As I spoke of in my previous post, I’ve been offering many of my resources I found while researching my Senior Project. While off galavanting around the internet I found some helpful resources for parents to get their hands on. Here are some great free downloads for parents who are looking to be better informed about the technology their children are using and how they themselves can use it as an educational tool.
The Modern Parents Guide to Kids and Video Games: “Nearly 40 years after their invention and a decade after exploding onto the mainstream, video games still remain a mystery to many parents, including which titles are appropriate, and their potential side-effects on kids. Now the answers are at your fingertips.
Offering unrivaled insight and practical, real-world strategies for making gaming a positive part of family life, The Modern Parent’s Guide to Kids and Video Games provides a vital resource for today’s parent. From picking the right software for all ages to promoting online safety, setting limits and enforcing house rules, it offers an indispensable range of hints, tips and how-to guides for fostering healthy play and development.”
Own Your Space: “Whether you are a parent, caregiver, or educator, you can keep up with the latest computer and online safety issues and help kids learn to avoid the real dangers that exist in their Internet-connected world. In partnership with security expert and author, Linda McCarthy, we offer a free, downloadable version of her new book, Own Your Space: Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online.”
How the Internet Works:“The web’s place in our daily lives is undeniable. We can now access the Internet from our home computers, office, laptops and our phones. But even with this close intimacy many people still aren’t entirely sure what the Internet is and how it really works.
We aim to change that with MakeUseOf’s latest PDF guide, “How The Internet Works.” This guide, by Taty Sena, explores the hardware, software and organizations that power the modern Internet.”
One of my goals this semester was to survive my senior project: Complete success! Hopefully I will have more time to post things from now on (and I say hopefully very lightly).
My senior exit project was to create a design campaign that encouraged parents to become more actively involved in their children’s online lives and offering them all the quality free resources a parent ought to be able to get their hands on all in one website. However, since the project is only a prototype and I do not have the funds to keep the project running, I figured I would take all of my knowledge and offer it to you, my faithful readers (again I use the word faithful lightly).
One of the challenges I faced with this project was finding online family friendly gaming that…well…wasn’t a complete waste of time. Some games are neat, but overly violent, and other games were…well…they really sucked and were poorly designed…it was a nightmare.
One of the unique things about this generation is that we have an increase in parents who are gamers. Sure we all love Halo and Catherine just as much as the next guy, but are those games really appropriate for children to play 9or even be present while playing)? Then we run into the problem of how to choose what kinds of games kids like before we go out and find games to buy them? What do they even like out of a game?
I offer you a solution of various safe online games to help get parents in the right direction and help them give their gaming children a taste of variety.
Safe-game.com: Okay, so the site it’s self is pretty lame looking, but it’s got gold…trust me. You’ve got you classic games many of us grew up with like Donkey Kong, Tetris, and Pac Man. In addition to that you’ve got a variety of gaming genres to get the kids started on and help them figure out what games they’re good at and what interests them. Great for ages 8+…and possibly a few parents looking for a taste of the old arcade.
Gamehouse.com: An awesome mixture of classic and contemporary games with varying game styles. You can also purchase games for both Mac and PC here and they also offer reviews and top picks. Better for older kids…I’d say for ages 10+ maybe 13+ depending on the game. Parent discretion advised.
Bigfishgames.com: Not entirely family friendly. These games are catered to a much older audience and parents are cautioned to review games thoroughly before game-play begins (or are encouraged to test run the game to see if they think their child can handle some of the content). However, there are some pretty cool graphics in a bunch of the games and most of them are pretty mild. I’d say for ages 13 and older (some of them I’d play myself ).
Kabam.com: I play on here all the time. Great free online strategy games with awesome graphics. They have a freaking Hobbit (yes as in LOTR) game on here. What’s not to love? Some mild violence (let’s be honest… it’s war strategy games). Best for ages 13 to 15+ …and mom and dad. It’s a bit more mature.
It is becoming more and more common for young professionals to interact with potential employers via social network. Though, how often do you think about what you posy and how much you post in a day? While trekking across Pinterest one day (a site I encourage all designers to use to collect design ideas), I discovered this awesome infographic to help recent graduates towards being better professional social networkers . Though this infographic is targeted for Facebook users it still remains helpful to consider some of the suggestions for Twitter or Pheed (all the cool kids are doing Pheed now apparently), such as having a separate professional page to post on, or only posing between 3-5 times a day.
One thing I think more Graphic Designers need to understand is the need for social network. Social network isn’t just about keeping up with old friends, but also a great tool that is useful to build professional relationships and get potential employers interested in what you do and who you are. It is a first introduction before there is ever face to face contact, and if you think no employer really wants to Google you before meeting you face to face… you may want to think again.
So here are the “Facebook Dirty Dozen” to help you get on the right track with how to appropriately social network.
So there is this site I kinnda like going on called Awwwards, which is an innovative web design site, and it’s really very neat…you should probably take a few hours and have a look….because you’ll need a few hours.
Anyway, there is this site I found on there called tweetflight, which is an interactive twitter powered film clip that actually take words from twitter posts and makes a live streaming music video. Don’t believe me? Go to the site yourself and take a look, or watch this YouTube Video.
Skeuomorphism. It’s a term you’ve probably haven’t heard much, or even at all, but you can see it almost everywhere. You open your bookshelf on your ipad and what do you see? A book shelf… designed to look like what you would in the real world. That’s skeuomorphism. At least that’s how designers have been using the term, which is inaccurate. It’s actually the mimicking of elements in a former or older device that were functionally necessary. Not necessarily the design looking like a real world object entirely…but I digress.
