Just look at all the boxes you can fill with stuff!
Maybe it's just me, but as I read Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," I couldn't help but feel that it was directed at me, especially between the ages of eleven and fifteen.  This feeling of guilt grew even more as I watched Davits' pecha-kucha on pecha-kuchas, and remember growing up with PowerPoint.  I clearly recall being astounded at all of the tricks it could do, only to become disillusioned with each of them, one by one.  Tufte's disapproval of the "abuse" PowerPoint performs on content is legitimate, and I stand guilty as charged.

I have to admit that I did love PowerPoint at first.  When they added the letter-by-letter animations,  I was still in middle school, and I couldn't wait to use them. I thought they looked really cool until I watched my slideshow just once and couldn't even sit through it myself.  Animations, once the most exciting thing on the screen, were just distractions that lost the audience's favor (and quickly).
  
Is it 1? Or just under 1?  Maybe 0.98 New Nations?
An even harder lesson to learn was appropriate information density, or managing clutter, a lesson PowerPoint certainly does not seem to be aware of (see image at top right).  Tufte's advice on data-to-ink ratios would have been invaluable in this area, as would the six lines per slide, six words per line guideline.  However, I'm not sure that Tufte is age-appropriate for most students that are being introduced to PowerPoint.  For such a group, I feel that the now-global pecha-kucha presentations would be more suitable to show them the ropes, as far as effective information presentation is concerned.


The real trouble with class PowerPoint presentations came later, as we got to high school.  Our projects became more and more complex, so more people would stand there and read long blocks of text directly off of the screen.  Tufte's book does not address this issue quite as well as the rigid format of pecha-kucha presentations does.  I can remember many past projects with a time or slide limit (nobody had considered both), which often drove students crazy, either trying to cram their slides with information or rehearsing their slides over and over to nail a time limit.  The turmoils of middle and high school presentations may be averted with pecha-kuchas, but Tufte's core idea of being true to your content must come into play at some point in the education process.
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In class, we discussed Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," which is really the seminal work in well, understanding comics.  McCloud discusses just about every, and any aspect of comics that can be conceived, and our discussion on 'gutters' was interesting, as I hadn't read "Understanding Comics" in some ten years.

As an avid comics fan (buff?), I had always been told that Neal Adams was one of the genre-defining comics-book artists of his day (which happened to precede me by some 15 years).  As you can see in the examples to the right, his use of panel arrangement was completely "outside-the-box," to coin a phrase that came up in class.  That is not the interesting part, however.

Trap. The combination of the genres of trance and rap usually through sound mixing and editing, has become a staple of parties and festival shows. They share similar use of synth, heavy base and spoken words to create music. But what interests me out of these is the artwork and how the artwork mimics the mixing of themes between rap and techno much in the same way the music does.

Arguably one of the most recognizable symbols in the Western cultural lexicon, or even that of Eastern cultures, is the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. Popularized in the late 1920s by a series of short films, America’s favorite rodent has come to represent the Walt Disney Studios and the Disney corporation at large.

The above comic by Robert Berry appears in his Ulysses “Seen” adaptation of the James Joyce novel Ulysses.

We watched "The Machine is Us/ing Us" and had an interesting class discussion on whether it was a scholarly work or not. It was not, perhaps, “scholarly”; but it was an argument, and it made me think about the sociology of internet communication.

During our in-class discussion of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," the composer brought up gutters, the space in between frames of a comic (or newspaper, cartoon or other media).  In a comic, as McCloud states in the image to the right, gutters "play host to the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics."  These gutters are vital, and can serve as more than a space to let the reader's mind wander.

When we talked in class about usability and the internet, it sounded like the conclusion as to what makes a usable website is simplicity. Creating a website to serve a very obvious purpose is the key to usability. But even when a site is usable, there are aesthetics that make a website a more enjoyable experience for the user. Color, formatting, and graphic elements can enhance usability by making a website visually appealing.

In Vitaly Friedman's article "10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of," the first item listed is  problematic hidden login links on websites. Friedman uses Backpack as an example because the login link is very small and placed right underneath a block of text that looks like an advertisement, rather than placing the login somewhere else on the page where it can be easily located.

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Of the recent readings for this course, I feel most compelled to comment on the writings of Jakob Nielsen. I had heard of him before, touted as the leading expert of usability. A great deal of the discussion in class was devoted to some apparent contradictions between his ethos and one of his now defunct websites. However, I noticed contradictions on the very page we were asked to look at for class.

Professor John Logie teaches us that comics have a place in academia. He teaches it in Visual Rhetoric. Why not? Comics are visual and they are graphic and they are certainly full of rhetoric. Comics teach us to engage ourselves with the comic we are viewing, on our own time, in our own space. Professor Logie teaches that Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" is an essential book to do just that, understand comics.
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