It’s been a successful DD slam last Friday, most of DD students participated on this event.
Special thanks to all the participants especially the actors Braun McAsh (Game design instructor), Leah Bancroft (DD08 student) and Tom Fedechko (Program manager), also the motion graphics instructors Bun Lee and Ron Serna who spent the time to shoot the green screen footage in the production studio after school last week.
I think you should know why you all saw Danny almost every night at school for the past couple weeks, well, Danny was working non-stop on three videos for the GRAPHEX 2008 Gala.
The videos have been really well received by professionals and students alike, check them out here:
It’s always great to see work from former faculty members and alumni. Check out the work from Todd Smith, and DD07 alumni Boca and Ryan Uhrich at Thank You.
Also, you should check out the Mar/Apr 2008 issue of Applied Arts. Jeff Greenberg from DD06, branding instructor Eric Karjaluoto, and Final Project advisors Cosmo Campbell, Alex Beim, Sergio Toporek, Wil Arndt have all been honoured for their various interactive design projects.
Thanks for attending assembly today –I enjoyed speaking with some of you after my talk!
I just wanted to put a shout out about the Beta User pool at Rouxbe. If you think you could be good at trying out the site experience and providing objective feedback, then hit me back and let’s chat about setting you up with access. gdiesh (a) rouxbe.com.
Following up on Brett’s post about the opportunity to get some free business cards from vistaprint.ca, I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts on the subject of business cards based on my own experiences through the years.
You’ll never use 250 so don’t buy 500.
It’s almost funny how many times I’ve gone out to buy business cards and thought, “wow, getting 500 cards is only 25% more expensive than buying 250.” Speaking as someone who has had to throw out boxes of old business cards at least a dozen times in my career, don’t fall for it. As young designers, how likely is it you’re going to keep your visual identity for even a year? My experience is that it’s rare - you’ll probably want to change it within 6 months. How likely is it that your phone number will even stay the same? Or your e-mail address? (note: don’t use hotmail, yahoo, or other generic e-mail addresses for your business cards - it always looks a little cheap.) So the advice is, buy the lowest number of cards possible
Business cards for Digital Design students?
No one ever thinks they need a business card while being a student. After all, we generally think of business cards as things we use to get jobs or contracts. But in actual fact, when you apply for a job you’ll already be sending them your portfolio, resume, and cover letter. Your contact info will be all over the place. But what about the people you meet at design events? Or when you’re introduced to an actor or cinematographer or sound designer you might want to collaborate with later? Or someone who might have freelance work down the road? Business cards are for maintaining a connection that would otherwise fade from memory. Usually I forget people at conferences about half an hour after I meet them. A business card that leaves an impression helps me remember them and feel like it’s worth my while to maintain some contact.
So what does that mean for me?
Here’s some basic suggestions for Digital Design students. I hope faculty, students, and alumni will give their own thoughts on this and disagreement is always agreeable:
Term 1 and 2: You’re going to be meeting a lot of people and it’s hard to tell who’s going to play a role in your education at VFS or your future career. But at this stage you also don’t know what your focus is going to be so you don’t want to spend a ton of time on this. My advice is, design a fairly simple, elegant one-sided business card that has some design element (picture, symbol,…etc) that connects it to you and who you are. Show it to your design instructor (Robin or Jen are both great for this but any of us can give you feedback.) Then find a free deal like the vistaprint one or something similar and get a bunch printed. Don’t give yourself a goofy title like “design genius” - people get turned off by that. Don’t be afraid to put “Design Student” as a title - professionals often admire people who aren’t afraid to say who they actually are. Don’t give out your cards to your DD instructors or other DD students but do give them out to alumni and soon-to-be alumni.
Term 3, 4, 5: You’re probably starting to get focused on some specific area of design. It might be motion, interactive, communication, or some other sub-discipline. If your earlier cards still work for you then great - don’t worry about doing something else. If you’re feeling like those cards don’t represent you, then take advantage of what you learn in Print Design in term 4 and print your own. You don’t need a lot. Seriously. At any one time I really only need to have about fifteen business cards. This is an okay time to take a few design risks and see how they turn out.
