Remix your childhood favorites

May 7, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 1 Comment

We have been talking about Remixes and Mashups in our Coetails classes off and on for some time now. It’s been great discussion for me because as an art teacher I can bring these concepts into almost any of my classes with very little effort. Two of my finals units now have incorporated some sort of remix or mashup into the students final product. I’ve found the students to be incredibly motivated and creative at the same time. As I move forward to create an animation class next year I am positive that these themes will continue to creep into my curriculum.

What I love about the buzz around mashups and remixes in todays culture is that this is nothing new to the art world. I can talk about these things with my students as a very easy segway into the history of appropriation in the arts. According to MoMA appropriation is the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of preexisting images and objects. It’s been a part of western art for centuries but its a style that has rapidly increased with the rise of consumerism. Jonathan Lethem’s article in Harper’s Magazine “The Ecstasy of Influence” nicely describes how appropriation has been a part of the arts for a long time in many different ways. If you think remixing is anything new then check this article out. I personally find that using the word remix is just what helps me to relate to my students. From there we are able to dig a little bit deeper.

Using the word Remix also brings me to the idea of having a good hook for your students. I was recently introduced to a concept referred to as Fan Art. Again, to me this is another form of appropriation or if I was trying to pull in my students I would say Fan Art is another form of remixing. If you are unsure about what Fan Art is watch this OffBook short from PBS.

The thing I love about fan art is that so many people start out drawing fan art when they are little. When kids or even adults don’t know what to draw they will draw a character that they know from some sort of work of fiction. If you want to get a little creative you could draw them doing something new or out of character. I would say that about 70% of the independent drawings that my students do in their sketchbooks are fan art from their favorite shows. Fan art is yet another genre that falls under appropriation that I can easily use to stir up some creativity with my students. I’m not sure where all this is going just yet but I’ve got high hopes for all the places appropriation in it’s many forms will take my classes in the future.

ReVamp

May 7, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ Leave a comment

I recently took a little survey with my design class to see what type of project they would be interested in pursuing as we wrap up the semester. At our school all of the students have blogs that are used regularly so I thought one of the options should be to revamp their blogs and give them some more visual appeal. I was surprised to find that the idea of adding a personal touch to their blogs was very enticing to whole class. Several students claimed to have never done a single thing to their blogs because nobody ever showed them how. The level of enthusiasm for this project got me excited to develop this unit but I was even more excited because it so nicely brought us back to all of the design elements that we have been discussing throughout the semester.

To kick of the unit we watched the OffBook video on “the Art of Wed Design”. Side note, if you are not familiar with OffBook I highly recommend it. It is a great collection of shorts put together by PBS on Art in the Digital world.

This video gives a little history about web design and at the same time helps to generate some discussion about basic elements to consider when designing a web site. Some of these elements were typography, usability, layout, content, and color. With these things in mind students took a look at their own blogs and asked themselves two questions.

What bugs me about my blog?
If I could do anything what would I like to change about my blog?

After our mini brainstorming sessions we will be dug a little deeper. The second phase to our research process was to look at the article Understanding Visual Hierarchy in Web Design by Brandon Jones. Students opened the article in an app that allowed them to annotate it in order to highlighting what they felt were the key components to each section. Afterward we took turns sharing what we highlighted for extra clarity. With this new information in mind students were then asked to return to their lists of things that bugged them and things they wanted to change to make any further clarifications or add-ons.

With a complete list in hand of ways to move forward we will set out to do make three major changes. Students will:

Pick a new theme
1. As students began looking deeper into wordpress themes they will have their lists of what they would like to change as well as their knowledge of the elements of good web design to help guide them.
Reorganize your content
1. Students will make sure the content fits into the new theme in a user friendly and aesthetically pleasing way. Some of these changes will include but are not limited to the following:
  1. adding categories to posts.
  2. Making a Home page more like an about me page.
  3. Parenting posts and ordering pages.
  4. Adding or subtracting widgets.
  5. Adjusting the layout of columns, scrollbars and posts.
Design a new header
1. We will use our adobe suite skills to create a new personalized header. We have been using many of the adobe suite products throughout the semester and students have done a great job developing their skills with digital imagery. They are allowed to use their own images, create a mashup, remix of an image using creative commons.

