Well, everyone, with only a few days left before graduation, I have been getting creative with some new photos I took and the free trial of Photoshop CS 5.1 I recently downloaded. Here are a few of them for your viewing pleasure!

This is a dandelion! The colors were not added, simply enhanced. Who knew these white fluffies were actually opalescent and colorful?

This is a closeup of a necklace I made, I edited the colors to bring out the copper-colored lutz charm. :)

Rum and strawberries with background colors removed, then enhanced VERY slightly! Daquiris!

These are the before (bottom) and after (top) photos I dedicated to Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of "Where the Wild Things Are" and other beloved children's stories. Sendak passed away on Tuesday morning at the age of 83, and the Wild Things are in mourning. Wild Things inspired my childhood imagination, and I hope it will ignite the wild rumpus in the minds of my future children. He'll always be remembered as the true king of all the wild things in my mind.

This will be my final post for Web Design. I bid you all a fond farewell as I graduate and move on to other things. It's been real, guys.

Illustrator Creation #2: 3-Dimensional Text

I played around with this one for a long time! I had a hard time making it look the way I wanted it to, but finally, after many references to the tutorial, and lots of adjusting the 3D grid, I finally got it to look like actual 3D! I'm pretty excited about this one, but I think I still like my guitar better! :P

Illustrator Creation #1, Simple drawing. I spent a lot of time experimenting with brushes, and I came across one that I liked, the artistic ink brush. I was just sketching a little, and wiggly lines became a rough guitar. I added minimal shading and a little writing. This was simple to do, but I kind of like the way it turned out!

Design Articles

From the website given to us, I LOVED the minimalist movie posters, because I am always really struck by minimalist art in general. As an advertiser, I have spent the past years learning to say as much as possible, to as many people as possible, with as few words as possible, and I think that minimalist art is often the best way to accomplish that. The way artists are able to incorporate so many elements of a story plot into a simple picture on a solid background with so little detail, gets their message across at a glance, and I strive every day to be able to communicate so effectively to people through creative design. http://www.webdesignbooth.com/minimalist-movie-posters/

The second article I really liked was the amazing print ad article! I'm seeing a rise in digital everything, and even though I think that print advertising, as well as print media in general, is slowly starting to phase out of our society, I still really love magazine ads. I always have. They hit me the same way the minimalist posters did, and the work of Olly Moss does, quick, big, straight to the point. They offer visual stimulation, a product, and a little quip that's just relevant enough to fill in your own narrative. They encourage imagination, they're often funny, and they sometimes require a little thought. I think that the most effective way to sell something to somebody, is to let them put something together in their head, laugh about it, have a revelation, and feel smart. Making consumers use their own mind to construct the narrative behind a print ad, is much like performing "Inception", making the reader feel that investing in the product was not only fun, but their idea.
http://www.kitaro10.com/inspiration/30-new-amazing-print-media-advertisement/

Completed Art Poster

My art poster is finally finished. As you may remember, it was inspired by the minimalistic but deep work of Olly Moss. Visual art constructed from scratch is not my forte, but I was able to capture a little hint of Olly Moss's superimposition-like design in making one plot-specific object merge with another by making the main character's wristwatch coincide with the core of the granny smith apple. I also took a little inspiration from one of the original film posters in which a period at the end of a sentence falls toward Will Ferrell's head, but I made it into the dot of the first "i" in fiction, and decided in the interest of minimalism, not to use a photo of Ferrell's character. I decided that the apple should be the only photorealistic element in the poster in an effort to keep it simple.

My poster does not look exactly like the work of my inspirational artist, but that's to be expected when working with different media while trying to keep a little originality, and overall I'm very happy with it.

Photoshop Color Manipulations

This is my photoshop color manipulation photo. The image on top is the original color image, which was converted to greyscale and then back to RGB Color so that I could use the history brush tool to bring blue
back into her eyes. I then added more blue to her eyes with simple brush tool paint, and then a very low opacity blue tint to her pearls. I then used a very low opacity pink to bring soft color to her cheeks, and a little to her nose and bottom lip.

Art Posters

The artist that I would like to emulate in my art poster is an artist called Olly Moss. He is not particularly well-known, but his Star Wars Trilogy poster reimaginings are recognized web-wide. I think that these posters, as well as his other, primarily minimalist, works are very creative and really cater to true fans who have high familiarity with the content of what he is representing.

