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Showing posts from September, 2009

Sheer Brilliance!

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Good examples of great design that have me stoked this week. In the constant effort to improve my own work and provide great examples for students, I find myself often on the look out for good design examples.  I’ll be giving a shout-out to everything from my church’s new web site to the new Themes and Styles available in MS Word of all places. LWCC York's new FAQ page http://www.lwccyork.com/pages/page.asp?page_id=70814 The sheer brilliance here comes from the amazing use of awkward silence.  Just click on the page and enjoy for 2 or 3 minutes.  This isn't simply a brilliant concept rendered with great design and amazing flash coding, it's also a great example of fabulous video editing. Wow, that's a lot of positive adjectives... I hope I have some left for the rest.

Bad Hair and Word Art

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Drawing a connection between faux pas in fashion and in print design to help kids “Get it” when it comes to their documents. Microsoft Office for once is not promoting terrible design.  The core applications in suite now contain new Themes and Styles that make it easier to use really sound design techniques.  Unfortunately, the majority of twelve-year-olds do not see the value of this and would rather make their documents look like a gypsy’s nightmare.  Fortunately, many of our middle school students do have an obsessive concern for fashion, and this has been the key to unlock design greatness.

Cheers, Jeers, & Tsuki

In a post totally unrelated to any mentioned in my Monday mash-up, I must declare: Cheers for Mr. John Pontolillo , 20, of Wall, N.J!!!  Jeers for the Baltimore city police for detaining him. Back Story So my local news just carried the first paragraph: A Johns Hopkins University student armed with a samurai sword killed a man who broke into the garage of his off-campus residence early Tuesday, along with a comment that police were still investigating the student.  I decided to give this the benefit of the doubt, but then I read the above article.  Mr. Rice, the suspect / victim apparently has quite a record including many recent incidents where our criminal justice system failed to get him locked up. Reaction All I could think of when I read this story was character, Burt Gummer' s line from Tremors . ...Broke into the wrong [darn] rec room, didn't ya?... Again, bravo John Pontolillo!!

A Miscellaneous Monday Mash-up

Wow... so I haven't posted for awhile, and I'm beginning attribute this to my lack of inspiration for one singular coherent topic to write about.  Of course, I also have so many topics I'd like to talk about that the task of covering them all seems monumental. Additionally, I'm a bit unmotivated by the readership stats I've seen since moving here from Edublogs .  My blog at Edublogs had 100's of hits per day from all over the world.  I moved to Wordpress essentially because Edublogs took on ridiculously un-blog-like advertising practices to try to cover costs.  I feel that I am no longer accessible by the education community, but at least all the links in my posts are MY links and not some advertiser's links. Today's "Miscellaneous Monday Mash-up" is really an attempt to run through a quick list of those things on my mind for this coming week, and whether or not any or all of these topics become full-grown posts depends largely upon my week. To