Fall Semester

I don’t remember if I ever really talked about them much, but I took two classes this semester at UHCL. One was Digital Media Law, which turned out to be a really great class — far more interesting than I thought it would be. I feel like I got a lot out of it as well, and have a much better understanding of both law in general and law as it applies to the areas I’m most interested in, like copyright and the Internet. Our final project was essentially a term paper that we were required to turn into a webpage. After reading about them during the two weeks we concentrated on copyright law, I chose to research the issue of orphan works — those which are still copyrighted, but whose authors are unknown and cannot be found. (Basically, people don’t use them because they don’t want to get hit with a copyright infringement claim should the owner turn up. Some groups argue that this actually defeats the purpose of copyright law, which was to protect author’s rights for a limited period of time before allowing them to fall into the public domain, the latter of which is considered to be good for society as a whole.) I’ll post a link to the website once I make the final tweaks for the last day of class on Wednesday.
The other class was Desktop Publishing, which is really a class in learning how to use Adobe InDesign to prepare files for printing. There’s a lot more that goes into a professional print job than you’d think, and I enjoyed picking up little bits of info here and there, and doing a few more projects to add to my portfolio. But overall, I was really disappointed in the class and it can all be traced back to one thing…the professor is just way, way too nice. I know that sounds like an odd complaint, but hear me out.
First, she is consistently late to class and thus starts class late. I guess most people would like that, but not me. First, I’m not getting my money’s worth and second, I leave work at least 1.5 hours early on Mondays just to go to her class. When she starts half an hour late, that bugs me!
Second, when we critique each other’s work, her feedback consists entirely of “that looks fabulous!” — even if it doesn’t look fabulous. It’s nice to get 100s on all my assignments, but it’d be even nicer to get some constructive criticism! She’s supposed to have the outside perspective that I don’t have. I want to hear it.
Third, she consistently pushed deadlines farther and farther out in response to people in class whining that they needed more time. That’s all well and good until you come to the end of the semester, when suddenly there are three projects due on the last day of class. This is partially my own fault, since I could have tried to get started earlier. But most of the time, I had to wait for her to present the project outline and requirements in class before I could really start working on it in earnest. So that’s the situation I found myself in, and that’s why I worked the entire day yesterday, from 11 a.m. until midnight, to finish all of my projects.
Here’s a rundown of the projects I did:
The first assignment was a poster for the Siggraph conference — a gathering of all kinds of digital and interactive media people. The 2009 theme is “network your senses.” I’ll be entering it into their poster contest in the spring. I don’t know if it’s what they’re looking for, but I was happy with it.

The second and third assignments were to pick an organization and create a one-page ad and a tri-fold informational brochure. I chose the Smithsonian because I knew they’d have plenty of material to work with! The artifact photos came from their website, the sky photo is one of mine, and the stars photo came from NASA. Since I don’t live in DC and couldn’t take my own photo, the Smithsonian castle photo is courtesy of Flickr user g-na, used under a Creative Commons license. If this were being made for actual use, I’d need to get permission from g-na, but since it’s just a non-commercial class project, Creative Commons is enough.



The fourth assignment was to make a two-page magazine spread. I recycled a cheesy “space history” article I wrote almost four years ago and added a bunch of photos I’ve taken of JSC. This one was a breeze, thanks to all my time working on the Technique at Georgia Tech. 😉

The final assignment was a 12-page booklet — either a cookbook or a city walking tour, our choice. Of course I chose the walking tour, and decided to feature Kyoto and use some of the photos I took on our trip.



As a grad student, I had to do one additional assignment — redesign a menu from a local restaurant. I chose Tokyo Bowl, a great sushi place down here that has a pretty ugly menu. (I also knew I wouldn’t have time to take new photos, so this let me use more of the Japan photos I already had.) This is the assignment I ended up least happy with, mainly because with all the pushing back of deadlines (and the fact that the prof basically ignored the fact that she needed to give us specs for an extra assignment), I ran out of time to do the job I really wanted to do. I plan to re-do this one when I have some downtime.


These are all just small JPGs of the projects. If you actually have interest in seeing a larger version, let me know.