Monday, December 05, 2005

Powerpoint Performer

This is an update of an earlier version. I seem to give this talk annually, so I figured I should do a bit of work on it and then re-post. Is this an acceptable thing to do on a blog?

A couple of years ago I watched the Paul McCartney ‘Back in the US’ film of his tour, I was impressed by the incredible collage of digital film, animation and video that was projected behind the stage. Maybe this is typical now at pop concerts. I have heard about VJs, a new breed of nightclub and dance scene entrepreneurs who can construct, in real time, mixed digital video projected to go with the music.

Of course this may be a far cry from standing in front of class to give a ‘Powerpoint’ presentation, but still it’s a performance, and how can we make it work well?

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Friday, April 30, 2004

Blogging (new and updated)

The web has become saturated with 'blogs'. Since about 1999 this phenomena has grown and grown. Why should we blog? Is this the new way to create for the web? Should we throw away all our HTML skills? If you want to create stuff for the web then you should become totally immersed in the medium. You need to spend as much time 'surfing' (a term that seems a little dated now!) as you do poking around with Flash, HTML or other code! If you do spend a lot of time browsing for things that interest you, then you will have noticed that a lot of people are posting to their web sites in a particular way. This way is known as 'blogging'.

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Saturday, April 17, 2004

Web Standards

I was inspired to put together this presentation on Web Standards after reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s ‘Designing with Web Standards’, New Riders, 2003. This book needs to be on all web designers shelves, alongside Jeffrey Veen’s marvellous ‘The Art and Science of Web Design’, New Riders, 2001.

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Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Authoring Tools

In the days when Hypercard was the only authoring tool around, we got used to the idea of presenting information ‘one screen at a time’. Hypercard, like other authoring tools that followed needed a metaphor to help us think of screens of information.  Hypercard used the card metaphor. A bunch of cards was called a stack. So we thought in terms of a pile of cards and we presented them one after the other.

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Thursday, October 02, 2003

Montage / Collage

The words montage and collage seem to be used frequently to describe the same thing. I certainly find myself using the terms interchangeably. The definitions found on dictionary.com are thus:

Collage: An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.

Montage: A single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs.

It seems that montage is more often applied to 'superimposing', whereas collage seems to apply to 'pasting over'.

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