Mindtracks

Since we are now in week 9 of the course, this morning I thought a round up of some Image Ready tutorials that may be useful for my students and are applicable to this mornings lesson.

Also listed are some odd links to articles that i have found recently that pertain to areas of discussion in class.

ImageReady tutorials online
Interfaces and ImageReady explains how to slice a Photoshop image into an web interface. Please note what is said about PNG file format on page 2

The use of PNGs is controversial. Based on a newer graphical standard, PNGs are not supported by all browsers and have a tendency to sport quite large filesizes.

Accessibility Alert on this technique:
With any slice you create you should also add Alternate text. To do this
select the desired slice and add alt text using the Slice Palette which you can pull up by going to Window > Slice. Type in the Alt Text in the Alt field.

Building a website with Photoshop and Dreamweaver by Colin Smith is a great tutorial which covers Preparing the background, adding the design elements, preparing rollovers, slicing in ImageReady, rollovers in ImageReady, optimizing and publishing Imageready, bringing it into Dreamweaver, and turning the page into a website Dreamweaver.

A selection of ImageReady tutorials from Vecpix

One-Day ImageReady Tutorial by Michael Kay of Web Monkey

Animation in Adobe Photoshop / ImageReady shows you how to create an animation using Adobe ImageReady. Animations can be exported as an animated GIF or Macromedia Flash file.

Here is another Animation primer

Using the same principal you can create fade in and fade out effect see Creating a Fade-in Fade-out Effect in ImageReady by Fast Hacking

Here is a cluster of tutorials on animation effects in ImageReady

Adobe ImageReady Droplet Tutorial which enables you do batch processing

Here is another on creating Optimization Droplets

Found through the week
John Tokash’s Aggcompare compares RSS aggregators.

Your audience
It is crucial to ask who you are creating a website for. In How To Create Pen Portraits and Understand Your Target Audience Chris Garrett discusses pen portraits as a way to visualise who your audience/readers are. This is a marketing technique but many visual artists who are developing an online presence will find it useful to stop and think about who it is they are trying to communicate with.

For anyone interested in Web design check out Design Meltdown as they collate together examples of design styles used around the web applied to different types of websites.

For instance in class this week the topic of using brown a dominant colour scheme came up and another student was interested in Distressed Designs

Collis Ta’eed of Freelance Switch has written about the techniques he used take Freelance Switch From 0 to 2000 Subscribers in just 12 Days

Collis first identified a suitable niche topic and once that was done he drew on past experience and other blogs to draw people to the blog. Next he wrote some key worthwhile bookmarkable articles that would, as he describes them ’stand the test of time’. Collis then used some carefully targeted paid advertising. An investment of $50.00 did it.

This is an excellent example of using social software for self-marketing. Blogs can be more than a personal journal. Freelance Switch aims to provide resources for freelancers and in building such a site it will raise the authors profile and positions them as an expert in their field.

Students often start out blogging using free platforms which is fine. In many ways it is ideal because it is possible to try out blogging and find out if its for them, then the decision made about what platform to use is made in an informed manner. Over the next few weeks I will be gathering together links on how to decide which blogging platform to use as I will speaking about it towards the end of semester.

Over on Build a Better Blog there is a discussion about using Blogger. Choice of blog platforms is an important decision and worth a little research. Check out Blogger: Should You Use it?

Personally I am a WordPress fan and you can get a free WordPress blog For a free service there is excellent support, heaps of features , lots of themes to choose from, you can import an old blog easily if that blog platform allows exports and you can create extra pages.

I have had my nose in a book well actually a PDF printout. I have a fascination with how ideas in a culture grow and spread so I could not resist the downloading some free chapters from Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology by Jack Balkin which uses memetics to explain the growth and spread of ideology.

All 13 chapters – yep the whole book is available free as a PDF or html files, but I think I am going to buy it. Although it is very convenient to be able to dip into something to read while munching on my breakfast and I can make guilt free notes in the margins of a print out I do still like a book!

Here is the blurb from the site

Cultural Software offers a new theory about how ideologies and beliefs grow, spread, and develop– a theory of cultural evolution, which explains both shared understandings and disagreement and diversity within cultures.

