Day 032: New Keyboard

Looking at the reasons for the layout of the keyboard, it makes sense that with the evolving technology and shrinking size of the cell phone/keyboard, a new style is needed.

Day 031: Cell Phones of the Future

Cell phones are constantly evolving, as seen in an earlier post, but what will they look like in the future?

Day 030: Watson

IBM's supercomputer, Watson, is beating the champions of Jeopardy!

Day 029: Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging site used by a variety of people for a variety reason, the most common being free expression.  The site is free to join and gives you a free URL off of tumblr.com. Different users' goals for their style of site is divided into groups such as poetry, fashion, science, illustration, food, etc..  Throughout the site, people can "reblog" other users' pictures, text, and links, or blog their own work.  Some people even use their tumblr to get their work out to be "discovered" by someone.

Day 028: Photoshop Brushes

Besides tutorials and manipulation tools, Photoshop also has brushes for "painting".  There are thousands of brushes available to download for free.  These brushes help you add extra flare, texts, and decorations to your work.

Day 027: Vector Portrait

Photoshop has so many manipulation tools.  This tutorial teaches you how to make a completely vector portrait from a normal photograph of someone in 8 simple steps.

Day 026: 5-step Hair Color

Photoshop allows you to change the color of someone's hair! There is a tutorial that teaches you how to do it (pictures included) in 5-7 steps.  Makes a scary looking process so much easier.

Day 025: Evolution of the Cell Phone

The cell phone has changed so much, so fast! Here is an article explaining in detail, with pictures, the evolution of the cell phone from 1983-2009.

Day 024: Media Facades

A new and upcoming style of architecture is starting to catch attention.  Media facades are found all over, especially Europe.  A building will have an acrylic glass wall which will be like an art canvas, where lights and design show up.

Day 023: Deviant Art

Deviant Art is a free site where artists can share, find inspiration, and promote their work as well as other fellow emerging or established artists.  This is like a digital portfolio for these artists.  The site is a peer community dedicated to artists, where they can share paintings, sculptures, digital art, pixel art, films and more.

Day 022: Photoshop.com

Photoshop has created a website that you can sign into and do quick easy edits of your photos, then acts as a digital album seen throughout the internet.  The website also provides a place to find products, online tools, tutorials, and sample images so you can practice your editing without needing any pictures.  There are even different ways of editing available, from the quick do-it-yourself picture touch up to the style matcher where you apply different styles of editing to your pictures.

Day 021: Music Maker

This is one of the coolest ways to make music I have ever found.  All you do is click and a key will play.  The site's description of the player is, "Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute."

Day 020: Crossword Solution

The digital world now allows those who are having trouble solving crossword puzzles to find answers.  All you do is enter the word with question marks where you don't know the letters (w?lc??e, ?ai?y) and it will find all the possibilities in seconds. 

Day 019: Plot Scenario Generator

Running out of creativity but need to write a story? Writer's block? Awesome writing skills but don't know where to start? Plot Scenario Generator is here!  All you do is enter the site and you're automatically set up with a character with a "mess to get out of" as well as a second conflict, usually containing a new character.  Still don't know where to go with the beginning you're offered? Simple. There is a "refresh story" button offered below your first option.

Day 018: Digital Photo Album

Ian Molloy is a friend of mine who is looking to make a career of his photography skills.  Thanks to the internet today, he can have a digital photo album of his work.  This impressive photostream on flikr.com can be seen by everyone with an internet connection, which not only lets his friends see his work, but schools, jobs, and potential customers.  Without the digital world, all Ian would have is his own printed portfolio, which is not as spread nor easily discovered.

Day 017: Online Shopping

Online shopping has found a new tool to catch attention of their consumers. How? Two sites I have visited lately, hipstery.com and justfab.com sell various attire, shirts and shoes respectively.  To catch your attention, you take a short "quiz" first asking questions like, which of these shoes would you never be caught dead in? Or  "I..... Start the party, End the party, Attend the party, Avoid the party." Once you have completed the quiz and offered some personal information such as an email address, the company will "analyze" your answers and send you clothes that match you according to the results.  It's like having a personal shopper.

