Photo Friday

This is my first winter in Florida. One of the best parts? Reminding all of my friends and family back in the midwest that I’m in shorts and shades while they’re shoveling.

To help me get that job done, I have InstaWeather. This iPhone app allows you to add your weather to your Instagram photos. There are several different skins with a variety of placement and nice typography similar to InstaPlace. Here’s one of my Instagram photos shared in January using InstaWeather outside Station 400, one of my favorite breakfast places in Sarasota.

Photo Friday – “Over”

I edited this photo with DeluxeFX and a new app (for me) called Over. Over’s concept is simple – it allows you lay text over a photo. It’s design is as simple as its concept, and as brilliant as it is simple. The app uses a wheel for a menu, recalling that navigation ingrained in me by my old iPod. It’s all very intuitive. Users have 27 fonts to choose from – all of which are beautiful and fresh. Sharing on social media is streamlined and easy. The app is $1.99, but a $1.99 well spent. for 99 cents more, you can gain access to a greater inventory of fonts. These include a lot of your basics – think the stuff that already came programmed into your Microsoft Word.

Here’s my photo, taken at Smuggler’s Cove Adventure Mini Golf (where real live alligators live, including an albino gator!).

Edited with DeluxeFX and Over apps

First Photo Friday of the New Year!

It’s a new year, so I’m trying out some new photo editing apps. For this photo, I used InstaPlace and DeluxeFX (which I’ve used before, and remains a favorite).

InstaPlace is geared towards editing photos for Instagram. It allows you to add text to your photo, showing your followers where you are, when you were there and what you thought of the place. My favorite aspect of this app is the typography – it’s clean and attractive. Not cheesy like a lot of other apps out there. This app is meant for instant editing and posting, which has its advantages and disadvantages. If you are editing your photo right away from the place where it was taken, InstaPlace will automatically track down your location and add it to your photo. It will also add the time. If you are editing your photo later, after you have left the location where it was taken, you can edit the location, but you can not edit the time. There are options that do not include the time. This was my case in editing this photo, and thus the reason I used text that did not include a time and date.

There is a free version of the app, but it comes with a lot of ads and automatically places the app’s logo on your photo. To avoid this, you can pay the 99 cent upgrade to the pro version. I currently have the free version, but I’m planning to upgrade. It’s a great app, definitely worth the 99 cents.

Here’s my DeluxeFX/InstaPlace photo from Siesta Key beach on New Year’s Eve!

 

Siesta Key Beach on New Year’s Eve

 

Photo Friday – DeluxeFX app

I tried out a new iPhone photo-editing app this week – DeluxeFX. One of my favorite Instagramers, izkiz, uses this app to edit photos, so I thought I’d check it out. Definitely worth the 99 cents. The photos don’t look realistic by any means, but they certainly come out colorful and beautiful. I posted a version of this photo earlier, using Camera Awesome and Instagram to edit. Here’s my DeluxeFX version:

Sunset from the LeBarge sunset cruise on Sarasota Bay, *edited with DeluxeFX app*

Photo Friday

One thing I cannot deny about my new life… I am living in a BEAUTIFUL place. Sarasota, Fla., lies on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It is home to towering palm trees, exotic flowers and wildlife, gorgeous white sand beaches and breathtaking sunsets. And for the time being, I am staying at my aunt and uncle’s condo on Siesta Key, home to 2011’s #1 beach in the US.

So I’m going to add a new little segment to my blog, which I am calling Photo Friday. The designer in me really wanted to call this segment “Foto Friday”, to make the alliteration visual as well as audible, but the writer in me refused to allow a misspelled word on this blog.

Anyway, my goal here is to post a new photo to this blog every Friday, to share the beauty of my new home. But as I promised before, I’m trying to give it a twist involving one of my professional interests. In this case, the obvious – photography, but also new media. The photos I will be posting have been taken through the lens of an iPhone, and processed through my favorite apps. First – camera awesome, which offers a variety of photo-editing options, filters, textures and frames for free and in a quick, easy-to-use manner. And second – Instagram, which also offers a variety of filters, with the addition benefit of being social.

So enough of my rambling! Here’s my first photo:

Sunset over Sarasota Bay – check out the silhouette of a pelican in the upper right corner!

Capstone reflection

My experience with this capstone project has been outstanding. I never thought I could be capable of such innovation. This is mostly thanks to my fantastic capstone team – Brent, Leanne and Ryanne. I think they would all agree that this was a very good match-up. Our talents and thought processes complemented each other in a way that led to, what I believe was, a very successful project.

A good portion of our project consisted of sitting in the testing lab and simply talking – bouncing ideas off of each other until we got to something brilliant. Normally I’m not the kind of person to speak up in these kinds of situations. But since the group was smaller, and maybe because we got along so well, I did speak up, and I think I came up with some pretty cool ideas and helped the rest of our team reach innovative conclusions. I’m very glad that finally, by the end of college, I’ve learned to speak up.

Here’s a link to our website, as it stands at the end of the semester.

RJI Innovation Week – Massive Scale Online Conversations (my team!)

My capstone team, made up of Brent Davidson, Leanne Butkovich and myself, presented at RJI Innovation Week on Wednesday, April 25. We spoke about the project we have been working on this entire semester with MU computer scientist Ryanne Dolan. Ryanne has developed a commenting system that allows for thousands of people to be commenting simultaneously in real-time, without the system crashing. It also allows for automatic filtering of comments to scale down the potentially massive size of the conversation and detailed analytics. My team’s task was to research ways in which this technology could be useful in journalism and design a user interface for a website using this technology.