The Obama Administration and the Cry for Mobile and Digital Privacy

This post would be an excellent follow-up to my social media post about facebook and other networking sites. It seems that the Obama administration is seeking to crack down on the invasion of citizens' consumer privacy, proposing a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, that would provide restrictions on the availability of your personal information, as well as a code of conduct for what may be done with that information. If I'm completely honest, I am torn on this issueeiiII KNOW. WAIT. wait wait. Hear me out.

While I agree that the idea of your ISP and your Phone company tracking your locations via your smartphone without your permission is, at the very least, strange. And the information handed over to marketers and advertisers about your habits and lifestyle gives them the upper hand at manipulating you into buying their products and services.

But.

In my experience, most of the people who complain about their privacy rights being infringed upon are the people who make their "privacy" as public as they possibly can. Say you have a smart phone, you know, one of those tiny pocket computers the kids have now so they can play the Grumpy Pigeons game while they're on the toilet. If you use it for social networking, they track your tweets and status updates by location, and if you happen to use foursquare...forget about it. While you're staging a coup, trying to finally oust that smug jerk in the cubicle across from yours as Mayor of the 12th floor Mens' room, you're willingly handing out your location at every second to LITERALLY ANYONE with an internet connection who wanted to bother finding it. You have no legal expectation of privacy, so it cannot be invaded. It's like going around taping copies of your social security card to payphones in a subway station and then trying to say that somebody stole your identity. They didn't. You taped your identity up in a public place and left it alone, any reasonable person would expect it to have immediately disappeared, used to open a credit card in your name, and charges for a Ferrari to show up on your accounts within the next 36 hours, but it seems that reason goes out the window when the information translates from tangible to digital. People seem to assume that just because they are using their own digital device, that there is some cloak of anonymity to protect them from being the target of a Ruby Tuesday's ad, while they use their iPhone to post a low-contrast vintage photo of their Ruby Tuesday's Burger to instagram, and tweet it to their coworkers, tag the restaurant location, and all of the people at the table. ON THE INTERNET. These are the people who seem to believe that just because they are using the internet on their phone, that the information they enter will never really leave their hand.

I also feel that I must say, as a future marketing and advertising professional, I relish the thought of being able to conveniently screen peoples' habits to more easily sell them stuff they want. This sounds underhanded and sneaky, but really, it's been going on for years. Do you have store discount or rewards cards? You know, CVS extra care, Kmart Rewards, etc. These cards save you money, and they're free! Why, that's just the most altruistic...wha...what's that? You say they're not only a ploy to get you to become a loyal customer to that establishment, but also to subsequently provide data on your purchases, so the store and advertisers will have an easily quantifiable record of your buying habits so that they can crank up the prices or offer you store-specific coupons for the products you can't seem to live without? Ah. There it is. I know many people who complained endlessly when Verizon began making their customers' smart phone locations available to marketers looking to analyze commutes, routines, and all that, saying that their contract was breached and they couldn't wait to switch to AT&T. Not surprisingly, though, these same people were the ones who had a keyring that looked like a cheerleader's Pom-Pom it was so loaded up with a gas, grocery, pharmacy, bookstore, and even retail department store rewards cards for every establishment within ten miles of every place they had ever been, all hiding exactly TWO keys. These are the people who call to mind the recent story about the teenage girl who shopped regularly at Target, and just by noticing a small change, a sudden preference for unscented lotion over ones with fragrance in her usually consistent buying habits, Target realized that she was pregnant and somewhere in her second trimester where the sense of smell becomes heightened. So, knowing this, they began mailing coupons for diapers and cribs to her. At her parents house. Who had no idea she was pregnant. Outing the young expectant mother, who had no idea her purchases were being tracked and analyzed.

I may be biased in my experience, and limited in interaction with people who find digital and mobile privacy to be of dire importance. However, the way I see it, you are NOT paranoid. Your information IS everywhere. Everyone IS using it to manipulate you. But, it's also making life more convenient for you. Folks may find it creepy when the exact same rice-cooker they were just scoping out on Overstock.com pops up in an Amazon ad on the sidebar of their facebook page, in the color they wanted that Overstock didn't have, for $12 less. I see that and say "That's amazing, I gave amazon my personal information when I bought that 18-box pallet of Count Chocula, and now they're using it to try and sell me that rice cooker THAT I WAS TOTALLY GOING TO BUY ANYWAY. JACKPOT." Sure it's a little frightening to think of major corporations recording your every digital move and using that information for profit. But you know what scares me more? The thought of these major corporations having to hand over all that information to the Government. At least I know why Amazon.com wants to know where I tend to be from noon to 3:30pm every day. I don't care to think what the Government might want with singular access to that information, but it's probably not to try and convince me to buy the top three items on my wishlist.

