Oh, Oh, Dreeeeeeamweaver….

That line is — of course! — a reference to Gary Wright’s super-groovy 1975 song of the same name. However, it also represents the fact that I am currently trying to make up a week and a half of homework in one night on using Adobe’s Dreamweaver for my Web Design class. You’d think that a professor would be better able to stay on top of things. Ay yi yi… But it IS amazing stuff and I’m very glad to be working with it. I just wish I could spread out all that educational goodness over more than one night.

Flash Is Slowly Dying?

Well, interesting news today via TechCrunch: Apparently Adobe has decided that Flash for mobile devices (i.e., phones and tablets) has been a colossal failure and is pulling the plug. As the article points out, Steve Jobs famously panned Flash in an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Flash" in April of last year. Well, his words appear to have been prophetic (or at least timely).

Sooooo, no time like the present to finish my Flash homework and get cracking on HTML5!

My Professional Blog, Data-Literacy.com

FYI, I thought I'd mention that I have another blog that I'm working on but this one is purely professional. It's called Data-Literacy.com and it's designed to provide information and resources on — you'll never believe it! — data literacy, or the ability to understand and work with data. (For a little more information on what data literacy is, you can also see a blog post on Wired.com entitled "Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data" or an excellent report on the related field of data science from the O'Reilly Radar.) Anyhow, as I'm trying to be professional and authoritative, here's a screenshot of my very clean and orderly web page:

Anyhow, it should be fun in its own little way (if you're in to that sort of thing, you know).

Personal Logo, Take 2

Earlier, I showed Take 1 for a personal logo, which was supposed to be modeled after a Chinese chop (although it looked more like a baby block). After some consideration, I decided that I needed something cleaner. I needed a slogan, too, especially as that was part of the assignment for my Computers and the Arts class (FA2000). As my "chop" looked a little sloppy, I decided to go with just typography. After all, lots of companies has excellent, type-only logos:

See? Works just fine. Also, I thought the forest green that I used on the last try would work well so I decided to go with a bright, flat orange with gray accents. I also needed a nifty slogan. As I decided to do something with data science (which is, after all, one of the reasons I'm here at the U of u) and as I'm trying to be arty and accessible, I tried "The Art of Data Science." Has a nice ring, doesn't it? Also, that phrase has not been copyrighted or used very much, so it can be distinctive.

Soooo, after much hand kerning, here are four variations on the same theme, from simple to complex. (The "BP.c" is short for BartonPoulson.com, by the way. Also, the light gray boxes around all of these is something that WordPress puts on there so you know it's an image file and you can click on it. Those are not part of the logo but the darker gray boxes are.)

Oooh, nice! Personally, I like the third one best because of the way it highlights elements in the slogan. On the other hand, the BP.c could use some explanation, so the fourth is a good one.

I'm pretty happy with these. Next, I get to design an actual web site that uses my fancy new logo. Exciting!

Processing & Baba Yaga: Part 6

This sketch uses a custom "babaHouse" function to draw the house. (You can try it here at OpenProcessing.org.) Here are shots of the original code and the function:

And two versions of the output:

It may not look so different from earlier version, but the mechanics are different. Whee!

Repertory Dance Theatre: Vanguard

As a public service announcement, I wanted to let every single one of you know that Repertory Dance Theatre, one of Utah's three major professional dance companies, is having its season opener this weekend (6-8 October 2011). RDT is a modern dance company that, in addition to creating new works, also has the unique mission of preserving the history of modern dance.

In this spirit, their first performance, called "Vanguard," features several historically significant works: Scramble by Merce Cunningham (1968, and with sets by Frank Stella!), and Trio A (1966) and Chair Pillows (1969) by Yvonne Rainer. The concert also features a new composition by the RDT dancers themselves.

My wife, Jacque Bell, is a modern dance choreographer and dancer who has long time connections with RDT. Also, I have been on the company's board of trustees for several years. (As part of that responsibility, I have been pursuing a pet project to have the US Congress declare RDT a Living National Treasure! We'll see how that goes.)

Goodbye Steve

I mentioned just a little while ago that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computers and, in my estimation (and that of many others), the greatest living champion of quality design, had stepped down from his post at the head of Apple. Well, today he died and we have all lost a tremendous inspiration. As a lifelong Mac owner and Industrial Design follower, this is particularly poignant for me. We’ll all miss you, Steve.

Quarterly Music Report: 2011 Q3

I decided that there was a significant gap in my cultural life: organ music. And so, that was the dominant theme this quarter.