At the moment my students are about half way through revamping their blogs. Fun things are happening and I’m excited to see the end results. As kids finish up they will be posting a reflection to explain the reasoning behind all of their changes. I know thier have been a lot of little bumps in the road where students find they are not always able to do everything they want but this has been a good lesson as well.

In the end I’m most excited because this final project that accomplishes several things. First, it teaches the students several new concepts about web design. Second, it reviews many of the key components and tools that we have been building on all semester. Finally and most importantly this unit allows for the student to put some individuality and personal flare into a product that they will be continuing to use in the future.

Can Flashy Prezi be Zen?

May 2, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 1 Comment

I use Prezi very frequently in my classroom. While reading about presentation Zen I noticed all of the examples being displayed were powerpoint or something similar. This got me wondering; Can Prezi be Zen? I decided to do a little fishing around to see what some others critiques might have to say about the Zen qualities or lack there of when it comes to Prezi.

I started with the creator of Presentation Zen, Garr Reynolds. From what I found Reynolds had two main positive things to say about Prezi:

One is that “ Prezi is a good tool when used with discretion and restraint.”

and that

“Prezi works well in non-linear presentation situations”

The first quote by Reynolds could easily be applied to any presentation platform, or any tool in general for that matter. The second however is the one that I find to be more relevant. In a way Prezi’s can be set up like an animated infographic. Prezi will zoom into one section of the whole and then zoom out again to show the viewer how everything is connected, helping the viewer to never lose sight of the big picture. Like Garr said, it works well with non-linear situations.

Not everyone though seems to think that Prezi has the potential that Reynolds does. Scott Burkun has a post dedicated to his hatred of Prezi. Stating that:

“The people most drawn to use Prezi are those who are more enchanted by the pretense of style, rather than substance.”

Burkun’s statement may be true for many Prezi users but who’s to say those users are in any way knowledgeable with the concepts behind Presentation Zen. From what I read the biggest critisism of Prezi is that the transitions are to flashy, distracting the viewer from the content. These transitions definitely go against the Presentations Zen model. They are what I believe Reynolds was referring to when he said that Prezi is a good when used with discretion and restraint. So are there Zen Prezi’s? Chris Anderson has a wonderful Prezi that he uses in his TedTalk on how web video powers global innovation and I would say it’s getting the job done.

https://embed.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html

In this presentation you can see many of the advantages to Prezi as well as the distracting transitions. My conclusion is that when creating a Zen presentation there can be a place for Prezi but you should think carefully about the content and whether or not a non-linear presentation platform enhances your content.

On the other hand I don’t use Prezi just for presentations and talks. I’m sure that a lot of presentations that teachers make are not so much presentations as they are reference points for students. I actually use Prezi as a sort of weekly planner that helps to organize the information my students need for each class. I have one Prezi for every week that encompasses all of my classes. Different areas of the Prezi are dedicated to providing the students with images, video or links they might need but mostly it is a way to communicate what the class period will consist of along with some key points. If it was only visuals it wouldn’t be very helpful to students. In this way Prezi is not being used for presentations but it is a reference for my students. Since I have started using Prezi here are what I have found to be it’s advantages, Zen or not.

You can create a presentation that is are non-linear, displaying the big picture and how concept overlap and are interconnected.
Prezi is web based so it can be accessed from different devices and has a user friendly app.
It can be kept in the public domain so it can also be accessed by your students.
Embedding video, images and links is extremely easy and allows you to keep more information in one place.
It can be shared with others to make presentations a collaborative effort.

I would like to leave you with a course relevant Prezi example that may not be exactly Zen but it nicely displays that advantage of Prezi without the Presenter. This is something prezi can do well when needed.

https://prezi.com/embed/bm9alx1pbtmc/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined

Spring Cleaning

April 10, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 2 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-04-03 at 5.35.32 PM — Magazino wordpress theme

As I set out to bling out my blog I decided I would work to get rid of the things that irritate me about me most about it. As an art teacher there are always little visual irritants that eat at me. The screen shot to the right is what my blog used to look like.

