Max Beatty » Digital Art

New Business Cards For My Old Man

Max — Fri, 29 May 2009 03:10:53 +0000

This morning my dad and I sat around playing with some new ideas for his business cards and overall brand. You can see his old logo on his site. The redesign and rebranding stems from wanting to be clearer about what he does as a business while at the same time simplifying his office setup. Instead of having a landline phone number and mobile number, he’s just going to have one. Instead of paying for a fax line, he’s going to do more email invoices and electronic faxes. It’s smart and more efficient, but that wasn’t the point of this blog.

I just felt like posting a few of the ideas I had to redesign his logo and business card. It’s very minimal, not a lot of color (still cheapest to print black and white), and it was meant to transfer between business cards, invoice headings, yard signs, and print advertisements. Keep in mind I have no training whatsoever in graphic design or print design. Here goes:

Vertical version

Based off Pages Invoice template

Traditional and Minimal

None of these are finalized. They were just ideas we were throwing around. I know some people find it interesting to get a sneak peek into design processes. If we totally rebrand I’ll be sure to make the announcement here first!

Done with Digital Art

Max — Wed, 06 May 2009 22:06:57 +0000

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 this site. One of these days…

Flashy Flash Flickr Fun

Max — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:00:34 +0000

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!

Dreamweaver Isn’t Dying- It’s Dead

Max — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:00:19 +0000

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 By Your Browser

Max — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:00:36 +0000

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:

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 Artwork From Flickr

Max — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:55:36 +0000

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

Max — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 01:46:33 +0000

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: Frustration

Max — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:13:01 +0000

“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

Frustration by Max Beatty

Why the analog art show in a digital art class?

Max — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:21:57 +0000

Today’s in-class exercise was to create two squares where one represented happiness and the other sadness. After everyone was done, we rotated around the classroom leaving a few sentences in an open Word document about our observations. When we were done commenting on three or four other pieces, we turned the JPG and DOCX in to Oncourse.

What bugged me about the exercise was why we didn’t just upload the images to our blogs that we’re maintaining for the class and have everyone just leave a comment on the post? It’s simpler, less time consuming, and would have taught everyone how to post their images to their blogs.

Here are my happy and sad squares:

Leave a comment about what you think or open a word processor, type out what you think, and email it to me. Whichever you find easier for you…

Old Digital Composites

Max — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 04:14:30 +0000

This week’s digital art blog assignment is to, “find an art piece which is related to digital composite, and talk about it.” I went to my doodle album on Facebook and pulled a few of my old composites I used to use on intro splash pages back when they were popular for websites.

This first one is made up of a picture of my keyboard, a picture of a wave, and then a bunch of filters and effects along with the text.

This second picture is composed of a picture of a drainage grate and a drawing of a fist in the clouds that I found online plus the text.

This last photo I made with a free brush set in Photoshop in like 15 seconds. It’s very random and has no point, but I’ve always liked it.

Our first assignment which is a digital composite is due Monday. I’ll probably post my finished product to Facebook and Flickr if you’re interested in what I come up with based on my supporting materials.

Digital Art: Project 1 Supporting Materials

Max — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 06:58:55 +0000

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

Max — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:44:27 +0000

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!

2 Blogs 1 Source

Max — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:30:55 +0000

This semester two of my classes are requiring that I blog, but neither of them will allow me to use my existing blog. In true blogger fashion, I’ll be crossposting everything here. I personally think it’s somewhat idiotic I have to do this because I can easily categorize my posts, but it would be irresponsible of me to think my professors would be competent enough to make an assignment they actually understood themselves.

For my Digital Art class (FINA D210), I’ll be posting here but crossposting with the category “digital art”
For my Entrepreneurship in Informatics class (INFO I400), I’ll be posting here (may be private to non-IU viewers) but crossposting with the category “entreprenership”

Supposedly, the I400 class is some sort of capstone project where I guess they are setting up and managing a WordPressMU install :: yawn (please let me know if it’s something more). There is really no excuse for my digital art class to have me post elsewhere (thought about submitting this URL and seeing if she knew the difference). The only reasonable explanation I could think of was that my teacher is originally from Taiwan and I know Blogger offers easy-to-use translation tools.

Bottom line, I’ll be blogging a lot this semester and I’m excited for that. I have quite a queue of other things I’d like to post, but haven’t found the time. Note to professors requiring their students to blog, let your students have some freedom (sure offer them a default like Blogger and WordPress) and just use Google Reader or some other RSS reader to manage the class. It’s not that hard.

Digital Art: Introduction

Max — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:25:42 +0000

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 andthere. 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