Advice

My advice for Essential Computer Skills would be come to class, don't skip it! Its hard to make things up if you miss them because there is a lot of information learned in every class, so you have to make sure you pay attention.

student websites

When we looked at everyone's websites in class, my favorites were Teka's, Katie, and Rory's. I liked Teka's because the design was really, really cool and it looked professionally done. I liked Katie's because it really matched her personality and I think she successfully made a website that completely represented her. And finally, I liked Rory's because it was really well designed and had a lot of funny elements and was entertaining to look at.

My website

Please visit my website at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~zlunden. Before we learned how to make our websites, I was dreading it, but then we actually learned how to do everything, and it was easier than I thought it would be. I used Expression Web, which made things so easy and simple. I am most proud of my Gamma Chi Delta page because I like how the tables look with the writing and I think it looks really balanced. I had a little bit of difficulty with my navigation bar, so if there was anything i'd change, it would be that because it doesn't look as good as I hoped it would. My biggest technical challenge was inserting my navigation bar because it came onto the page being way too big and I had to resize it every time but it caused a bunch of spacing problems. My biggest design challenge was probably finding the right color for my font because it seemed like everything was hard to see. I plan on showing my sight to probably my friends and maybe my family. I do not really what class I would need to make a website for in the future, but if it comes up, i'll know what to do now!

HTML code

I think it is important to be able to know html code even with all the fancy technology that does it for you because you never know when that technology is going to break of malfunction and its very good to be able to manually do something. Also, it is good to know the basics of something you are doing.

Pictures That Lie

My picture that lies is this picture of a cat with a human smile. I chose this picture because it seemed like a funny thing to do. The picture is just this picture of a cat that I found on Google and then a picture of a smile I also found on Google. I manipulated it by cutting out the picture of the smile and adding it to the cats face, taking out the color so it was grey and matched the cats coloring, and then blurred the edges so it looked more blended. The manipulation was not harmful because most people will realize that its not really the cat's smile, so they won't feel lied to. This relates to the article I researched because the article is talking about all the different things you can do with photoshop, especially related to artists and all the crazy things they can do now. For example, the article says "Digital photo manipulation is a new applied art that has transformed relationships among art directors, agencies, photographers, production specialists, and printers." The article I read is:

The Altered Image, Computer Artist; Oct/Nov95, Vol. 4 Issue 6, p36.

Powerpoint Presentations

Last week everyone in the class did a presentation about what our inteded jobs were and what we found most interesting about those jobs. My two favorites were Tika Nichola's on the Terracota Warriors and Alexa Soto's on Genocide. Both powerpoints had really awesome effects and were really engaging. The animation on the title page of Alexa's of the blood was really good and got the point accross of what she was trying to say. The animation that Tika did that changed the colors of a picture she found on the internet was really cool, especially because it was something we never learned so she must have really good photoshop skills.