I love the look of the Magazino theme but I was always struggling to get the pictures to look the way I wanted them. As you can see the heading image would always be cropped awkwardly and the thumbnails pictures on the bottom would only show up occasionally. To me I felt these inconstancies made things look a bit unprofessional. That being said I decided to switch my theme to something similar but a little more user friendly and less time consuming. I wanted the most recent post in the header and tiles of posts below just like Magazino but I didn’t want to put so much time into making sure my picture settings just right. I managed to get a little simplicity and the look I was going for with the Photogram theme posted below.

The second little irritant on my agenda was to organize my content better for my users. I did this by making a bunch of categories, applying them to each post, and adding widgets related to categories. This may not completely fall under the category of making my blog more visually appealing but it definitely hikes up my usability factor. The screen shot below is of a post with new widgets to help navigate through my blog. None of these changes are earth shattering, rather they are small changes that can go along way. Like most things it’s a matter of getting the framework set up first and from then on out life should hopefully be a little easier for me and my readers.

Photogram Theme - View of a post — Photogram Theme – View of a post

Appropriate dress

February 28, 2014 ~ cpupovac ~ 1 Comment

This semester I’m teaching a design class and I’m finding myself in new territory. I’m constantly focused on making our projects to be meaningful and relevant. One very relevant project we were recently working on in class was designing a new cover for next years school agendas. In a way the class was hired to a job with very specific criteria and functionality. Knowing this we took our task very seriously. Students broke off into small groups to work on their ideas, periodically regrouping to discuss design elements until we came up with something that we all agreed was aesthetically pleasing as good design. I feel the project was a huge success, used a collaborative design process, and helped students to become more familiar with Adobe InDesign.

One little bug popped up in the process that brought me back to our copyright discussions in CoeTail. We started out our design process with a set of images that we owned. At one point students wanted to use other images and began grabbing things off the internet without thinking twice. I quickly realized that in a class where we are constantly on the computer and we are working with layout and design that copyright needs to be addressed. As a matter of fact I should probably be addressing it in all of my art classes to some degree since appropriation is a common artistic practice. With this thought in mind I have decided that the introduction to our next design project, which is t-shirt design, will begin with concepts of appropriation, copyright and remix culture. We have just finished creating our own personalized logos and have published them to our blogs. Ownership of their own work and fair use of others are things that each of my students should be considering at this point.

This unit will be introduced to my students by addressing the issue we ran into a few weeks ago when images were taken from the internet for our cover project. The class will be broken up into groups of two, with each group researching one of the following topics and reporting back to the class.

Explain copyright and who it is meant to protect.
What is appropriation? Give 3 examples of famous artists using appropriation in their work.
Tell us about Andy Warhol and one of the copyright lawsuits he was involved in.
What are considered the fair use and artistic standards for artists involving copyright?
Give two possible scenarios where copyright would affect us in Design class.

Once we have all been informed of each others topics we will take a closer look at our schools RUP. This will give the students time to not only review the RUP but also discuss what points in the RUP relate closely to our work in Design.

It is at this final point in the discussion that I will introduce students to Creative Commons, it’s purpose and how we should be using it from here on out. Creative Commons has two wonderful videos that I plan to share with the students to not only explain what Creative Commons is but also how they have contributed to the remix culture of modern artistic appropriation. The following is the first of those two videos. With help from the Creative Commons search engine we will be finding images to turn into remixed graphics on Adobe illustrator. Our final graphics should also be changed according to artistic standards of copyright so that they could be legally printed onto a t-shirt or submitted to a design company such as threadless.com.

I’m excited for students to do their own research into this topic and see how copyright enters the visual art world. I’m also excited to hear the discussions that might follow. This unit will being within the next two weeks in my class, stay tuned for updates.

Cassandra Pupovac

Art Teacher and Service Coordinator

Design