Organ Music

• Lots of Bach (the library has the Complete Bach set)
• Bine Katrine Bryndorf
• Duets and Cannons by Bowers-Broadbent
• Buxtehude
• Cameron Carpenter
• Christoph Maria Moosmann
• David Hicken
• E. Power Biggs (I listened to him on 8-track when I was growing up)
• Philip Glass
• Marie-Claire Alain
• Mendelssohn
• Messiaen
• Mozart
• Reger
• Saint Saëns
• Virgil Fox
• Widor

Other Classical

• Alfred Brendel: The Complete Vox, Turnabout, and Vanguard Solo Recordings
• Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen, From the House of the Dead, Jenůfa, Káta Kabanová, and The Makropulos Affair
• Messiaen: St. François D'Assise
• Monteverdi: Madrigali Guerrieri et Amorosi
• Saint Saëns: Misc. orchestral music
• Scarlatti: The Keyboard Sonatas

Pop

• Blink-182: Neighborhoods
• The Book of Mormon (Listened to this about 1000 times and eventually saw it live in NYC)
• The Kraftwerk box set
• Lady Gaga: Born This Way (They were giving it away online and I still haven't actually listened to it)
• Led Zeppelin box set
• Red Hot Chili Peppers: I'm with You
• Thundercat: The Golden Age of Apocalypse
• 311: Universal Pulse

Processing & Baba Yaga: Part 5

This time, the chicken legs move if you use the live version in OpenProcessing.org: a, s, d control the left leg; j, k, l control the right. Here's a picture of part of the code:

And here are two versions of the result:

And there you have it. Baba's hut is doing The Chicken Dance.

A Note to My Class Colleagues

As a public service announcement, I thought I should alert my fellow class members that you DON'T have to reach around to the back of the iMac to plug in your flash drive (where you will likely forget it). Rather, Macs have hidden USB ports built right in the keyboard! Just look under the left side (as the mouse uses the right side port) and, voilà, you can plug in your flash drive right where you can see it while you work (and possibly remember it before you leave).

Hope that helps!

Processing & Baba Yaga: Part 4

Okay, part four of our Processing saga may seem a little funny, because it's all about using images and text in Processing. This, of course, is the sort of thing that one would normally do in Photoshop. However, we did it in our Processing class because:

1. It was the next chapter in the book Getting Started with Processing
2. Although these sketches are static, it is also possible to make them dynamic and interactive (which we will demonstrate shortly), as well as data-driven (which we also hope to do at a later date)
3. Really, we did it because we could

And there you have it. Anyhow, here's the code for my image/text version of the Baba Yaga hut. I should mention, however, that this code also refers to image and font files that are stored in a data folder with the sketch, but I'm not going to show those here.

And here's the resulting image:

Cute, huh? And, if you want, you can run the code yourself at OpenProcessing.org by clicking here. Enjoy!

Personal Logo, Take 1

Okay, for my Computers and the Arts class (FA2000) we needed to design a personal logo. My first thought was to model something after a Chinese chop or seal, like one of these:

So, here’s my not-very-impressive attemp at a first draft in my favorite color:

So, hand drawn with Sharpies and, given that I couldn’t even draw it straight, a fair amount of freestyle warping in Photoshop. I kind of the the inverted symmetry between the lowercase "b" and the uppercase "P." Also, the whole ends up rather looking for like a child's alphabet blocks:

Anyhow, that’s the first take. We'll see what happens next.

Oh, the Things You Can Do in Preview

Most of us know that Macs are handy for working with images. However, you don't have to have Photoshop installed to do a lot of basic (and not-so-basic) image manipulation. Instead, the Preview program that comes with Macs and that most people associate with simply viewing PDFs or images, can do a whole lot more than that. For example, here are a few screenshots from when I was working on a photo of chicken legs (whose purpose will become apparent at a later date). In the first shot, you can see the palette for color adjustments. (You get it by going in the menu bar to Tools > Adjust Color...)

Cool! Next, you can adjust the size and resolution of photos by going to Tools > Adjust Size..., like this:

That brings up the following dialog box, which lets you do all sorts of nifty things:

Quick and easy and no extra software required! Preview has other lovely features, too, like letting you add or delete pages from PDFs, crop pages, annotate, or even add your signature. Very nice!

Getting Hit with the Ugly Stick

Speaking of Citroëns, how is it that the DS, which has been called the most beautiful car ever made — by professional automobile designers, no less — can become such a horrifying monstrosity when turned into a wagon? See of yourself. Before:

And after a beating with the ugly stick:

As we say here in Utah: “Oh my heck!"

