Catching Bullets

 So, you've decided to make an app to share books.  What, how and who are the next decisions you need to make. What! What to call it.  After having a revelation at 3am that Omlet was the perfect name, and could be used an acronym I thought this was easy.  After brain storming with Noah about what Omlet could stand for I realized that 3am ideas were not always great.  I wanted to stick with O so OLE was born, the Online Literary Exchange.  The military gives you skills to make words fit to acronyms! How was dictated to a certain extent by one of the assignment criteria, use Figma.  This is nice because we don't need to learn coding (HTML/CSS/Java/etc) but it is a bit more involved than mechanisms like Carrd that I used for the previous assignment.  Figma develops an understanding of the relations and mechanisms needed for an effective application. Who took a lot more work.  Luckily I took a year long program in equipment procurement that had a...

 My view of this assignment is making a good design.  We are of course not going to produce a bug free app, but rather one that, once it works, is easy to use and doesn't trap the user in dead end, a loop, or sell them things they don't want.  Things I thought about apping (that's a word now). Trail Cams Bus Track using Med Hat data (not available) Game app/Game Exchange Art student image exchange  Finally, a book exchange.  Decided on the book exchange while walking my dog and we went past one of little community libraries. I did some thinking about what a book exchange app would look like and decided on some things Local Volunteer Free Donation run Accessible I am not interested in coordinating book exchanges in Calgary or Cordoba.  If someone wants to make a localized one, that's fine.  Volunteers along the lines of Meals on Wheels are needed.  No charge, no one can charge for books, no sales of books (in the app), if someone steals your book s...

 Just a short entry.  Jessica returned our book reports on Art and Fear.  In mine she said she hoped that the book would provide an impetus for self-examination and reflection in my own work.  On reading that I realized that I don't want to do any of that.   I do this work to avoid thinking about anything.   This makes writing an artist's statement challenging.

 The one things I decided on with little analysis when this assignment was explained was I would use my Dulse Sheep Design branding from AAD I.  I really liked what I had produced for that assignment and hope to make it going concern at some level.  Details to be determined. I did a small update to my Behance profile at Christmas and was singularly uninspired by the experience, so even before Ian said that Behance shouldn't be used I had decided to switch.  But to what?  There were a lot of tools flying around, Canva, Wix, Wordpress, etc.  With the exception of Canva they all seemed pretty CSS, or site specific process, heavy.  I used Canva during the marketing course and it seemed like glorified powerpoint so that was out. I went to the source of all knowledge, Google, and searched for 'good portfolio site builder'.  Lots of returns, but the /r/portfolio subreddit threw up some interesting results.  There was a lot of illustrative, anime foc...

  9/12 After showing the video during the critique I took on board the points about the moving images and faded them in and out.  I also decided to modify the final message to leave it on the screen for a bit longer. 1 hour As a bit of background to understand my parent's life. My dad joined the army in 1940 and fought in Italy and Northwest Europe.  When he returned to Canada he mined uranium in Northern Ontario for a while and then became a police officer in Toronto.  He got married and had a son.  His first wife was killed in a car accident when my brother was less than two.  He changed careers and became a security officer for External Affaires, and set out the travel the world as a single dad in the 1950s.  His first posting was in London, then off to Moscow.  My mother was born in Orkney and after high school got a job as a clerk with British security and then a communicator (teletype operator) with the British foreign office....

   25/11  Scanning the photos were fairly straight forward.  Getting them out of the old photo albums after 50+ years was not, but I got it done without any full thickness tears.  I lost some material off the back of the older ones but no images were damaged.  I decided to colourize the parts of the photos where my parents were and included them as backgrounds in the text reveal.  The images are not directly associated with the letters, but show how they both traveled extensively, both separate and together. 5 hours 2/12 to  8/12 Once the letters and message were scanned, along with the photos I put them through Photoshop to colourize the photos and cut out the relevant parts of the letters.  Once I had those files organized I started up with the After Effects project (see image above).  I made the image full HD but in vertical because of the format of the letters.  The AE project involved a lot of masking, line by line for the lett...