Day 016: The Noun Project

This website, The Noun Project, shows everyone a visual perspective of our language.  They take every noun such as windmill, stroller, kidney, etc. and relate it to a symbol.  If you rollover a symbol it will say the name of the noun and offer the chance to click for more details. When you click, a small window is brought up with a bigger picture of the noun, the name, the "designers" and other symbols used for the same noun.  The website welcomes more people to add to the site, expanding the nouns available.

Day 015: Lego Printer

This guy made an entire printer made of legos and various pieces for the coding and computing.  The ink is a felt tip marker, and it really works! It's so cool!

Day 014: Katamari

You go to any website and enter the following into the URL.  A small window will open up providing options and then you just hit start!  Somehow it creates a "ball" that follows your mouse when you hold down the right click button.  As it follows the mouse, it "picks up" the contents of the page.  It was quite entertaining for some time.

javascript:var i,s,ss=['http://kathack.com/js/kh.js','http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.min.js'];for(i=0;i!=ss.length;i++){s=document.createElement('script');s.src=ss[i];document.body.appendChild(s);}void(0); 

Day 013: Scholar Showcase

On Friday, May 13, I attended the Student Scholar Showcase.  I volunteered to work the showcase during the morning presentations, but in the afternoon I was able to view multiple works.  In Anderson, the first piece I looked at was a photography piece.  Finger Prints by Emily Finger was a well done presentation of portraits.  There were three photographs that stuck out to me the most.  Two of these three were taken with similar settings.  They were black and white portraits of two different men with intense contrast.  The lighting made the intense contrast work very well within the pictures.  The third picture that stood out to me was a picture of a girl in what looked like a field.  The colors were soft and the editing of the photograph helped to enhance this soft appearance.  I thought her titling was a clever play on words, as she was showing her prints of her portraits and her last name is finger and portraits can often show the difference of individuals, as finger prints do.  I also viewed Brielle Matthews’ Claystallation: Baseball Diamond.  This was a piece using the media of clay to make a baseball diamond.  Different sized baseballs of different shades of gray were placed in the shape of a diamond to creatively create a “baseball diamond”.  Brielle also created other baseball paraphernalia such as a hat and a player’s mitt out of clay.  This piece was interesting and I wish I talked to the artist more about the meaning, but instead I enjoyed my own perception of the pun of baseball “diamond”.  The scholar showcase included a few interesting art pieces and I enjoyed seeing them included throughout the presentation floor.

Day 012: Peep Show

On Friday, I attended the annual peep show here at Hartwick in Anderson.  There were many pieces that were humorous and quite creative.  I like that Hartwick provides the students an opportunity to have fun with art through this open, more carefree styled showcase.  In fact, there was an entry by a younger girl under the age of 15 whose artwork won her a prize.  Over thirty prizes were given out, allowing the competition of the show not to be very high and everyone was able to have a good time and enjoy themselves.  There were many pieces that stood out to me amongst the rest, but I really enjoyed going to see them all.  One piece I noticed was a peep version of Pacman where the artist made a large Ms. Pacman and ghosts using different colored peeps.  Another piece that I liked was the large gorilla made with peeps that were brown and green and was put together very well.  A piece that represented recent American entertainment was the apocalypse piece.  Many movies recently show the rumored apocalypse to be through zombies, and this piece had peeps that had been “bitten” and were “bloodied up.”  There was one piece that was creative and was humorous, especially since I didn’t understand it until I read the title which was “Peeping Tom.”  It was very simple and was just a picture of Tom Cruise with a peep attached to the picture to the left of his head.  I was looking at it for a while before I read the title and realized what it represented.  Once I understood, I enjoyed that the piece was able to make me stop and think about the meaning.  I had a fun time at the peep show and enjoyed all the artwork, especially the environment of the show as a whole.

Day 011:Long Exposure

A great photography technique, when done correctly, is long exposure photography.  There are different uses for this, including speed for traffic pictures, sky effects, and added time such as firework shows.  The below images are good examples of these.

Day 010: Pencil Led Sculptures

An artist, Dalton Ghetti, has found a completely new medium for his sculptures.  These are the smallest, most detailed sculptures I have ever seen. He has sculpted things from letters of the alphabet to a detailed boot, to everyday tools like nails and saws.

Day 009:Stacked Image

This image is taken in Athens. It took 30 minutes to do, but is 51 stacked images.  The outcome image looks awesome.