Cultural evolution occurs through transmission and spread of cultural information and know-how– or “cultural software “– in human minds. Individuals embody cultural software: they are literally information made flesh. They spread it to others through communication and social learning. Human minds and institutions provide the ecology in which cultural software grows, thrives, and develops. Human cultural software is created out of the diverse elements of cultural transmission, also known as “memes.”

This discovery came about because on my other blog In a minute ago I was asked what a meme was. So I was trawling about in order to find a simple definition of the term.

Some bloggers see memes as little more than an online chain letter but the concept and the implications of memes is a little more complex as Balkin’s book points out.

For any of my students who may not know the term this definition of a meme explains the term and here is Wikipedia’s definition of meme

Brent Silby has asked What is a Meme? and being a philosopher has … well answered it in philosophic way!

For another brief article The Lifecycle of Memes by Henrik Bjarneskans, Bjarne Grønnevik and Anders Sandberg explores the idea further. Here is the abstract.

Memes, self reproducing mental information structures analogous to genes in biology, can be seen as the basis for an explanatory model of cultural and psychological behaviour. Their properties and effects are evolutionary conditioned and ultimately seeks to promote their replication. To survive in a context the memes must meet certain conditions. We abstract a model of these conditions and use it to analyse three well-known memes: the “Kilroy was here” graffiti, urban legends and Christianity.

No doubt since my interest has been pricked by a simple question I will find other stuff online but that’s enough surfing for one day - I am back to reading Balkin’s book.

Anyone with half a brain realises that for anyone working as a ‘creative professional’ the work place and its culture has shifted dramatically in the last few years. Jonathan Follett in The Long Hallway points to something I had not really thought through completely.

Virtual companies are establishing new business processes which are not simply telecommuting as we think of it. Follett points out that “telecommuters work remotely for businesses that already possess an established culture and physical buildings” whereas virtual companies exist “wherever its people are”. In other words these companies do not have a physical space or head quarters with an associated culture. These companies are often international. As an example I (an Australian) write online course materials for a company in America.

The implications of this non physical workspace are teased out by Jonathan Follett. Process becomes paramount, social interaction via networked play helps to build good working relationships, writing skills are important, team management involves consideration and adapting to different working styles and personalities.

It’s a good article which is worth reading I would only add one thing when working across international borders. Although you might think you are on the same wave length don’t assume so. Everything has to be spelt out very clearly otherwise misunderstandings can easily occur.

Ben Macintyre of the Times online has written a piece on archiving digital information in History 1980-2000 has disappeared into the ether. Sorry

The digital age brought with it the false promise that everything written, filmed, photographed or recorded might now be preserved, for ever. The “save” key would eliminate the need for filing and storage. Since 1945 we have gathered 100 times more information than in the whole of human history up until that point. Entire libraries could be preserved on disks that fitted into a pocket. Paper was dead.

It has not quite worked out that way. Digital information may be impossibly voluminous and convenient, but it is also vulnerable and dangerously disposable. Already a vast amount of information has been lost. CDs disintegrate in just 20 years, whereas the Domesday Book, written on sheepskin in 1086, will still be with us in another millennium. Few people still write regular letters, but their replacement, the ubiquitous e-mail, is so easily deleted and forgotten, to say nothing of the fleeting text message.

Found with thanks via Ephemera

The Economist has run an interesting story pointing out that the popularity of porn sites are dropping in favour of social software and networking sites.

In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat”—chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now

See the chart in the article Devices and desires

Found with thanks via Joshua Porter’s blog Bokardo

Joshua Porter points out 5 reasons he thinks that a blog is the new resume all of which hinge around the argument that a blog represents you.

I think regular blogging also points to a personality that can organise their goals, plans and thoughts in a constructive manner consistently. It takes a certain amount of regular application and energy to write day in and day out, week in and week out that I am sure employers would appreciate – or will do in the future.

After being listed in the print mag Computer Arts Bittbox too is singing the praises of blogging if you are a designer.

In Making the Most of Meta Description Tags randfish of seomoz.org covers the main uses of meta tags on a web page.

Great meta descriptions, just like great ads, can be tough to write, but for keyword-targeted pages, particularly in competitive search results, they’re a critical part of driving traffic from the engines through to your pages. Their importance is much greater for search terms where the intent of the searcher is unclear or different searchers might have different motivations.