IDAT 101: DAT installations and the Scouting motto (preparedness for installations)

In today's lecture, in terms of being prepared for setting up and tearing down installations, I discovered that the good old motto that is well known throughout the whole of the Scouting movement also applies to Digital Art and Technology installations, especially in terms of using the right tape for the installation, because you don't want to end up using too much wrong tape on the walls, because in a public place, you don't want to end up damaging someone else's property! At least if we had to do our IDAT101 installations for real, at least we can learn a thing or two from the motto: Be Prepared!

PS: Even Simon revealed that he was a Scout, and agreed with me as it was incorporated in some form into the slides.

IDAT 106: Addressable Technologies (crossover with IDAT101 for the research part of the blogging)

For my assignment, I chose to look into addressable technologies. Addressable technologies, depending on one's definition, is a technology that sends information to the receiving end (such as a computer or another central monitoring system. Although there are many uses for addressable technologies, the most prominent use of addressable technologies in a practical application are fire alarms, in which most buildings of the University have. In my application for IDAT101, the installation will make good use of it for influencing the ambient lighting and possibly a video screen behind the DJ booth.

Link to research: http://bit.ly/idat106research

IDAT 102: Flash, boxes and things to come

Re-igniting old flames from the times that I've experimented with Flash back at college, we flock to Flash for the next assignment that will be coming up soon: developing a game.

In the meantime, we had a bit of a refresher. We made a box that flies around the screen (the software uses 'the stage' as a metaphor) by using a path. When publishing it to HTML, we discovered that it automatically creates a line of JavaScript that is extensive (not to mention confusing, unless you're fluent in it!) in the code, below the piece of code that references the source file in the same directory. We'll also be soon covering ActionScript 3.0 (I can hear more movie industry metaphors, best boy grip anyone?) during the course of the coming weeks.

IDAT 107: Photoshoppage time

As we soon start to begin another fine assignment, we practiced some tips and tricks to doctoring the ideal image. The ingredients we used for the practical were: one image of a series of skyscrapers, one large HD plasma screen and several starfish.

IDAT 102: It's here! The completed result

The specifications of the website consist of a conventional layout with a navigation menu to the left-hand side of the page and the content in the main body of the website, with a header consisting of the title and a footer consisting of validation information and links to my Twitter, Facebook and my blog here. The layout is defined by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is referenced externally in the HTML code, but stored locally in the folder and on the server the website is hosted at. The website is constructed using XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS2. The colour scheme, which matches my personality of minimalism and Apple, will result in less issues regarding colourblindness due to the fact that when there are less colours (especially when they clash), there are less problems, and because the text is bright on a dark background, it's easier on the eyes and because my website did not rely heavily on text-on-images (especially if it had paragraphs on it), my website will not have problems with screen readers.

After ironing out a few things (mostly regarding the validation of the email submit form on the Contact Me page), I now have a completed result of my personal website, which is at http://www.elnormo91.co.uk.

IDAT 102: Almost there!

Progress is smooth on my website (which will be at elnormo91.co.uk) and the end is in sight, ready for more on Facebook API stuff and other projects that are upcoming

IDAT 107: Digital signature

During the course of a few weeks, we've been doing some Adobe Illustrator stuff. Part of our assignment is to design a digital signature by using fonts, scaling and colours but without stretching or distorting it.

For my digital signature, I have decided to use the font Myriad Pro because this represents my personality as very creative, clean, modern and minimalistic, which is kind of like Apple Inc.'s usage of the font throughout their products, literature and communication. The Norman part of the signature is emphasised in light-blue because it represents the modern-ness of the world and the Web 2.0 generation, which many people can relate to. Also, the 'A's are set in italic because this adds to the effect of the signature, and also highlights the difference between the double-storey 'A's of regular/bold and the script 'A's of italic/bold-italic.

IDAT 106: Fun with Terminal

Today, we are having fun with one feature that has only arrived on the Mac 10 years ago but featured on UNIX and Linux for decades, Terminal. We are doing many things on Terminal, such as changing directories, communicating with other computers via echo with IP addresses, and learning that we can use it for when we start to work on Arduino cards - programmable boards that can be used for anything, but I'm not too sure if it can do the same things as what iOS apps can do at the moment, we'll have to see...