Some Reminders:
Seniors - Be sure to back up the work you have on your IU Google Drive to your personal account before the end of June. That would include work you completed in Portfolio class. Anyone with a personal Google email account has a Google Drive account so it would be wise to create copies of work you've completed here. Backing up work is absolutely necessary whenever you're working with a computer! Returning students - make sure that all work that is on local workstations in our lab is backed up to your Google Drive. All computers will be erased and reformatted with a clean image this summer. Just a heads up - it appears we will be starting the new school year with the Adobe Creative Cloud. Final Project - I expect all final project work to be completed by June 8th. Be sure to check your grade on Powerschool to be sure that I've evaluated your project. 2017 Shield I want to congratulate all of you that worked so hard on this year's edition of the Shield. The amount of labor that goes into producing this book is staggering. I appreciate all of the effort you put into creating this year's book. The yearbooks have arrived and sales are under way. There is no perfect book. We worked hard on this year's book but it has some issues that, going forward, we need to work at improving. After discussions with this year's yearbook staff we developed a list of actions we can take on making next year's book better. Some ideas for next year's book:
Yearbook Project - Portraits A small number of Commercial Art students have been taking student portraits over the past month and a half. Now it's time to get all of us in the program to finish this part of our yearbook. You will be learning how photographers finish a portrait off by correcting and calibrating the following details:
Go Red for Women T-shirt Design We have been asked to do a community service project for Phoenixville Hospital's celebration of the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women campaign. Kathleen Clarke, a cardiac nurse at the hospital, describes what they are looking for below: We are looking at having a contest to design the American Heart Association Campaign GO RED for Women. We were hoping that the students might help us design the t-shirt that we sell to fundraise for the campaign. My initial thoughts are that you all could do something internally to narrow down to 3-5 designs, and then we could have a vote here, giving a small award to the top 3. We have in the past just used the Go Red portion rather than including the “for women” to make it more inclusive of the entire population. The Phoenixville Hospital logo will appear on the left front in the pocket position. What we will be designing is the back of the shirt. Your designs should fit into a letter size space (either landscape or portrait orientation.) You might want to do a little research before beginning to create your design. The event is taking place in February of 2014 and might include a heart icon as a start.
Here is the link to the national organization's event website. I would like to see idea thumbnails in pencil completed by Tuesday afternoon and a finished one-color design by next Friday. All work should be completed in Adobe Illustrator. The winning design will earn an additional t-shirt project in our lab during this school year. I want to see what everyone can do with this as this is great practice for our upcoming SkillsUSA competition in early December. Yearbook
Congratulations on putting together a really fine looking chronicle of this school year. Design-wise, this book is well thought out and communicated. I've had discussions with both the AM and PM classes and based on those discussions, below are some suggestions for next year's work on the book:
Senior Projects Seniors will be presenting their finished projects on April 30th and May 1st. We'll be finishing up project work in the next week. You should also be working on how you're going to present your portfolio and product over the next two weeks. Make sure that you have fixed your portfolios so that all filler text is either completed or deleted. You can see the judging criteria by downloading this document. Be certain that you hit every judging criteria. You're going to need to practice your presentation and have a clear map for the order of how you'll present your project. It should include a demonstration of a skill. It doesn't have to be complicated - keep it simple so that you could do it blindfolded. All seniors will be expected to do practice presentations on April 25th and 26th. I'll be sitting down for one-on-one meetings to review your ePortfolios from April 23rd & 24th. Make sure that you're ready to show both your ePortfolio and your class portfolio at that time. Check for any spelling errors that will make you look unprofessional. In our field, spelling counts! Crunch Week - This is our final week to finish this year's yearbook. A number of photo sessions are scheduled. We have tracked those areas that we need to work on this week and they are listed on the class' white board. Try to keep this board up-to-date with anything that you feel could use improvement. We're trying to create the best book ever done at PIckering and we need everyone thinking and analyzing how we can improve over past issues.
