This semester of CST 201 Media Tools was an interesting experience. I had little to no experience with Adobe’s software and I was anxious to learn about them. I have learned several types of software on my own so when I new I had to learn Illustrator and Photoshop on my own I was thralled. Illustrator was a fun software and great as a Design Major. My favorite project was the duplicating Firefox and WWF logos. The ability to use a software to duplicate a professional design is very rewarding when it looks identical. Having to use the American Memory Project for the rest of our projects was a downer. I am not very intrigued by history and I was looking forward to having more freedom. The audio project was fun since I have used Garageband before and I like adding sound effects and making fun audio files. Flash Catalyst was a very tedious and obnoxious program. I like the idea of being able to easily make a web application without having to write any code but it was too slow and was not robust enough for my needs. I will be content if I never read about the phonograph ever again but this class was a great introduction to the rest of my major classes and I look forward to working with more Adobe products in the future. I am a Communication Design major so this class is required for me to go on to more advanced classes. I have worked with audio, video, and some photoshop in the past so this class helped solidify my skills in design software.
Interactive Map Reflection
This final project was defiantly the hardest one. I had never heard of Flash Catalyst ever before and trying to learn a completely new software is very difficult. The positive thing about Adobe is that all of their products are very similar. I decided to stick with my Thomas Edison Phonograph idea and used that as the topic for my map. The thing that made me want to do it was the idea of splitting up the phonograph into its separate parts and allowing the user to interact with the different parts of it. The hardest part was editing the original phonograph image from American Memory to have the parts be full and not cut off.
I really liked using the buttons to make cool transitions and interactions in my map. If I was really committed and had a lot of time I would love to make this map look like a professional website. Catalyst was easy to use after a couple of tutorials and a lot of trial and error. Buttons were very important and changing their up and down states really made the map’s interactions easy to do.
Critique #2
This class was a great way for me to hone my ability to learn new software using the tools available from the internet. I was very intimidated to learn about Flash Catalyst because it looked very complicated and had a lot of components I was not familiar with. The layout was unique and the stage aspect of the program made no sense to me. One of the first things I noticed when I opened up Catalyst was that it had the option to pick files from other Adobe products to put in the Catalyst file.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ2rq83Jhi4
This YouTube video really helped me learn the basics of Flash Catalyst and how to use buttons. It goes through how to take files from Photoshop or Illustrator and put it into Catalyst to make it interactive. The narrator also goes over how to make buttons and how to change their appearance when clicked on and when hovered over. Buttons are a very important aspect of an interactive map and Flash Catalyst does a great job of making it simple and easy to do. I use buttons in my interactive map to allow the user to go to the different states of my interactive map. A lot of my stages will have several buttons that each take the user to a different stage to learn something new about the phonograph.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okY8ci_wAy0
This tutorial from Lynda.com does a great job of teaching how to make your transitions from different states more appealing to your eye. It shows you how to work with the timeline panel and the different functions of fade and move. Making all my transitions just fade ins and outs would be a boring map so being able to utilize the timeline to make the transitions more appealing. I found out that if I duplicate each state and move the text off the stage so that in the timeline I can make the text fly off. I did that with the beginning of my interactive map. I made the first stage just the phonograph with the text hidden behind the picture. Then in the next state I made the text fly from behind the picture and into position so it read “PHONOGRAPH”. It made it look like the picture of the phonograph was projecting the letters from its reproducer sound box.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flashcatalyst/cs/using/WS4bebcd66a74275c3-326fcb52123816c0204-7fec.html
This is a link to the adobe website that has an article that talks about the compatibility of Catalyst with Photoshop and Illustrator. I did not know this when I started my Map but you can put things in Catalyst from Photoshop and Illustrator but while they are in Catalyst you can click on them and say edit in Photoshop or Illustrator and it will allow you to do so and the next time you go into Catalyst the file should be edited. I was under the impression you had to delete the current file and re-import the Adobe files but know this it is going to be a lot easier to make little tweaks to the map.
Poster Project Reflection
The poster project was not very difficult because the Intro Visual Project helped me learn Illustrator and Photoshop so I was able to use those tools to avoid the technical issues I had with the IV Project. I stayed with my subject of Edison that I did for my audio project and I decided I wanted to expand on his phonograph invention. I chose to do landscape so I could have the labels of the different components of the phonograph off to the side of the picture. The American Memory Project had a really good page with the history of the phonograph and all the ups and downs that happened during its creation and evolution. But they did not have a good article that explained explicitly how the phonograph worked and its different components. I wanted to focus a lot on the components of the phonograph but I did not do enough research outside the American Memory Project to find any reliable sources. I had little to no technical issues with this project except for trying to figure out the best way to crop the background image together so it looked nice and not edited. I like the subject I picked but it seems that having to use the American Memory Project as the starting off point in very limiting and I wish I put more time in the project to look for outside sources to make the poster for informative.