Ezine Post! These are a bit out of order it seems!

Alright, well, right now it looks terrible. I know this. However, this is the basic layout idea. Romancing the Stove will be an E-Zine about cooking and baking, featuring mostly cakes, cupcakes, and pastries, recipes, baking and cooking blogs, forums, news, and other exciting features. I want it to have a sort of romantic, vintage look. I want lots of texture, muted colors and floral patterns. The page displayed here is the "Recipe" page that would come up as a long list if the "recipe" button is clicked, or if the Cameo Symbol is clicked, it would bring up the "Recipe of the Month". It includes a photo, description, title, and the actual recipe of course. Many pages would be laid out in much the same way.

Like I said before, this is hard to look at. It's very busy, the colors are too intense, and it isn't how I want it yet, but it gives the general idea of what design features might go into different pages. Think of this as a sort of "swatch" page for the rest of the site, and try not to strain your eyes.

Interesting sidenote: My blog posts are being posted WAY out of order from which they were assigned. But they will all be here eventually! Hopefully that isn't too frustrating, but apologies to my professor and classmates who have to read them.

Design Blog 2: Steepster, The Communi-Tea

http://steepster.com/teas

I'm not entirely sure that anyone will be able to view the site in its entirety without creating an account or logging in with facebook, but I think that Steepster is a very well-designed community site. It adheres to the classical design principles, introduces some new ones, and is VERY user-friendly.

Apologies to followers and professor, I thought I hit post on this last week, but I guess I just saved it as a draft! Late post notice, but better late than never! Right?

Week 1 of Design Blog: New Internet Policies and International Blog Censorship

The internet has been under fire from all directions recently, with the rise of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and other proposed legislation in the U.S. and Canada, it's no surprise that countries under less democratic rule are having their free cyberspeech threatened tenfold. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, bloggers in Vietnam are being detained for speaking out against their government or criticisms of the communist regime. Google has been compliant with these laws, instated under the guise of national security, by creating a location-specific availability filter that uses IP addresses to register locations. It provides a way to circumvent this filter by using a non-country-specific URL. Also, China has been shutting down Tibetan blogs without explanation, after decades of tension between the minority group and the Chinese government.

The censorship of the internet and the prosecution of those using it, while unsurprising, is wrong. The internet has lost it's element of total anonymity, and now postings are quite easily traced back to unique IP addresses and individuals. This makes blogging much riskier for those with dissenting opinions posting in environments with strict speech regulations. As Americans, we sometimes forget, that though our liberties are occasionally lessened for the sake of "national security", we are still relatively free to openly criticize and oppose our governmental processes and leaders. In other countries without protection of free speech, harsher punishments await those who suggest dissent in a public forum. Google, whom I would have expected to absolutely oppose these censorship laws, has enabled this policy that complies with them, though they offer a way around the filters, "NCR" URLs may not be made readily known to everyone. The fact that this policy was released quietly, hidden under the outcry over Twitter's new censorship policy, doesn't make it any less oppressive.

The implications of these policies are unclear for now, but a future may still come when such standards could be applied to us here in the United States. There can always be found some loophole or adjustment to be made that will allow these impositions by the way of "protection" and "national security". SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA, are only the beginning, in my opinion. These and other short-sighted legislations could easily be passed and our liberties would be just as limited as those affected by China and Vietnam's new censorship policies, especially since Google already seems to be on board.

What are the implications? Where will free speech on the internet be in five years? Ten? What can we do to make sure the "World Wide Web" remains just that? With Iran throwing the Kill switch, China and Vietnam detaining and shutting down bloggers for their opinions, and the United States and Canadian Governments working to take down Piracy without analysis, where do we draw the line between liberty and security? Food for thought.

This Begins a New Chapter in Connois-saurus Blog History

Hello, all! This semester, I am taking a web design course; and from this post on, until the end of the semester my posts will be about the wonderful world of web design! Thanks to all three of my current followers for being patient with me!