Arranged Delirium

Now that students in New Media actually know a little something about Photoshop, you might also want to learn how to use brushes to increase the complexity of your work without doing everything manually. There are numerous sites where you can get brushes to download and incorporate into your work - but I like the iDesign brushes site because it also has a number of valuable tutorials accessible via the tabs at the top right.

As students in web design work with CSS for basic formatting, this list of common fonts for Windows and Mac should come in handy. You are always best served by using fonts common to both platforms…

In web development I’ve been explaining the differences between HTML, XHTML, XML and CSS - along with what to use, etc. Of course the future question will be when to implement HTML 5. Here’s some super-basic information about it. The question of whether to use HTML 5 though is one these students will have to answer in a few years, once the specs are finalized and support is more broad-based…

As a follow up to my last post which referenced the V Magazine size issue, here is a link to a recent interview with Crystal Renn (the plus-size model featured) which ran recently in the New YorkTimes. If you continue on and search a bit online, you’ll find a good amount of interesting commentary regarding the issue of body image and how it is represented to us via media.

I think we’re finally starting to see some of the lash-back against some of the more extreme photo editing that was so prevalent during the mid-2000’s. You know what I mean: the cover or story images that looked like some kind of 3D game characters rather than photos of real people. The New York Time ran a story relatively recently entitled Smile and Say ‘No Photoshop’ - if you can’t access it, do a search and you can get around the NYT required registration. In many ways, there’s nothing new to this - photographers have been re-touching images for decades - but digital technology has made this easier, faster, and more pervasive. And given the prevalence of our media immersion in the modern era, I’d say that makes things a bit different than it was a few decades ago. Check out the comments form the article too, as I think it helps us understand how many different ways there are of thinking about this. It’s a good discussion topic for class!

And as a continuation of the discussion regarding body image, take a look at these comparison shots from models.com and V Magazine’s Size Issue. You can find a ton of information on this story with a quick search online…