Intro Audio Project Reflection
I was intrigued about the Intro Audio Project because I like working with audio files and playing with different sound effects. My first idea was to do something from the Animation category from the American Memory Project but since all those artifacts are videos it would have been hard for me to make an audio recording from them, so I decided to do Thomas Edison because he had a big part in the creation of the technology that was later used to make movies. I picked a cool newspaper articles when Edison was seventy years old and he explains how he eats and what health tips he has to keep people heathy. I have worked with garageband a lot in high school so I knew how to make my own tracks and use the cool sound effects Apple supplies. The new things I learned was with the voice recording features and all the different modifications you could make to people’s voices to make them sound more crisp and totally different. I had my friend Austin read my script because he has a very deep voice and in garageband I was able to transform his voice to sound higher making it sound more like an Englishmen. I used a lot of other audio enhancing features to make his voice sound very crisp and professional sounding. I used the sound loops garageband had for different atmospheric sound effects like the wind, busy street noises, and background music. I also added different sound effects that correspond with different things Edison talks about in his interview, like water, cash register, and a police siren. To finalize the recording I made sure all the background sound effects were lower than the voice recording. This was a fun project and I hope with more time we could make real professional sounding audiobooks.
Critique #1
I was very excited to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator because it made very cool pictures and looked like I could have a lot of fun messing around with it. I have had to learn software on my own before and I knew that YouTube is a great place for tutorials so that was the first place I went and I found a lot of great tutorials. I started by searching just for the basics and how the layout of the software was presented then I started looking into more specific tools that Illustrator has to offer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VEQHcJTolo
This is one of the first YouTube videos I watched. It is a great introduction to the layout of Illustrator and the different functions it has. He explains the different layouts and panels. He explains how to deal with layers and how they are not as important as they are in Photoshop. I made the mistake of making a plethora of layers in my FireFox logo when I did not need to. The narrator explained that Illustrator is a lot about working with shapes and manipulating the different points to get what you want. He explains the importance of the shift and alt keys. The alt key allows you do duplicate your shapes and the shift key is used when rotating to make sure it snaps to the other shapes you have.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLNeMODvOYA
This is a link to one of the many YouTube videos I used to help learn Adobe Illustrator. In this video the person is showing us how to trace over a pre existing image. He had a picture of Mario and is using the pen tool to trace him. He starts by tracing his mustache then using circles to help fill the mustache. He uses the pathfinder module to help merge and cut the shapes he already has. Then he uses the circle and rectangle tools to make the nose and eyes. This is a very fast tutorial and was very helpful when I was working with my FireFox. I was too focused on using the pen tool that I forgot about the rectangle tool and in hind sight it would have been better if I used the rectangle tool for some of my shapes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCPCm6StROI
All my YouTube videos are from the same guy because he is pretty good at going fast enough that he gets a lot done but also is very clear when explaining the functions and tools. This is a video about the basics of the gradient tool. I had no idea how the gradient tool worked and when I saw the FireFox logo I new I needed gradients to make it look good. He showed how to open the gradient panel and drag the different colors into the gradient slider. I had an issue with this and every time I wanted to add an abstract color to my gradients I did it the long way by imputing the RGB scale numbers manually. It was very tedious and annoying. Looking back I wish I remembered this tutorial better and used the gradient tool more effectively.
Intro Visual Project Reflection
This project was a great way to ease our way into the Illustrator software. I have learned a lot about Adobe Illustrator considering I came into this project with no prior knowledge of the software. I have had experience with other Adobe products like Photoshop so it was nice to see that Illustrator had a lot of the same tools and features but I have to say I really like Illustrator over Photoshop. Illustrator gives you a lot of freedom when it comes to creating your own artifacts and the pen tool is a blast to play around with. When I first saw the two logos we had to do I knew that the Firefox logo was going to be the harder of the two. The WWF logo was very easy since it was one color and had very basic shapes, but the Firefox logo was the one that took up most of my time. Before I started anything I looked up tutorials on Illustrator with YouTube and I found a lot of helpful videos. The common feature all the videos recommended using was the pen tool. It allows you to trace items and create sharp lines as well as curves. Also before getting to into the project I looked up the keyboard shortcuts for all the different tools which really helped keep me from getting stuck or distracted. So to start the WWF logo I traced the body, ears, nose, eyes, and mouth separately so I could manipulate each one independently. Another thing that was very important with Illustrator was the use of layers. Having different parts of the logo on different layers really helped give me the ability to change little things without messing up the rest of the file. Lastly I added the text on the logo which was a cake walk. The Firefox logo had so many different shapes I could not just trace one part of it, I had to split it up into smaller parts. So I looked at the fox and tried to trace each different shape at a time and added its own color to correspond with the original. I traced each tail feather, ear, arm, nose, and different spikes on its back to allow me to edit each independently. One thing that hurt me when working on my Firefox logo was my poor usage of layers. I had a plethora of layers and not a good naming system so it was difficult to find what layers to hide and which to edit. Another thing that was an issue was the shine effect and the shadow the fox had in the original logo. I had no idea how I was going to make a two dimensional object look three dimensional but through more video searching I learned in order to create the shine effect was to add a circle and make it opaque and apply a gradient to it that would allow the white to slowly disappear. Finally for the shadow it was a simple as going to effect and selecting add drop shadow. I am very happy with my end products and had a lot of fun using Illustrator. I hope to continue to use it and learn the more expert level tools it provides.
Hello people in CST 201
My name is Bernhard Klingenberg and this is my blog for CST 201 Media Tools. This is going to be the medium in which all my work for this semester is displayed.
201klingenberg 