Day 008: iPod

A few months ago, I purchased an iPod nano.  They are now the size of the old shuffles, which is pretty small, and they're touch screen.  Beyond the obvious amazing technology behind an iPod and iTunes, I witnessed a cool feature Apple has been able to accomplish.  With the click of a button I was able to update the software on my iPod, which actually changed the function of the buttons on the device.  I had a problem with my iPod before, that my battery would die because there was no actual power button. But the software update through my iTunes while my iPod was connected to my computer, changed a button that had been a "sleep" button for the screen light and is now a power button, sleep button, and will skip to the next song or pause a song (depending on the setting you set).  I am shocked by the fact Apple can change functions of my iPod through a simple USB cord.

Day 007: Stop Motion Video

This is a cool stop motion video my brother told me about recently.  It mixes live video and the stop motion format of video, telling a story between two creatures communicating through messages in a bottle.

Day 006: Nativity video

I found this video and I thought it reflected today's society very well.  The video shows what the birth of Jesus would be like today, in terms of communication.  Email, Twitter, Google, Google Earth, Facebook, and other forms of digital media were used to represent the current times.

Day 005: Body Image

The digital world has created a new outlook on body image.  Girls (and guys) are being pressured to look like something that is impossible to achieve.  Magazines, advertisements, pictures all over our media are surrounding our society and they have all been 'digitally retouched' or manipulated.  Here is a very informative website that discusses the power of Photoshop on our culture today, and especially the pressures on the women of our society.  Within this website three videos are posted that I will also post below, discussing the power of manipulation over our ideas of body image.

Day 004: Digital Manipulation

As mentioned before the technology of today has allowed us to recreate deteriorating pieces of art and history.  However, this also has a negative impact on the photography industry, or at least the competitive photographers.  In the past, photography required more skill than it does today.  Not only was 'an eye' for the artistic touch on a photo was needed, but also patience, the understanding of exposure, the printing process, and most importantly, taking the photo with perfect timing.  Now, with the help of Photoshop and other similar graphics editing programs, every photo can be manipulated to have the perfect outcome.  For example, as seen in this video, you can remove photo bombers or other objects you want to remove from the pictures.

Day 003: Digital Recreation

The new technology involved in digital media has created a new way for ancient images to be recreated.  In my Religion and Science class, we recently watched a video that discussed a map that was drawn in the 1200s.  This map was called the Hereford Mappa Mundi and was a literal, as well as symbolic world map.  The following video is part 3 of 3 and shows the digital recreation of the map.

The technology has allowed us to recreate a map that was drawn hundreds of years ago.  The map, that was originally drawn on animal hide, is now losing color and detail, so the digital technology allowed the original colors, details, and print to be completely restored and printed out.

Day 002: Advertising

Digital art has opened entirely new worlds for the advertising industry. Photoshop tools alone allow people of all skill levels to manipulate or even create images that look appealing. Even as a student with little Photoshop experience, I have been able to find tutorials that lead anyone with a little patience step by step instructions to create a huge variety of effects on simple pictures.

For example, you can make an Adidas sneaker advertisement that looks completely professional!  There is also a tutorial that describes how to make a cell phone look much more interesting and eye catching, which is one of the most important factors of an advertisement.  Another way the designers of advertisements use Photoshop to create appealing images is seen through a tutorial showing how to make lighting effects within an image.

Besides adding to an image in Photoshop, there are tools that can allow someone to create an image from scratch.  For example, credit card companies would be able to use this tutorial to make an eye-catching advertisement for a simple piece of plastic, without any actual images.

I was absolutely amazed at what people are able to do using the tools of Photoshop.  Even more surprising, was how simple the instructions seem to create such good results.  The ease to make something like these tutorials help you create will allow creativity in the advertising industry to expand to new levels.  However, the ability for more, less skilled people to create the same level of work as someone who has been trained and educated increased competition in the field, and may even lead to problems in keeping jobs if companies are able to dispose their designers and open advertisements to contests.  The more I see there is to do with Photoshop, the more interesting it becomes.

Day 001

I love hot chocolate. There are so many ways to create this great drink:



Sometimes it's even made in different forms to keep the same awesome flavor in a whole new way!

Yum.