"Bing & decide!"

Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine, which was made public by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009. It is designed to do more than merely help you find information. Bing organizes search results and provides refinement tools that help you overcome information overload, get things done and quickly bring you to the point of using that information to make an informed decision.

Microsoft did a survey about internet search, and found that half of attempted searches fail to meet consumer needs, and nearly three-quarters of people consider search results too disorganized. With these results, they wanted to improve the search experience by creating a more organized search experience, simplifying tasks and providing tools that enable insight about key decisions, and most of all delivering great search results and one-click access to relevant information. Microsoft also found that 66% of consumers are more focused on using the Internet to get things done, rather than to simply find information. With this knowledge, Bing was created to be an Internet decision engine that will help one navigate through the irrelevant information and find the shortest distance to an informed decision.

As of 2010, Bing is the third largest search engine, next to Yahoo! and Google. On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a 10-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature "Powered by Bing" branding. However, Google still remains the number one search engine.

My Animated Gif

Since I had already put together both parts of the postcard, this should have been the easiest part of the assignment, or so I thought. I had a lot of trouble putting my animated gif on my blog because my filezilla kept on getting disconnected. We also tried pasting our link for our animated gif into a html that we thought would display our animated gif, but we were wrong. It turned out that it was a lot more simple than we had imagined, and we could have placed it in the same way we add an image. This was frustrating for me because I spent so long trying to figure out why it wasn't working! Once I saw my animated postcard on my blog I was very relieved that it worked out.

Postcard

For my double-exposure photo, I chose each picture based on certain words from my poem. As you can see, there is grass growing, a bright sun, a bird resting, and the main photo, a sidewalk. I chose the hue to be a bright red becuase of the line "the sun burns crimson bright". My biggest challenge was placing the pictures in the right spot. It took a while for me to get them where I wanted it. I also wanted the grass to be greener and show more but it couldn't because of the dark layer underneath it. If I had more time I would play around with the placing of the pictures a bit more, and maybe even try out some new ones, but overall I really like how my images illustrate my font poem.

Font Poem

I found the font poem assignment to be more challenging than the contact sheet because of the words. It was hard for me to work solely with words, but once I got the hang of it I began to enjoy it. I used an excerpt from the poem Where the Side Walk Ends by Shel Silverstein, one of my favorite poets. I tried having different words throughout the poem stand out and have a meaning of its own, for example the typography for "grass grows" is growing. I really had fun exploring the different fonts Photoshop had to offer. If I had more time I would have experimented with colors, but I did not want to go overboard and have it be too much. I like how the black and white is simple and leaves more of an impression than it would if it were to be in color.
I used the following fonts:

• Weidemann Std
• Neuland Lt Std
• Cutout Std
• Itc Isadora Std
• Ex Ponto Pro
• Bruno JB Std
• Stencil
• Flood
• Wendy Lp Std
• Nupital Script Lt Std
• Medici Script Lt Std
• Apple Casual
• Juniper Std
• Briem Script