Tag Archives: VisualAssignments

What A Crappy Font Will Do

Visual Assignments, ,

John Deere Logo

This is a DS106 visual assignment that challenges us to remix an existing corporate logo with a bad font (or an improved font). At 4 stars, I think the difficulty rating is somewhat inflated. Granted, I’ve been doing this kind of work for a while, but this assignment only took me 5 minutes to complete. It is taking me longer to create and publish a post about it.

My process used was simple. I did a Google image search for the “John Deere Logo.” Then I downloaded the image and placed it into Adobe Illustrator. I used a clipping mask to remove the old John Deere Text. Then I used the text tool to reset the type in the over-used Papyrus font. I then saved the image as a PNG graphic and uploaded to this website. Boom- done! My rating for the assignment difficulty was a 1 star. For a beginner with no graphic-making experience, it might take a little longer, but certainly no more than 2 or 2.5 stars.

So to take it up a notch, I followed Paul Bond’s lead and put the Papyrus font onto a John Deer product.

This took more time than the original assignment. I had to find a tractor using Google once again. Then I used the clone tool of Photoshop to remove the original John Deer lettering. I tried using Photoshop to add the lettering back in, but I wasn’t pleased with how it turned out, so I saved the edited photo as a JPG and brought it back into Illustrator, where I used the text tool to set the type. I then saved the photo as a web ready JPG image. Here is the result:

John Deere Tractor

Napoleon Gifs

Assignments, Video Assignments,

Pull me to town Tina you fat lard

Tonight, I did the Say It Like Peanut Butter assignment on DS106. I used to make a lot of animated gifs, but have gotten away from the practice. But apparently, ,the tools have gotten a lot better. I used Photoshop CS6 to do mine. I actually have Photoshop CS5 and CC on my Macbook, but either of these gave me an error saying that video import was not supported on Mac. For some reason, the CS6 version was happy to import a video clip.

For my 2 gifs, I chose scenes from Napoleon Dynamite. My kids & I love this movie, but my wife, and plenty of other people just don’t “get” it. To me, it is a lot like a non-sensical Monty Python film, but come to think of it, my wife doesn’t care for those either. It takes a special brand of humor, I think.

As for my process, since it’s been a while, I googled for an animated gif tutorial and found this one that told me what I needed to know.

*** Edit – Ok, I looked at this and decided I could tell you a bit more about the process I used. I was in a hurry and wanted to get this post made, but I’ll tell you more here.

I used Handbrake to rip the movie DVD. Handbrake is hands-down the best tool I’ve used to make a video file from a DVD. It’s free, and simple to use. It works on Mac, Windows and Linux.

Once I got the entire film into a digital file, I brought it into my favorite editor for quick video projects, Camtasia. It is $179 with an education discount, but really powerful andwell worth it if you make a lot of video projects. It is best known for screen capture, but also has a really nice, simple-to-use editor. If I needed to, I could have skipped the Handbrake step and just recorded the scenes I wanted directly from the DVD in Camtasia.

But I already had the fully ripped film so I brought it into Camtasia, and edited it down to the scenes I wanted to use. I rendered to a new file a smaller video that had only these scenes. Once I had this digital file, I imported it into Photoshop using the “import as layers” command. After it was in Photoshop, under the “Window” menu, I selected “Timeline” so the video frames were visible. From there, I deleted any frames I didn’t want, and used “File -> Save For Web” to save the project as an animated GIF.