DIG 315 Week 3 In Review

This week was another good week. I thoroughly enjoyed the newsletter and the HTML lab, while a little tedious at times was very good. It makes it even easier to change around my MySpace page.
The website evaluation articles gave me a lot to think about. There is so much information floating around out there on any given subject and most of it is either outright untrue or purely opinionated depending on the author's point of view. That is OK if you are looking for other people's views or it is just for purely entertainment. If you are looking for facts or educational material, it is very important that you evaluate the websites with a critical.
Determining the purpose of the author's intent and if the information is purely opinion or if there are facts behind it is probably the most important for me. I chose 2 sites on the Mayan Calendar and the Doomsday Prophecies behind the end of it in 2012. They were: http://www.armageddononline.org/2012.php and http://www.michielb.nl/maya/

The first one I found to be interesting and filled with lots of information regarding 2012, not just Mayan, but other prophecies as well. It all has to be taken with a grain of salt, which the author does most of the time. There was a a lot of factual information and a lot of what I would consider to be straight entertainment, but I felt like it was easy to differentiate between the two.

The second one contained factual information about the Mayan Civilization and I found it to be more educational based. I believe it was a project for a college student and was structured in more of an educational format. I have a pretty extensive knowledge of the Mayan Civilization and found the material to be true and could also easily be checked on educational databases.

Overall, another great week. I already was critical of websites, so this did not change the way I view them, but it may enhance the way I view them going forward.

Paul Shingleton

DIG 315 Week 2 In Review

This week was fun for me. I had used Photoshop here and there, mainly to edit pics for evil purposes, i.e. making fun of one of my friends. I learned some new tricks both in class and from the websites. This something I am going to have even more fun with and it is coming in handy for my newsletter. Which, by the way is much easier in Publisher than word. I have included an example of Photoshop work.

I used some cropping and magnetic lasso and feathering. All pics were taken by myself or other friends, so no copyright infringements, it was actually pretty easy to do after about 54 tries. Looking forward to this week and getting into HTML.

Paul Shingleton

DIG 315 Week One in Review

This first week made me look at a lot of things differently. 1st off, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" should be "A Few Good, A Lot of Bad and Way More Ugly Than Should Be Allowed". I never really gave it much thought and I am the furthest thing from a professional, but so many of these adds, etc. could be so much better with just a few basic changes.
Now that I am looking at these with critical eye, it makes me realize how many of these that I definitely would have skipped over because they didn't grab my eye or were just too difficult to read quickly. Some of the ugly just needed to have better alignment or contrast and they would have moved right to the good, also I was surprised to see how many needed just font changes to make them better.
If more business owners just learned the basics of Graphic Design, I believe they would be pleasantly surprised by the increase of business they would see.

Paul Shingleton

First Post

Here is my first post. This class will be fun.