Term 6: Now your focus is either on getting a job or going freelance. Either way your probably going to need to design new cards. You’ll get a lot of help in Employment Prep (with Keiron) and Portfolio Development (with Miles) on designing your identity and setting your career direction. There’s a lot more thought that has to go into these cards because they have to represent your professional identity. I won’t go into detail here because you’ll get formal help with this at the right time. But I will say this: paper matters. When it’s your professional identity and you’re putting yourself out in the marketplace printing on cheap card stock or free card products. Focus on quality, not quantity. You’re only likely to use at most 30-40 of these cards before you end up in a position and they risk becoming obsolete. You’ll use probably a quarter of these on people who don’t need them (like parents, friends…etc.) However sometimes this is still a good idea because those people give them out to other people they meet who might be in your field.
There are tons of examples of great business cards out there, but here are some innovative ones that might give you some ideas:18 Business Card Designs
It has been too long since I have posted any news about the multi-touch. As some may know the FTIR MT I built for the program is up and running and I have started to teach how to use/develop for it. It still isn’t finished in terms of the build and definitely isn’t much to look at yet (which is why I haven’t posted photos). Several students are working on software for it this term and I will post video at the end of term when they are done.
It is no secret that I am also in the process of developing a diffuse illumination multi-touch screen. This one is going to be huge 130″ diagonal and 16:9 aspect. On Thursday I finally got it working on a much smaller scale and shot some HD footage. Here is a 1 minute time-lapse of some of the tests.
As some of you may know I attended the Flash Forward conference in Boston last week. I finally have a chance to write about it a bit.
There was a great turn out this year and the sessions where all well attended. There were several highlights. Adobe showed off “Moviestar” which is the code name for the next flash player at the opening keynote. It has all sorts of video enhancements: h.264 and hardware scaling. They also demoed the dual core support which results in about a 70% performance boost. They gave a demo of AIR and some of the cool apps that are in development. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to AIR but over the course of the week I really got excited about it. It’s one to watch.
Craig Swann’s presentation on day two was really good. He showed a lot of his physical computing/music/video work. Great stuff. Later that day I sat in on Mario Klingemann’s presentation about generative art. He is working on some really interesting concepts (MMMM….100 dimensional vectors).
Well the silicone is here. We tested it today and by golly it works! Now it did point out one minor flaw in my mad scientist ways, not enough LEDs. So tomorrow I am going to pull everything apart, again, and drill more holes and put in another 26 leds on the other side of the acrylic. Not a huge deal but a bit of a pain. Once this is done things should be as close to perfect as they can get. New pictures will be posted tomorrow.
It has been a while since I posted about the multi-touch. It’s not because no progress has been made. Lots has been done but through out this project I have constantly under estimated the time it takes to order and ship parts and then assemble said parts.
Polyurethane rubber experiment results are in. Turns out it doesn’t work as a good intermediate surface layer. Our projection screen, rosco grey, sticks to it and sets off the FTIR effect after you lift your finger. As a replacement we have ordered a silicone sheet from the guys over at mutltouch.nl. They have had great success with this as a compliant surface. I am assuming it works so well because things don’t stick to silicone as readily as the polyurethane. Our silicone sheet should be shipping this week. Once it arrives I will post some new videos.
We have been trying to get the new version of touchlib to work but it is crashing upon calibration startup. We also seem to be having some weird calibration issues with the older version of touchlib. I am hoping this is magically disappear once I get the new version working. There seems to be lots of touch tracking software projects starting and I am really looking forward to the opentouch project.
Dave and Tetsuya, now DD alumni, have done a small interface/interaction project with the current setup. I will post more info shortly.
We have also done the following:
Projector has been mounted
Wiring has been run into the table
Front surface mirror has arrived (no ghosting!)
2 screens worth of Rosco grey has arrived
Enclosure has gone through one round of beautification
I have to say the folks over at nuigroup deserve a big pat of the back for their support of the DIY multi-touch community. Their info and forums have been a big help to our project and I am sure many others. Great work guys.
