Your Website Vs. Social Media Presence


Social media platforms are great for building community and knowledge of your goods, services, brand...but you don't own or control the platform. We'r all aware of the ever-changing landscape of social media: look at how 'groups', 'pages', 'individual' Facebook account (sharing and privacy) rules have changed in the past few years. Users get very little input on how these evolve.

A website allows you to market yourself on your own terms. On your own site you get to:

• set rules and guidelines for how you share content
• have and build direct relationships with your audience
• organize your branding content how you want  it organized

Roberto Blake gives a lot of food for thought on the topic:

In the past half-year or so I’ve lamented the fact that I have little time to do in-depth video production. That drought is over.

With growth on the horizon for my department and an organizational push toward getting the most from the technology tools that we now employ, I’ve been called upon to interview some folks. I got the assignment and the deadline last week—these need to be done really soon. Luckily I grabbed my favorite campus personality about a year ago and recorded a 30-minute interview and B roll of him strolling across campus and teaching his online course.


This week is dedicated to editing down 2+ hours of interviews, and an hour of atmosphere/B-roll into three, under-five-minute snapshots of how our faculty use technology in the and out of the class. The upshot of this double-quick assignment is that I get to hear the individual stories of how these folk approach the tools. What I’ve learned—and this is important for us in IT departments to hear—is that they are open to using these tools and pushing the limits of the technology to best fit their needs. They’re experimental and they’re open.

My goal is to have my final cuts done by Friday.

Then sometime on Monday, next week, my committee reviews them for content and offers any edits or input. And I spend that afternoon editing--if necessary. Then the final cuts will be hosted on our website by next Tuesday…

*Whew*

Adobe Connect Virtual Meeting Room

Many of you know about the TechTalk lecture series that I spearheaded last year. I got a lot of great feedback on the design from the PubDesign groups on FB and LinkedIn!

What you probably don’t know is that after much deliberation my cohort and I have decided to switch the format from an informal lunchtime conversation to an (Adobe Connect) webinar. There are some good reasons for this.

1. While the fall and spring events were captured using Panopto, Connect, and (once) a digital video camera.  The recording method was not formalized and a bit ad hoc in the earlier days. Each one offered different pros and cons.
2. Second, the lunch option was a great idea, but became impractical later in the semester. A lot of the faculty (and a couple TAs) who attended were busier by the later weeks and ended up no-showing; food was wasted. These busy folks ended up catching the recorded session after the fact.
3. Lastly, one of my goals in starting this professional development series was to–eventually—open it up to the larger university community, reaching professionals at schools like Hopkins, Bowie, Maryland, etc. The webinar format allows for others to easily join the conversation without having to drive to my school. We had several colleagues from Notre Dame make the trip for several of the sessions. Webinars can be watched as they happen, OR after the fact.

The added benefit is that Adobe Connect allows participants watch the recorded session on demand and also to download webinar materials (like PowerPoints, PDFs, and Docs) that were used in the session. That’s a major bonus. I got several requests for links to TechTalk materials days or months after the talks.

That said, Sue and I—that cohort I mentioned earlier—are now planning the upcoming fall sessions, and creating the marketing plan for the next year. Whew! More designs to come.

Check out the posters for 2013/2014 

I wanted to share with you a series of graphic design quotes that have stuck with me through my design education and throughout my career. My list got to about ten quotes before it got sidetracked.

I came upon a quote from one of my favorite designers, Chip Kidd. According to the autobiographical Cheese Monkeys—a book that inspired me in school, he sort of fell into the study in school. Since school Kidd has worked as a designer for Knopf, Random house and other publishers. He continues to inspire me.

My first instinct was to make myself one of these for my cash and cards. My second instinct was to share this beautiful minimalist design with you. Nothing Fancy, minimalist wallets, are created from a single piece of leather by London-based designer Chieh Ting Huang. Check them out:

The great benefit of drawing is not to replicate reality, but to understand what is real."

A recent project I built a HTML5 video player. For these players to work across all the major browsers redundant video formats must be created. There are several free online services that will convert video formats to ogg theora, mp4, and webm for you. However, once you get to long/large video files, they act up (require payment, or freeze).

VLC media player is free and will convert your vids to the desired format, relatively quickly. One drawback is that you can't run more than one conversion instance at a time. If you need to convert, say 1000 videos, then you'd better get some help.  Here' the quick and dirty of using this player to make your job easier:

I got a bunch of questions about this HTML5 video player, so I wanted to shed some light.

This product was designed and developed by the awesome and talented Lambert Group. This player is basic but so functional. This is a full list of more Lambert Group products

Hey I just realized that I haven't made any recent updates on my work projects. It's that that I haven't been busy because I have! Recently completed was a web style guide for online courses, plus a workshop on using video lecture capture. Also a book and presentation of effective graphic design. There's also the freelance website project for a local Lutheran church, and I can't forget the infographic project that's almost complete. There're one or 2 other things, for now take a look a the evolution of the HTML5 video player that I've been developing for my university's streaming media server:

This is the final version. Look below for all it's iterations.

This screenshot looks more sophisticated than the actual page.

More realistic.

This is the out-of-the-box, page that I threw together. T'was step 1.

We started with this Open Source Flash Media Player that only supported FLVs. With the advent of HTML5 and the proliferation of mobile and handheld devices, Flash is now only  a good fallback option, not a first solution.

Many of us regularly use social media. It’s an easy way to entertain and be entertained, even when it leans to the  embarrassing. Posting a picture on Facebook from the bachelor party that shows you duck-facing the camera with a bottle of champagne in hand is likely to get a laugh from your friends — none of whom are actually in the market to hire you.

When you’re job hunting, it’s a great idea to work with social media. This means taking advantage of the great communication tools available on the Internet to help you find the ideal job, at the ideal salary, in the ideal location. That could mean:

1.  writing an industry-related blog or being a regular contributor to one,
2. participating in online discussion groups, or 
3. sharing videos that demonstrate your abilities.

My first instinct was to make myself one of these for my cash and cards. My second instinct was to share this beautiful minimalist design with you. Nothing Fancy, minimalist wallets, are created from a single piece of leather by London-based designer Chieh Ting Huang. Check them out:

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

This is awesome because my formal training ended in the previous version. I ended up buying a decent textbook and walking through tutorials for hours to get a handle on the new CS5 upgrades.

EPub will get your e-books easily viewed on smart phones, tablets and various readers--I dont mean a PDF




Here's part two:

I think the perspective grid is in my top five too!!



Coming soon--to a blog near you--embarrassing practice vectors using perspective drawing tool!

Hey Hey. I totally forgot about this little gem.