The very same day after we discussed Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint", I was subjected to a PowerPoint presentation in which the student committed many of the mistakes this comedian points out in the video "How NOT to use powerpoint". It was rather difficult to not laugh, and indeed I had trouble focusing on the message because all I could think about was how bad the presentation was. I distinctly remember my professor telling us that having visual presentations wasn't necessary, but that they wouldn't hurt to help the audience understand our topics. That, my classmates, was a horribly mean lie.

Here is a summarized list of what is covered in the video, along with some choice quotes:
1. Putting everything a presenter wants to say on a slide, then reading off the slide
2. Not runing spell check... then attemting to read of of the slid
3.

  • Excessive
  • bullet
  • points
  • "...Term bullet point comes from people firing guns at annoying presenters"
4. Bad color schemes
5. Too many slides
6. Too much data/too fancy of graphs
    -"You can improve effectiveness by adding some shading and some 3D effects"
7. Too much animation
8. Stupid font choice (Thankfully, blogger.com saves it's users from this blunder)

Now let's look at a few things that Tufte has to say:
For mistake 3: Use of bullet points often clouds topic or key point - Almost always BAD (16)
Mistake 4: While Tufte doesn't say anything specific about color, the "standard ready-made" template shown on page 18... Yeah. - BAD
Mistake 6: 3-D effects for graphs, in one word - BAD (21)
As to mistake 7: Animated transitions and things liked the "dreaded slow-reveal" - BAD (6)

Faith in humanity cannot be completely lost when there are people in the world who are able to recognize the horrible blunders of PowerPoint usage like the comedian in the video, and we must thank him for posting his message on Youtube.com. He presents the mistakes so clearly (ironically using PowerPoint to do so) that the issues become instantly obvious and everyone can admit to having committed at least one at some point, but we really shouldn't need a comedian to point out these problems! 
In conclusion, don't use PowerPoint because it "can just suck the life out of you".
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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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