Today we embedded our sound slide which consisted of our PowerPoint and the music that went along with it. The sound slide was rather simple to create, and it was very exciting viewing my final project. After we made our sound slide, we added it on our blog through Filezilla, which we have used previously when adding our animated gif. I was proud to see that I remembered how to use it, and it was an even better feeling when I saw my successful final product.
If I had more time, I would have played with the timing of the song so I could have gotten it just right to where it sounded perfect. I would have also worked with the timings in my slide as well so that everything really meshed well together. I really enjoyed how simple it was to create the sound slide, and I think it would be interesting to use it again in the future.
For this assignment, we had to create a poster for the artist that we chose to do a PowerPoint Presentation on. We had to create it based on the idea that they were going to have a CD release party held at Roger Williams University, and provide the necessary information on it for those who wished to attend.
I am a marketing major, so I love to create advertisements for different projects. This was unlike anything that I have done because I usually am creating story boards, and not posters. My favorite picture of Van Morrison from my PowerPoint was one where he is singing and playing the saxophone. It does a great job of showing the viewers of what kind of artist that he is, and what to expect. I also chose that picture because the background of it was red, and I was excited to play with the color since I did not get to play with much color in my PowerPoint.
The background of my poster was a painting of Van Morrison that was very light. I then put Van Morrison in big bright red letters at the top of the poster, followed by all the information.
I was really proud of my poster. I thought that the visuals and the information worked really well together. If I had more time, I would have incorporated yellow into the poster. We had discussed in class how yellow is the best color to catch someone’s eye and grab their attention. Though I was aware of this, we also spoke of how red is used in the everyday world to do the same thing, and I thought that since I had a great image with red in it, that I would use it throughout my poster. When viewing my classmates’ posters, it turned out that yellow really worked best when trying to make a poster pop. Aside from that, I thought my poster turned out great.
For this assignment, we had to choose a music artist, and create a PowerPoint Presentation based on them. One of my favorite singers is Van Morrison, so I decided to do mine on him. I have created numerous PowerPoint Presentations in the past, however this was by far the most enjoyable.
The most difficult part of this assignment was finding good photographs of Van Morrison. Many of my other classmates did more recent artists, who have thousands of pictures on the internet with various colors and graphics. Seeing their presentations almost made me wish I did someone more recent as well, because it definitely would have been easier to work with. Nevertheless, mine was unique because it did not posses these qualities.
I wanted my PowerPoint to portray Van Morrison as the sophisticated and talented musician that he is. I did not go crazy with my colors; I chose a very basic dual-tone background (blue and black), and repeated it throughout the PowerPoint. For my second slide, I wrote basic information about who he is, and the instruments he plays. For the picture, I chose him singing and playing the saxophone, which I thought really displayed his talent. For the third slide, I chose the album Moondance, and listed their tracks and track times. The fourth slide consisted of four of his albums that I like, and I chose my favorite songs from each of them. I enjoyed working on this slide the best. I also really like my reference slide. It is hard to make it interesting, considering it is just a list of links, so I chose a picture of him looking directly at the links, drawing the viewers focus to them.
I thought I did a great job of displaying Van Morrison as a serious talented musician. I did not clutter the slide with graphics and bright colors, because it does not pertain to his characteristics. If I had more time, I would have played with colors a bit more to make it a little more lively, or perhaps have chosen a more lively song. (I couldn’t help but pick my favorite!) This was one of my favorite assignments so far, and I think that the majority of the class would agree. Music is a great way to share and learn about other people, and I had a great time doing this project.
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.
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.
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.
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:
