Coming soon:

Helvetica: The Motion Picture

Yes, I'm serious.

No doubt this will be followed by a parody called Arial! from Mel Brooks, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, or possibly the Wayans brothers.

Here's the schedule for September

I am hoping to make some sense out of the schedule that you see. Here’s the breakdown:

To download the schedule pdf, click here

Portfolio Creation
I am teaching this class and giving the students the option of working at home. There is a lab time scheduled at 5-9p (immed. following class) that I will take care of in case there are students who wish to work at school.

Type & Page Layout
The lecture is scheduled at 9a and there really isn’t a way around it. So I will teach this class for this month. It also has double labs, one at 1p and the other at 5p. Dawn Beard is starting this month but will be unable to lead the class within this time slot. So is how I would like it to go down: Fatima will cover the 1pm TPL labs. I would like to pair Dawn and Ashley together to lead the 5pm lab. This will help her get oriented to Full Sail, get an idea of the pacing and class structure without having to also be thrown into teaching at the same time.

Digital Publishing
This will leave Digital Publishing with concurrent labs going from 9p-1a to be covered by Brian, Denny, Giancarlo, and Leslie. There will be 17 labs this month. I am ok with one person to each lab (they are right across the hall from each other so should there be trouble, it is easy to grab help) so it leaves the four of you scheduled for about 9 labs each. I will leave Brian to do the scheduling of individual time slots since he is better familiar with schedules, etc.

I know this is a little wacky, but we will get through it. If you have any questions in the meantime, let me know.

I appreciate you :-)

Triesta

Pictures that Lie

I remember a few of these images from what Triesta used to present in DP. Brad, if you're still doing that, there might be some nice new additions--if nothing else, it'll keep you from getting bored presenting the exact same material every month. :-)

Fonts
I've been meaning to talk about this forever, and now that I have a forum, I think I will. :-)

Long story short: I think we have too many fonts. A lot could be scrapped altogether--most people (myself included) can't tell the difference between Times, Adobe Caslon, Adobe Garamond, Bodoni, Palatino, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all fonts are unique and beautiful, and students should be aware of their existence--maybe we could even spend some time talking about a bunch of similar fonts like the ones I mentioned, or maybe a little time on Helvetica vs. Arial--but finding a good font by paging through the 3841-page list is painful. (Plus, Preview will crash if you scroll through that PDF at full speed for a minute or two.) I think 500 would be plenty. You can cover a pretty wide range with that. With fewer fonts, we could leave them all open, all the time, which would make working easier--you wouldn't have to deal with font activation. (On the other hand, it's good to teach font activation... but then again, forcing its use in all classes, all the time, might not be the best way to go.)

Also, I think they should be grouped in a more usable way. A-Z is a handy way to keep them straight if you know the name of what you want, but it doesn't tell people who are new to the collection anything. I'd suggest breaking them into different groups: classic serif, classic san-serif, fun, classy, techno, etc.

I don't mean to put down the effort involved in creating this. I just think, now that we've spent some time using it as it is, it would be better for our purposes here if it were different, and I'll be happy to be involved in changing it. Also, one thing that definitely needs to be changed: a lot of the fonts that are in the book are not actually in the system. In one of my last months in DP, a student was looking through there for fonts, and of the 10 or so he picked, we couldn't find at least 5. Or maybe they were there, but unfindable for some reason. That's entirely possible, given that there are 4,879 items in the 'Fonts' folder on the server.

Thoughts? Leave a comment!