing a heart. We then used the freeform pen tool to draw our name which we then made more fancy by applying the brush and stroke path tools.

After finishing the above we moved onto digitalizing a scanned image by using the Photoshop tools that we were already familiar with – pen and brush tools, layers, freeform pen, textured brush, burn tool, filters (texturiser – this was a new one). I enjoyed creating the blue sky in the background with the help of the gradient tool.

Here is the scanned image and the result for you to compare:

Digital Creativity Lesson 4

Monicka — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:37:24 +0000

At our lesson number 4 we were playing with demonic portrayal of celebrities a bit more. Our today’s target was Gerry Ryan. We learned how to use adjustment layers to give him the reddish tone of skin without actually changing the original picture, how to invert the colour of his eyes and how to use the clone stamp tool to give the poor guy few extra nostrils. We also used the pen tool to draw the dripping blood on his lips. After saving the image as an jpeg we were done with the defacing.

But not for long!! As Niamh (our teacher) obviously enjoys ‘having fun’ with celebrities (no insult intended! ) our next assignment was to pick a celebrity and portrait him or her in a positive or a negative way. I decided to ‘play around’ with Britney

Web Critique

Monicka — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:54:59 +0000

The website I chose for the Web Critique assignment is http://breakingnews.ie/.

User Centric Design

Breakingnews.ie is an information website, its primary function is to deliver the latest news to the general public. Its use (or possibly abuse) of typography allows viewers to navigate through headlines in search of news stories of interest to them. In essence it is a simple website made complicated – mainly due to excessive content, distracting advertising (flash), photographs, video content. It simply looks cluttered.

Simplicity

While the layout seems to offer the latest news to the general public the website is unfortunately cluttered with too much content and contains unnecessary components (ie images and advertising). At first glance we are easily able to navigate the various news options (Irish News, World News, Sports, Entertainment News are all available on clicking a headline), but a longer that a person views and navigates the site the more he/she becomes bombarded by option, banners, flash advertising etc. It distracts the user from browsing content and using the site for its primary purpose – locating the latest news.

Typography

As we divide the website we notice a uniform presentation in terms of typography. News headlines are clearly marked in matching size, font and colour; similarly the lead-in or opening paragraph associated with each headline is also in uniform, almost to the point of regiment. The website uses three different sizes and two font types which allow for ease of use. The larger bold fonts are used classically for the header, whilst the smaller fonts are used for the specific details and for some of the less relevant links of the webpage.

Layout

This webpage contains a header, footer and three columns. While the header includes clearly visible and recognisable website logo and well-arranged navigation bar, it also displays flash advertising which covers half of the header and distracts the user. The first two columns in the ‘body’ of the website let the user see the latest news (local, international, sports, entertainment, weather) with the (arguably) most important news story of the day on the top of them. The third column contains some audio and video clips, news poll, most viewed news. It is spoilt with two flash adverts located right on top of the column and Google ads at the bottom.

Colour

The website designers decided to use three colours that compliment each other – blue, black and orange. The black colour is used on the big headings – links to the different types of news, the blue one on the smaller headings – headings of the individual stories and the orange one shows what time (how long ago) the article has been added. (The extra colour – green – is used on two of the less important links in the navigation bar which is a bit distracting.) The fact that the webpage does not use underlined text to show that the headings are links leading to other pages is a disadvantage (it makes it harder for colour-blinded people to navigate the site). All in all the website uses and mixes the colours nicely and wisely, but once again the extra pictures and flash advertising do not add to its (possible) clean look.

Digital Creativity Lesson 3

Monicka — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:14:58 +0000

Lesson 3 started with us reviewing the different functions of Photoshop again. We were then given an image of Louis Walsh and were told to make him appear ‘angelic’.. A hard task you say..? With a bit of blue skies, pair of wings, a halo, a lot of angels, a bit of fantasy and a big help from Photoshop (using selection tools, layers and adding a ‘glow’) this has been achieved.. In my opinion anyway.. Judge for yourself:

Our home assignment for this week was called “Life & Death” which sounds pretty dramatic but was actually fun to do. The task was to ‘paint’ the back door of a truck in a way that would show other drivers that it is safe to overtake it on the left but they could get into danger (or lose their lives even) if overtaking on its right. (And as painting an actual door (not even mentioning being able to find a truck owner willing to let you do it) would be time-consuming and probably a bit expensive we used sheets of papers and pencils to complete this task.)

Digital Creativity Lesson 2

Monicka — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:24:04 +0000

It is the 20th March and we are back in the classroom sitting behind our Macs. We are introduced to Photoshop interface first – some of us familiar with it, others haven’t had the pleasure yet. Afterwards we work with selection tools and are using them to create “Mr.FruitGuy” – which in essence is a face made of pieces of fruit.

And here is the result:

Another assignment we got to do as a homework was to depict 12 subjects given to us that had to carry the function of road signage – an immediate and practical communication.. Some of the subjects were quite interesting and challenging to create:

We were also asked to create two road signs of our own:

Digital Creativity Lesson 1

Monicka — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:05:34 +0000

Our first lesson in Visual Language.. We got a task to express the meaning of certain words by drawing squares..the words being ‘order’, ‘increase’, ‘bold’, ‘conjested’, ‘tension’ and ‘playful’. We had to use 4 squares for each word. Easy, do you say..? Try it for yourself, I dare you !

Our next assignment in the class was to draw 10 pictures that sprang into our mind when thinking negatively and 10 pictures expressing ‘positivity’.