Session 1: Processing photographic imagery is used in a wide variety tasks. Print advertising, packaging, promotional materials, presentations, and fine art all take advantage of techniques made possible with photo processing software. Using processed photographic images in presentations is an important skill regardless of ones chosen professional field. The photo manipulation and slideshow project provides an opportunity to learn several ways to process photos and include them in a presentation with titles, textual captions, and transitions.

Use a digital camera to shoot a minimum of twelve photographs. Choose a theme for your photos like buildings, people, animals, objects, or textures. Be creative. Shoot photos in both portrait and landscape modes. Process each photograph in Photoshop to prepare the images for use in a presentation. Crop and resize all you photo and use at least one example of each of the following techniques: convert to black and white (grayscale), convert to duotone (i.e. sepia tone), brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, and invert.

For complete instructions download the following Word document:
Photo Manipulation and Slideshow Presentation

Session 2: Use PowerPoint to create a twelve-panel slideshow presentation of your processed photographs. Each slide must include the photo, a title for the photo and a short description. Experiment with different layout techniques for each slide. Apply transitions between slides to learn how to apply transitions, and then never do it again. Transitions should be used sparingly so as not to distract your audience.

To keep things in perspective, the following article explains the dangers of using PowerPoint, or similar applications for presentations.
PowerPoint Is Evil By Edward Tufte

Session 1: Flash is an extremely versatile application, which allows users to create an infinite array of applications from something as simple as motion graphics to as complex as fully functional, arcade style games. Our next assignment will be to create a bouncing ball in Flash. An example of a bouncing ball made in Flash is available here:

Bouncing Ball Example

For complete instructions download the following Word document:
Bouncing Ball Assignment (Adobe Flash)

Session 2: Today I’ll be demonstrating exactly how to create a bouncing ball in Flash. To create the bouncing ball, start a new document in Flash. Select the oval tool and draw a circle. To constrain your ball to a perfect circle, hold down the shift key while dragging. You can also choose to select a fill color or gradient to make your ball a little more fancy. After your satisfied, from the Insert menu choose “Convert to Symbol”. Make sure you name it and select graphic as the type.

Insert a key frame at frame 10 and another at frame 20 (for a slower bounce try inserting the key frames at 20 and 40). Select the middle key frame and shift+drag the ball to the bottom of the scene. Here you can also adjust the height property of the ball so that it appears to squash down a bit as it strikes the floor.

Now select the 1st key frame and in the properties panel choose “motion” under “Tween” and set the ease to -100. On the middle turn on the motion tween as well and set the ease equal to 100. Hit ctrl+enter to watch the animated ball bounce. When you’re finished please email a copy your assignment to jck362@gmail.com.

Session 1: Today we are going to continue experimenting with Flash. Specifically we will be learning how to apply shape tweens. Shape tweens can be used to morph objects from one shape to another (i.e. a circle to a square). This technique is especially useful for animation. Another technique you can use in Flash is to create unique logos by shape tweening between characters in a typeface. This will allow you to create unique logos that would otherwise be very difficult to create. Here’s an example logo that I created using this technique.

For complete instructions download the following Word document:
Shape Tween Logo Assignment (Adobe Flash)

Session 2: Adobe Illustrator can be used for more deliberate techniques. The principal difference between Photoshop and Illustrator is the concept of bitmap versus vector graphics. Vector graphics have a distinct advantage of bitmap images for logo designs because of the ability to print or display at any size without seeing any loss of detail, like you would with a bitmap image.

The next assignment involves creating a set of five vector based logos using Illustrator. For your first logo, use the same technique we used for the Flash logo, then save if from Flash as an Illustrator file and place it in your project. For the rest of the logos make them out of a group of letters and use a different font for each logo. Place all five logos in the same document one after another and align them on the page. Experiment with the kerning, tracking, and type treatments. Use transform and drawing tools to manipulate several of the logos. Use the create outlines function to convert the type into vector shapes. Ungroup your shape to manipulate individual letters using the white arrow tool, scale, and transform tool.

For complete instructions download the following Word document:
Illustrator Logos Project

Session 1: School closed.

Session 2: Today we will start working on our first project that involves using the web server space that we all have available through the school on the OLS system. The Internet is a vast and complex network that includes the World Wide Web. A simple way to imagine the Web is as a delivery platform. Postal services deliver physical packages to geographical locations. The Web delivers electronic packages to and from computers all over the world. These data packages are reassembled into files made up of text, images, video, sound, and interactive content. In the next project we will make some of our own content available on a web page including a thumbnail link to a full sized image, text, and links.

For complete instructions download the following Word document:
Assignment 9: Simple Web Page