Field 2 Productions » teaching

Portfolio design with shadowbox

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:55:11 +0000

I’ll be demoing this in my Capstone class tomorrow night. Feel free to come-312 Lyons Hall, Canisius College, 2001 main St. 6:00 pm, March 10.

Go to http://wlab.canisius.edu/~dunkleb/notes/portfolio_workshop/ to read up on what we’ll be doing.

HTML crash course

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 02:36:23 +0000

I’ve refined this course over the last couple of years to encompass what I think are the essentials of web design. Check it out if you’re interested in learning web coding, and let me know if you have any feedback.

The course

How to add a “brushed metal” look and feel to a shape in photoshop

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:39:00 +0000

How to add a \"brushed metal\" look and feel to a shape in photoshop

How to create seamless patterns in Photoshop

admin — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:21:41 +0000

Dreamweaver

admin — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:44:27 +0000

I cringe whenever I see dreamweaver listed as a requirement for a job posting. Right away, I can tell that whomever is posting the job really doesn’t understand web development, or the people who are good at web development, because if they did they’d know that dreamweaver is fundamentally a useless, pointless, resource-sucking program that continues to try and slap WYSIWYG on the most slippery, amoebic, “un-speccable” communication technology to date-namely the web. The only real contributions Adobe makes to the web are Flash and Photoshop. Everything else can be done with the most basic of text editors.

Comparing the anti-aliasing properties of Illustrator and Photoshop (cs4)

admin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:28:13 +0000

I’ve read (can’t think of where at the moment: UPDATE: Jonathan Hicks pimps fireworks here:http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/branding-firefox ) articles applauding the pixel preview functionality of AI, especially when it comes to designing low resolution icons. I investigated this a bit and here’s what I found:

16x16 circle in Illustrator, snapped to 1x1 pixel grid

16x16 circle in Photoshop, made with a shape, snapped to grid

Compare the above. Both are 16×16 pixel circles, but the Photoshop one is superior. Note how Illustrator adds grey pixels to the left and top of the icon. I’m not sure why it does this, maybe someone can explain, but for now I’m sticking with Photoshop for my icon design. Here they are at actual size:

Can you guess which one is which (hover over each for the answer). IMHO, the one on the right is better.

Rethinking web design instruction

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:45:47 +0000

I’ve taught Web Design for many years now. I started out teaching students how to use the now defunct Adobe GoLive. I realized quickly that wysiwyg editors such as GoLive and Dreamweaver were effectively bad ways to teach students how to build websites, and moved into html and css.

I”m seeing a new trend in web design that may make me rethink how I teach it. It seems that the big open source CMS packages, drupal and wordpress, are taking over high-end website design. If your site isn’t built on one of these two platforms (OK, maybe there are one or two others), it ain’t cutting edge.

This summer I’m undertaking two major site designs, one in drupal and one in wordpress. The drupal one is finished: http://www.msja.org (assuming they’ve launched it). The wordpress one is under construction.

My hope is to gain a deeper understanding of how to build within these two environments, and begin to shift the focus of my classes from building sites from scratch, to starting with basic CMS templates. This fall, I’m teaching Intro to Web Design again, and my summer projects will definitely bear some weight on the material.

Wordpress

admin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:26:28 +0000

So I spent the night getting the basics down of wordpress theme customization and as I figured it is easy, but there were a few hurdles. It was definitely easier than Drupal, and I think this will be my focus of study for a while…

Typography

admin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:33:57 +0000

I’m at the typecon conference and a lot of people are talking about how to teach typography in the education forum.

My take: Tap into the love of typography students had when they first learned how to write. My kids all scribbled and stuff, but the revelation came when they learned how to write their names. Nancy, in particular, writes hers all the time now, and puts curly flourishes on the ends of all the letters.

Kids grow up loving to write letters–but usually not the letters they are forced to write by their teachers. They (the interesting ones, anyway) fill the edges of their notebooks with all kinds of funky letters and words.

My conclusion: every typography class should feature a section on hand-lettering. It could be structured like the kind I learned about in my workshop with Stephen Rapp yesterday, or more informal and experimental, like one I would love to teach. Once students reconnect with the fun of letters that they may have lost long ago, typography has hooked them.