In our presentation, we discussed the current state of commenting. We described a comment as:

• Useful content – useful content for the reader and the editor.
• Additive – adds content, value and insight to the website at no cost to the news organization
• Measurable – editors can glean analytics
• A relationship – establishes a relationship both between readers and between readers and editors

…and a commenting system should be:

• Easy – easy and intuitive to enter a comment
• Fast – as few barriers to entering a comment as possible
• Compelling – fresh user interface that allows for various interactions and intuitive options

Then we showed our prototype. Here’s our beta version, which we’ve embedded on a mock site we built called “The Pacific”.

Some features of our site include:

• Comment placement inline with the article, off to the article’s right side
• Ability to “pin” paragraphs of text in the article, marking them as interesting or something you’d like to comment on
• Easy, one-step registration – enter a name or pseudonym when you submit your first comment
• Separate tabs for all the comments, “my pins” (comments and parts of the article the reader finds interesting) and “hot topics” (most-pinned parts of the article)
• Ability to look back at what a user has pinned by clicking on their profile picture, in order to see what they are interested in and have a more informed discussion with them.
• Option to see comment threads, by clicking “replies” at the bottom of each comment.

We concluded our presentation by discussing what’s next…

• Delving into the analytics – this system allows for many opportunities to view and analyze relationships formed between users and what they are discussing
• Better threading of comments
• Implementing a user dashboard
• Developing a prototype we’ve created for commenting on videos and live events

RJI Innovation Week – Emerging Networks Project, Janet Coats

Today kicked off the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s 2012 Innovation Week. I attended my first presentation this morning – Emerging Networks Project from Janet Coats. This presentation was particularly interesting to me because it is right in line with my capstone project. Janet is working with MU computer scientist Ryanne Dolan (also my capstone client) to mine social networks for data, divulging hidden relationships and networks that aren’t immediately apparent to the typical user.

For example, someone may pose a question on Twitter. Users who respond to this question create a network of people who are interest in the topic the question surrounds.

This is a break from “old school” networks. Traditionally, a network is a group of people who belong to the same organization – i.e. I am a member of the Student Society of News Design, this is one of my networks. Now, in the “social age,” networks are not so formal or hierarchical. Take, for example, the network of people who joined in the protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. This was no formal group, but a group of people with similar thoughts, organized by social media. Janet called these kinds of groups “communities of practice.”

Ultimately, this idea of “communities of practice” has huge potential benefits for the world of journalism. All editors need to do is listen. Listen to the ideas being evoked by your readers through, for example, social media or comments on their organization’s website. This can build sources and inspiration for stories. It can aide in giving your readership the news it needs and craves.

This is an idea my capstone team is hoping to harness in our project, which we will present at Innovation Week this Wednesday at 11:40 a.m. Check out our presentation or read my blog later this week for my thoughts on our specific project.

Jonathon Berlin’s 10 News Design Trends for 2012

This week, the University of Missouri’s chapter of the Student Society of News Design hosted the 2012 College News Design Contest. One of the perks – amazing news designers from across the U.S. came to campus to judge the contest. One of them was Jonathon Berlin, graphics editor at the Chicago Tribune. He gave a brown bag lunch presentation on the “10 News Design Trends for 2012”. Here are some of the exciting things he spoke about:

• Use my paper. Berlin showed us examples of newspapers that were literally making their designs useful. For example, the National Post published a front page Thanksgiving week showing pictures of all the foods needed to make a Thanksgiving feast. The page read something to the effect of “take this page with you to the supermarket when you do your grocery shopping”. He also showed us examples of pages that had “keepsake value,” i.e. pages that could be used as posters.
• Pictures as posters. Don’t be afraid to run pictures big. Like, really big. Berlin showed us an example of a spread run after the tornado in Alabama last year. The picture covered an entire page. Berlin said one design regret he had was not running this iconic photo of Lake Shore Drive from the “snowpocalypse” poster-sized in the Tribune’s print edition.
• It all comes down to reporting. Brilliant reporting is a big part of what makes a graphic brilliant. During the London riots, The Guardian overlayed a map of income levels in London with a map of where arrests associated with the riots had been made to prove the two were related, despite the fact that the government was insisting they weren’t. It was reporting that data out that made that graphic great, more so than the design of the map. At National Geographic, they take a scientific approach to graphics. They are accurate to the tiniest detail, and that makes them great.
• The web is good at playing. News organizations seem to forget this about the web. It’s great at interactivity and fun! We should offer people more of that.
• Use data that is unexpected. Go beyond census stats. Some examples:  all the attack statements made by GOP candidates and who they attacked, how long a creature can live vs. how fast they can run, word count of Facebook privacy policy over time.
• Responsive design. Whatever you think about it, the Boston Globe is changing web design with it’s highly responsive website.
• Rise of the motion graphic. Some of the coolest work in graphics is being done in the form of motion graphics. Take a look at this one from NPR explaining how the earth’s population got so huge. Berlin said he never understood this as well as when he watched this motion graphic.

Finally done with Flash…

I just completed my final Flash assignment for my information graphics class. The assignment was to create a slider puzzle. Previous assignments included creating a ping pong game, word guessing game and shooting game. I’m still not entirely sure what these assignments had to do with information graphics. I felt like I was mostly just listening to some computerized man talking at me while I copied the code he read off, not really comprehending what I was doing. I wish I had been able to learn more useful applications of Flash, so I could apply them to my standard, non-interactive graphics. The things that can be done with Flash are incredible. So while the exercises I was required to complete in this class were quite tedious and frustrating, I am now more motivated to learn the components of Flash that are actually useful to me.