Week #9: Piglet's Ears

This is probably one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen in my life. It shows how pigs react differently to sound. All of their ears twitch to different frequencies, even when they sleep. I guess this kind of made me think about how when you design or produce something, you have to really think about the varieties of audiences that will be exposed to your work. You might not know how exactly your work could effect or impact a certain type of individual or group of people. But anyway, this made me laugh, and I hope it makes you laugh too.

Week #9: Rhyme Design

Alright, so I found this awesome website and I just HAD to share: this site let's you type on a word and finds all possible words that rhyme with it. Talk about a musician or poet's DREAM! I can't think of how many times I have needed something like this website to come up with words that sound similar to other words. Plus, they give you the definition of each word so if you don't know what it means, you're just a click away from know the actual definition. Another great example of design helping design!

Week #9: Portfolio example

This is an excellent example of extraordinary design. There are numerous examples of design work on this website that showcase some amazing talent. Nik Ainley has some of the most incredible work I have ever seen. I'm pretty sure this website is his actual portfolio. There really isn't much else to say; the website pretty much speaks for itself. Find it here: http://www.shinybinary.com/

Week #8: Post Secret

Alright, first of all, I am a huge fan of this project. It's called Post Secret, where people randomly and anonymously send in their deepest, darkest secrets on post cards for everyone else to see. The project has been ongoing for years, and many books and a full website have been released due to the project's overwhelming popularity. I think this project is totally amazing; for many, it has become a form of self expression. Many of the post cards are considered respectable designs and works of art. It's interesting, because the Professor would always stress how design can be anything, and who would think a post card could actually be so extremely powerful. I check this website on a regular basis, because there are always new submissions. It just never get's old...

Week #8: Altered Books

This site is dedicated to the alteration of used books to create new meaning to the content. Basically, the concept is to go through a book, omit most of the words that occur in order, but randomly select a word or group of words to stand out. Then, you read the selected words together to create a whole new meaning to the literature. I think it's considered a form of poetry, I think it's pretty cool. In relation to design, it's like the project where we design something, then changed a few things to give the design a completely new meaning. I really enjoy looking at this website and viewing the different creations. Find it at: http://www.logolalia.com/alteredbooks/

Week #8: Musicovery

Musicovery is one of the coolest music websites I've ever seen. This site allows you to select your emotion, and based of emotion selected, it will create a playlist of songs for you to listen to. It also has a new feature where it will connect to you own itunes and select songs from your own library, adding an ever more personal aspect to the music player. The design is also very interesting as well; you can select different emotions or different colors to help explain how you are feeling. It's another great example of combining audio and visual components together to get an overall successful effect. You can find the site here: http://musicovery.com/index.php?ct=us

Week #7: I'm hungry...

So I found another genius example of design. This website let's you select different foods that you currently have in your kitchen, and generates recipes of different food items you can make with only those ingredients. This is so smart! Most college kids struggle when it comes to finding something to eat, and they don't really have a lot of money to eat out all the time. So this website is an excellent alternative. It's a great resource, designed to be user-friendly, and can help people save time and money when it comes to food. The link for the site is: http://www.cookingbynumbers.com/frames.html

Week #7: The Visual/Audio Block

This website allows you to manipulate sound in a very interesting, visual way. You can rearrange the different blocks to create different sounds. Not only can you have variety with the audio, you mix things up visually as well. I think I probably played around with this site for over an hour because I thought it was fascinating. I've shared this link with a few of my friends and they really enjoy it as well. You can find this website at: http://www.thepixelplant.net/dmf/dmf.html.

Week #7: The Breathing Earth

This website is pretty interesting. You can find it at http://www.breathingearth.net/. Basically, this website displays CO2 emissions and birth & death rates by country, simulated in real time. There is a legend that explains the symbology the websites uses. It also has a counter that shows the fluctuation in the world population. I think this website is good design and sends a pretty powerful message about environmental issues. It is also really information and makes you think about what we are doing to our planet on day-by-day basis.

Week #7: Man in the Dark

Alright, so this is one of the coolest websites I have ever been to. The website is called "Man In The Dark", and you can access the site at www.maninthedark.com. On the site, you have an image of a man that you control with your mouse. The man appears to be floating, and you can move your mouse around to control him in different ways. If you click the mouse, multiple images of the man begin to appear and they form some sort of random pattern. It's very interesting, visually amazing, and appears somewhat complex from a design standpoint.

According to StumbleUpon.com, this website has had over 1.1 millions views. One user commented, "its like pulling a man around by a thread attached to his head". I know I have bookmarked this site in my favorites and have enjoyed sharing it with my friends.

Week #6: Confusing Parking Sign

So I came across someone's website that was talking about different public sign and how some of them just don't make any sense. I decided to use this one as an example because it just kind of made me laugh. First, the top of the sign says "mon-sat, 8am-6:30pm", meaning......??? What exactly is that time restriction for? The section below makes a but more sense, "no loading", and is gives the time restrictions. Then the bottom section makes sense at first, I'm thinking it's informing about parking and the limitations. The last part that gets me is where is says "No return within 2 hours", which who knows what that means. If you park, you can't come back for at least 2 hours? Or, you can't park for more than 2 hours? Who knows.....but this is yet another example of bad design and a poor attempt at visualizing information.

Week #6: Lab Assignment 4-Example #5

This example is my favorite! I think it might be confusing if you try to over think what is shown here, but really, it's a very simple metaphor. This images is representing the metaphor "Chill Out". I started with the igloo to help convey the idea of "Chill". This is where I think someone might get stumped when trying to figure out what this means. Next, I took an image of a door, found a sign to place above the door with an man and an arrow, and thought this would effectively convey "Out". Like I said, if you think too much, you might not get what this means, but really, it's just a two word phrase!

Week #6: Lab Assignment 4-Example #4

This image is representing the metaphor "Showered with gifts". I first tried to find something that I felt like would represent rain, but I needed a human aspect to it as well. After browsing tons of images, I came across this one and decided it would work best with the metaphor. Then, I used random images of presents and gifts and placed them all over the image. Like the example of "it's raining cats and dogs", I rotated the gifts to make it look more like they were actually falling down with the rain from the sky.

Week #5: Lab Assignment 4-Example #3

I really enjoyed creating this example. I found the metaphor "Recipe for Disaster" and the creative juices started flowing. I was thinking of all these different ways to represent this metaphor, doing all kinds of image searches. Then, I came across this images, which was one of the most effective images I found without being too disturbing at the same time. Next, I took an image that I thought would convey recipe in a slightly abstract way. I could include an image of an actual recipe because most of them ended of up actually having the word "recipe" on them, so I decided to use the images of the recipe books and the cooking utensils, hoping it would still deliver the same meaning.