Theory This Week - One area that we are going to be stressing this week is the concept of creating page layouts that will print and transfer well. This means using Preflight Profiles in InDesign. Download this preflight document and we'll be discussing how this profile can help us avoid pitfalls in getting our book to the publisher and saving time and money by avoiding mistakes. Our Workflow - for creating pages must be consistent and mirrors what is done in industry. Here are the basic steps:
The Illustrator self-portraits that I've seen so far are very well done. This week I'd like to see everyone finish their digital portraits by Tuesday afternoon. If you're having problems "seeing" the lines in Illustrator, you may want to try this Photoshop Tutorial that allows you to turn a photograph into a sketch: Below is a before/after sample of one that I completed this afternoon. We'll work on this in our theory session on Monday. Once the illustrations are complete we are going to try a new transfer technique. This will require you to print your finished Illustrator file out in color to fit a 8.25" x 10.25" area. These prints will then be chemically transferred to wooden frames. The end product will be displayed in our room and they will be yours to keep at the end of the year. Make sure that you're happy with your portrait before doing the transfer. We will be limited in how many frames we have to work with each year.
I have enjoyed reading your journals every week. These journal entries are a record of your growth in our program and they allow you a chance to ask questions and make suggestions. Dan Berger asked a great question this week in his journal. We'll be researching an answer to the question, "Is digitally-created work art?" Shea O'Neill asked that more choices be made available for project work. I'm supportive of Shea's suggestion, but I have a request. If you want to work on an alternate project during the lab period of our class - you need to send me the details via your journal and let me know that you made a proposal via twitter when you want me to okay the alternate project. Another task that we'll be beginning this week is to do post-production touch up of all of the underclass photo portraits that we took the past two weeks. We'll be working with Photoshop to complete this task. I'll post a how-to video on Wednesday to make sure that we're all following the same workflow with these images. It is going to be a busy in our lab this week. For the past five years, Commercial Art students have had the responsibility of taking portrait images of our students and staff. This week begins the process for the 2012-2013 school year. This week both the AM and PM classes will be creating portraits of all 9th through 11th grade students.
We need to be organized in this endeavor so that our clients have a positive experience and that we end up with great pictures of every student. We'll be using this Google form to manage our pictures. I will work on Monday with those of you who want to be on our photography teams for the remainder of the week. One person needs to be the photographer. Their main responsibility is to evaluate the images that we are getting and working with each client in a respectful and helpful manner. I would prefer that only one person assumes that role for each class period. The photographer's assistant will be helping students sign in with their first and last name, their correct CTE area selected, and put an image number into the slot that they receive from the photographer. Below is our schedule for the week: Monday, September 24th: AM - Criminal Justice, Early Child Care & Health Occupations PM - Auto Collision, CIS, Early Child Care & Health Occupations Tuesday, September 25th: AM - Auto Technology, Carpentry, Culinary Arts PM - Criminal Justice, Culinary Arts, Electronics Wednesday, September 26th: AM - Animal Science, Cosmetology, Electronics PM - Animal Science, Auto Technology, Sustainable Energy Thursday, September 27th: AM - Auto Collision, Sustainable Energy PM - Carpentry, Cosmetology Friday, September 28th: AM - Commercial Art, Engine Technology PM - Commercial Art, Engine Technology Other work we'll be doing this week: Senior Portrait Schedule: we will be working with a database to create a schedule for each of our senior students. I need two upper class volunteers to help manage this important task. Let me know if you're interested. This position is worth 4 page designs in our incentive program. Mobile Project Building: The final due date for this ongoing project is this Friday. I really like what I have seen so far and I'm looking forward to seeing finished work this week. Some skills and ideas you may want to incorporate into your design: Envelope Distortions in Illustrator Creating a coat of arms in Illustrator Class Journal Entries: At least three twitter posts that show your daily progress and one learning journal entry at the end of the week that reviews your week and contains a self-assessment letter grade between A to F. Congratulations everyone - we're getting some publicity for our school's QR Code interactive yearbook page! This story was released by the Intermediate Unit and is being picked up across the U.S. and abroad. The story has been published by over 4900 news sources including major news, radio and television stations. Here is a Google search of the press release. The title of the article is "Tech Students Pioneer QR Codes in Yearbook."
Update: the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story on our use of QR codes. Click here for the story on the web. Welcome to the third quarter. It seems as though we were shot by a canon to this point. Over the next week I'd like to see us accomplish the following:
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Mr. TuckerMr. Tucker is in his 23rd year as the instructor for the Graphic Arts program. Prior to his teaching career he worked in the flexography industry for ten years and in quick printing for ten years. NEED HELP?Weebly Student Log-in Link
PHYS. ED. DAY
AM - Thursdays - 1 PM - Thursdays - 7 HEALTH DAY PM - Mondays - 7 Lake Photo
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