As many of you Apple product fans might already know, Scott Forstall, one of Apples designers, was fired over using Skeuomorphism.
“After Jobs’ death, Forstall become the company’s biggest proponent of skeuomorphism, much to the chagrin of the firm’s designers. “It’s visual masturbation,” one former Apple user-interface designer told Fast Company’s Carr. ”It’s like the designers are flexing their muscles to show you how good of a visual rendering they can do of a physical object. Who cares?”
- Should a Calendar App Look Like a Calendar? By Farhad Manjoo
Who cares indeed? Is it really that big of a deal to make objects on a screen look like their physical world counterparts? Personally, I don’t think it matters all that much. Real world objects are things users would be familiar with, and though on occasion it’s corny, I honestly feel like they make the apps and interface much more user friendly and quicker to read. People can tell what an app is for when they see a book shelf or a date book calendar, rather than some obscure screen with buttons and gizmos that have little to no indication of their use or function.
Yes, some of Apple’s software has become a bit corny. (I’m looking at your cheap-casino green felt, Game Center!) But those who advocate throwing out real-world textures and visual metaphors are missing something important. As designer Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin points out, when it’s used appropriately, skeuomorphic design can give users a quick sense of what an app does. - Should a Calendar App Look Like a Calendar? By Farhad Manjoo
Does it matter either way? Is it bad to make screen objects to look like their real world counterparts? The way I see it, if we’re using it daily in reality…why not make it look like it’s reality? Is it’s daily use not real enough for designers to want to make them look real? Because it’s certainly real enough for me. After all, it makes the virtual object more approachable for my generation, which happened to grow up from the transition between pen and paper to desktop. I’m used to using both, but perhaps in more recent generations, it may not matter as much to have any nostalgic allusion to the real world counterpart.
However obvious Apple’s skeuomorphic approach to UI might be, it’s an approach that is hard to argue with. The company is still considered highly innovative, and the success of its products is unprecedented–most would successfully argue that it’s by far the best we have. But aside from aesthetic reaons, it is hard to see how these designs will ever evolve beyond derivative representations. Will they just change color and increase their visual fidelity? -Can We Please Move Past Apple’s Silly, Faux-Real UIs? by Tom Hobbs
My question is, does it ever have to evolve? If it’s so classic do we need it to “get better” or even change? Perhaps the reason it’s so hard to argue with is because it’s so sustainable? I certainly feel like this is so. The way you can tell if something is designed well is if it can stand the test of time. Bookshelves still have the same structure as they have always had, and though we can change their color or paint them how we like in our homes, we certainly don’t change the structure of them much do we? So why would it be any different on screen. If it’s working well, why strive to change it. I think what we need to figure out is how to identify what is more valuable: sustainable or innovative?
We certainly live in a culture where everyone is striving to be “the next thing.” We automatically think that because we can have something new, we don’t want to hang onto what is sustainable. I’ve had my second generation iPod touch for a fairly long time in comparison to many of my peers. Why? Because what I have works for what I use it for…and it isn’t broken. But are we able to apply this same kind of logic to design? If it’s working, and remains relevant, is it okay to hold onto? Do we really need the next big thing in order to remain relevant, or are we confusing relevant with trendy?
Feel free to let me know what you think. For further reading visit these two articles.
A great blog post on the ever hilarious McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. I find it extremely relatable since I began my 20 credit hours of death in college and an extra design internship (because using a gun to off myself would just be too easy). The title of this blog post is: The Tortured Artists Grant. I hope you at least feel understood…if not laugh to yourself nervously about how clearly you wish you could get a grant for being this kind of person because it’s your reality. I know I do.
Found this image going viral on Facebook. Makes one wonder what our priorities really are…and where I may or may not want to invest for my retirement. Then again there isn’t much information to say what all this really means other than to say we use more ink than we do human blood…which may be a good thing. Maybe it’s a good thing that blood doesn’t cost so much? What do you think? Are we as human beings be being taken for granted by the cost of ink? Again I don’t know the context or the research behind this infographic…but it certainly gets you thinking.
With the War ongoing and the dilemma of ethical technology use ever more blurry. Many lawyers have been conducting legal research on the matter and the issue stands whether or not it is a legal issue at all, or simply a moral one.
This topic was brought up by what is being called the ”White Paper Memo” saying the President has the right to kill indiscriminately using drones…including US citizens (don’t you just love the freedom of equality).
For an introduction to the topic, please visit the link below.
The link below is a video that discusses the issue of Drone Warfare and the argument against it’s ethical and legal use.
The link below is to a video of Harold Koh, legal advisor to the US Department of State, arguing that the use of drone warfare is legal according to United States and International law.
Regardless of a person’s stance on the issue, we have to agree that to every action there is an intention, and there are those things that are unintended.
Medical technology has made leaps and bounds for people who suffer from hearing loss. This particular story touched me so much I had to share it with all of you. For many years Dawn Keim had been dealing with sever hearing loss issues causing her to be unable to hear at all. She was offered to be a candidate for a cochlear implant, but the decision to have the surgery was difficult, not because of any complications, but rather because she had grown so accustom to being unable to hear she was afraid of the unfamiliarity. She had never been able to hear her 8-year-old son speak…until now.
As I spoke of in my previous post, I’ve been offering many of my resources I found while researching my Senior Project. While off galavanting around the internet I found some helpful resources for parents to get their hands on. Here are some great free downloads for parents who are looking to be better informed about the technology their children are using and how they themselves can use it as an educational tool.