Mike Lee Smiles on Me

Okay, so it's not exactly a masterpiece, but it's a good first step. The first project for FA2000, Computers and the Arts, was to create a Surrealist collage in Photoshop. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to create an image of my family and I escaping Utah as a smiling Senator Mike Lee (one of our fine, fine Congressional Tea Party demagogues) looms overhead in the manner of, say, Lord  Voldemort and the Death Eaters. Unfortunately, we're driving in a 1960 Citroën DS wagon and getting passed by a Galapagos tortoise (although we have made it to the Bonneville Salt Flats and are therefore just a few miles from Nevada, where a Democrat is in the Senate). Here's the end result:

The whole thing, though, reminds me of a 2008 article I read about the Photoshop spoofs of Sarah Palin entitled "Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File." In it, the author, Henry Jenkins, argues that such creations are actually a useful way of investigating the collective beliefs and prejudices of the nation. As a researcher, therefore, it may be premature to throw such dross in the junk mail folder but, rather, to use them as social indicators. Fascinating.

I must say, however, my all time favorite is the one of Obama and Palin as contestants in Dancing with the Stars:

I ❤ lynda.com

Okay, after my Photoshop meltdown, I decided I had better get some extra help. While our teacher is wonderful and has given us some excellent written materials, I felt I needed more. Fortunately, I knew where to turn: The fabulous, miraculous, life-saving, lynda.com! (By the way, while the founder, Lynda Weinman, spells her name with conventional capitalization, the company's name is all lower case.)

[Immediate disclosure: I only learned about lynda.com when they invited me to create a course for them on the statistical package SPSS, which I gladly did. You can see a preview of it here. As one of the authors, I both get money each month from royalties (but not a lot) and I get free access to the site, which is normally $25 per month. That said, I love it and I would gladly pay.]

Anyhow, it's just fabulous to have video lessons that I can pause, back up, repeat, and so on. Now I understand why my statistics and research videos on YouTube have been so helpful. (You can see those at youtube.com/bartonpoulson.) I've been going through lynda.com's introductory courses for Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks. When I have a little time, I hope to go through the courses for Python, CSS, HTML, Google Analytics, typography, etc. Also, the "Creative Inspirations" series is a gem, too. It has extended interviews with prominent professionals where you/I can see all of these tools in use. My personal favorite is with one of my high school heroes, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo. Whee!

Processing & Baba Yaga: Part 3

The third installment in the Baba Yaga series involves interaction. That is, the hut follows the mouse (with some delay built in), it gets taller if the left mouse button is pressed, shorter if the right button is pressed, and, if any key on the keyboard is pressed, there's a special, secret surprise! (Well, not so secret because I'll show it to you below.) I also think it has much cuter graphics. You can try the interactive version at OpenProcessing.org by clicking here. Here's the code:

And here's a still shot of the Nickelodeon-style house:

And the special, secret surprise that you get when you press a key:

Whee!! Fun!!

Processing & Baba Yaga: Part 2

In an earlier post I showed my first, primitive, stick-figure drawing of Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs. That version was what we called a "static" drawing, in that everything was spelled out exactly how it was to appear and nothing changed. This version is still static but it uses global variables with random arguments for some of the elements of the drawing. (I chose to vary the color, the height of the roof , the length of the legs, and the width of the feet.) Consequently, the picture is a little different every time that it's drawn. (You can try it out at OpenProcessing.org by clicking here.) Here's the code:

And here are three different iterations of the drawing, each using different random values:

Aren't they just the cutest little huts (for cannibalistic Russian witches)?

Processing & Baba Yaga: Part 1

The first real assignment in my Processing class is for each person to create a simple sketch of an object that they will then use for variations and elaborations as the class progresses. The students chose flowers, aliens, dogs, Jedi, and squids (as there are only five students now). I chose something from a book of Russian fairy tales that I read when I was little: Baba Yaga, the child-eating witch who lived in a hut with chicken legs. (Although I am a psychologist, I choose not to pursue any Freudian investigations for my choice. For now, let's just say the hut sounded like fun.) In case you're not familiar with Baba Yaga, here's her Wikipedia entry and here's one illustration of her hut (notice the skulls on the fence posts!):

So, here is my most basic version of Baba Yaga's hut. First, the code:

And then the resulting stick-figure house:

A thing of beauty, is it not? Anyhow, it's a beginning. More to come later.

Photoshop-Induced Cognitive Failure

[The above image, "Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X" by Francis Bacon is illustrative of my current mental condition.]

Well, my last post was all about how wonderful Photoshop is. This one is about how overwhelming it is. Ay yi yi! It's all very, very confusing – masks, channels, layers, fidgets, blotters, who knows what. I can't keep it straight. I guess the upshot of this is that it gives me much more compassion for my statistics students when they get lost.

(On the other hand, I DO intend on going back over all of the class materials, the PDFs, Adobe's own online tutorials and some of the tutorials at lynda.com. I'm sure I'll get this all straightened out.

I am, however, excited to be working on my collage!