Interviews with Graphic Designers

If you teach graphic design, you may want to share interviews with graphic designers with your classes. Lynda.com has some wonderful ones under their Creative Inspiration section, but it that site requires a monthly fee (well worth it).

Another one, which is also a great example of using object animation, is from the School of Visual Arts, of interviews with designers who were students of Richard Wilde. (Love the target assignment!)

Good Flash Examples

If you are teaching Flash animation, you probably have bookmarked some excellent Flash interactive sites for examples. Would you please take the time to share them with us? Just add your favorites in the comments section with a short explanation (appropriate for public school viewing, please).

I'm looking for innovative, captivating educational sites for my classroom examples.

Shortoftheweek.com  has a Flash category. The Bendito Machines are ones I found there. I always show BM1 at least, and have fun letting the students interpret the meaning. There are 4.

Here is a great one on the MOMA site about their Tim Burton exhibition.

Another one from MOMA, but very different is their What is a Print? interactive

Here is a Flash portfolio site  by a very talented student, whose website is titled "okaydave.com"

Another museum interactive for younger children, from the Art Institute of Chicago, has some beautifully done storytelling, for example.

From the Smithsonian, a site about book illustrations

An interactive site about color theory.  I use this in my graphic design classes as an alternative to a lecture style lesson about color.

A nice example of Flash poetry, Why do you stay up so late?

Please share what you've found. If you have some successful student Flash sites as well, let us know.

More Painting with Light

You may want your students to take part in The Carrot Revolution's collaborative project of images created with open shutters and some flashlights. The deadline for entries is March 1st and you should register your class ahead of time. Visit their website for more info. You may also want to follow the Carrot Revolution blog, as well as read this NPR article about the project with student examples.  I plan on taking part and will post my students' examples soon. For some more info on light painting, check out this earlier DAE blog post

Color Decisions

Creating color combinations is a sensibility that most students haven't had a chance to develop. Cutting and combining Color-Aid paper is not the most efficient way to acquire color experience. (Ok, if you don't know about Color-Aid paper then you really are young.) Teaching color theory and relationships is much easier in Illustrator and doesn't have to be a mind-melting experience thanks to the Window>Extensions menu in Illustrator CS4. Your students can choose Kulor and download swatches of color schemes into their swatch collection without actually going to the Kulor website. You can tell your students which swatch collections to work with for each color exercise, for example, or just require them to choose a swatch collection and stick with it. The above color scheme is called "Haiti Relief". If you need to brush up on color theory, visit the kulor.adobe.com links page.  There is even a link to Colorstrology where you can find the Pantone color that vibrates with your inner you... or something like that.