Advice

Do all the homework all the time. Even the blogs assignments. It will really help buffer your grade.

Website Favorites

One of my favorite student websites was Erin Dooley's. I like how she created an entire website that functioned as an interactive resume. It not only gave the necessary information about her abilities and experiences, but also presented it in a form which showcased those skills and abilities. I also lived that you figured out how to embed a video into a website and I liked the design of your homepage picture. Another website I liked was by CJ Robinson. I liked the continual consistency in his layouts, which made it look very professional. I loved the blue colored tigers and found that they made each page go with the next. A third website I liked was John Nathan's. I liked how he decided to have a website about critiquing his favorite sports teams, which made his website stand out. He also had very professional pictures and designed the texts around them in a professional manor.

Website

Please visit my website at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~clewis.

Making a professional looking website was relatively easier than I thought it would be. I sort of cheated and avoided using either Komposer or Expression Web by designing all of my webpages in Photoshop Elements and pasting it into Expression Web as a picture. I am most proud of the background/navbar that I designed for all my pages. My favorite page that I designed was the Trinity Life page, just because I loved how the text and pictures balanced out on the page. I would like to have had more information per page, since the text size of the body paragraphs are somewhat overwhelming and it would've looked lovely in a collumn format. My biggest technical challenge was inserting a thumbnail picture after I did the majority of the website in Photoshop. I had to use layers in Expression Web to put it on top of the main page. My biggest design challenge is making it look nice and be readable with a longer horizonatal page than verticle. Part of the reason I wish I had thought to put the text into collumns is to make my website more readable with the long horizontal layout. I already sent my website to my mom, who will probably show it off to mutual family and friends. As long as I have photoshop, I would consider doing another website for another class.

HTML Code

Even though programs like Expression Web and Kompozer make it easy for everyone to create their own websites without ever dealing with the HTML code, it is still more beneficial than not to know HTML code and how to manipulate it. Knowing HTML code makes it easy to name specific dimensions and format, that would be hard to reproduce with only the visual side of the website. Knowing HTML code also makes it easy for you to dissect another person's website that you like and figure out how they produced the graphics or font. One can also go in and take out whole chunks of HTML code out of another person's website and insert it into your own. Also if something goes wrong, sometimes the easiest solution is to look under the hood of the website and find the problem that way.

Pictures That Lie: Love-War

I chose to manipulate a picture of a B-52 Stratofortess airplane dropping bombs during the Vietnam war. The picture was originally from an image gallery on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I liked the original picture because of the scattered and detailed bombs in the picture, which made it easy to move and manipulate the individual bombs in the picture. The main manipulation of the picture was using the magic selection tool and copy/paste to move the bombs into a subtle heart shape in the middle of the bomb-dropping area. The clone tool was used to remove nearby bombs to make the heart more distinctive. Finally, the hue and saturation was adjusted to bring a light, barely-noticable red tone to the original black/white photo. The manipulated photo is a commentary on the slightly oxymoron about how peace is garenteeded through war and force. The jutaposition of the heart and the bombs with help to excepify this seemingly controdictory statement that a country's safety is dependent on it's ability to threaten and force its neighbors to coorperate with it. The heart is also a nod to the protests in the United States which ended the Vietnam War with out our success. I don't think my manipulation was particualary harmful, since it was first off pretty obviously manipulated because the probability of bombs making a heart shape is very low. Also I chose to manipulate an event that has already been closed in our history. If I had chose to manipulate photos from the Iraq War in a similar way, it would be more harmful since the people can still be manipulated into believeing one thing or another, such as the Lcpl Boudreaux case, where a picture of him and some Iraqi children holding a "Welcome Marines" sign was manipulated into saying negative things about the military. Though probably a joke in the internet community, the altered photo resulted in the Pentagon investigating Boudreax and his job coming into question (Casimiro).

Works Cited:
Casimiro, Steve. "Seeing Is Not Believing." Popular Science 267.4 (2005): 70-98. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Apr. 2010.

Presentation Favorites

One of my favorite presentations was Erin Dooley's presentation about Tiger TV. I just loved how she was able to personalize the presentation by making it about a Trinity-created institution. Though I had absolutely no interest in television and news at all, i was very intrigued and impressed by the Tiger TV technology. I especially liked the use of pictures from the Tiger TV website. Erin was also every enthusiastic about her choice, making what would've been a somewhat-boring presentation to me (career- and interest-wise) into something fascinating to learn about. I actually never knew Tiger TV was on cable, which is pretty awesome, or that it was so easy to become involved in the network.

Another presentation is was very fond of was Taylor Stratton's presentation about being an ophthalmologist. I was most impressed by the high quality pictures and the extremely professional layout design. The requirements and other information were also excellent and very detailed. The video at the end showing the animation of a part of an eye surgery was captivating, and helped to show some of the general jobs of an ophthalmologist. Though I have no interest in the medical field, I still found Taylor's presentation to be very engaging.

Presentation Tips

I found all the tutorials and tip sheets full of helpful and informative suggestions on how to make a PowerPoint Presentation have a powerful impact. Generally I agree with most of the points brought up by the websites. The five main guidelines that I think are most important are:

1) Long text blocks are not good-- It's better to have a few bulletin points with key words rather than everything one is going to say on each slide. If one will just be reading off the slides verbatum, you might as well just hand out a printout of the slides and let the audience read them instead of taking the time to do a formal presentation.
2)Pictures are better than text-- Following the above rule, it is much better to have captivating images rather than blocks of text. It also give a point where you can tell a story and explain the meaning of the picture(s), rather than reading off the slide, which will be more interesting to the audience.
3)Have notes to refer to during the presentation-- This will make it easier during the presentation for you to remember all your points for each slide. This will also make it less tempting to write down more than keywords on each slide.
4) Image choice is important-- Depending on the type or presentation you want to give and the audience you are giving it to, this will change the type of images you will wont to use in your presentation. It is best to stick with professional images rather than clip art (which can come off as corny) for all of work related presentations. Only for certain audiences, such as children and a more relaxed/professional audience, can one use clip art and other more comical images in your presentation.
5)Video and audio is best when used appropriately-- Use of video and audio can boost the wow factor in your presentation and make the presentation more entertaining for both you and the audience. As long as the video and audio is extremely relevant and not annoying, it is a great addition to any presentation.