Tom Hapgood

New Page Above: Elective List

I’ve added a new page above under the tab “Elective List,” which is an attempt to begin listing all of the relevant electives around campus for Visual Design students interested in supplementing their skills in Animation and Web Design. Take a look and let me have some feedback.

New Orleans “Voluntourism” of our design student

Design/Journalism senior Bertha Gutierrez volunteered in New Orleans over Spring Break, as part of the university’s Alternative Spring Break, working with Katrina Corps. She snapped many pix, and ever the good design student, noticed lots of good distressed type among the distressed conditions. See more of her many pix from the “Big Easy.”

Adobe CS3 Announced

Larry Johnson, the CEO of the New Media Consortium, with whom I’ve worked on several projects and with whom I’ve presented at a few conferences, was in attendance at the Adobe launch party in NYC for CS3. He snapped these pix while there, and sends his congratulations to the Adobe team for integrating the Macromedia programs so well into the Adobe suite. The new Flash capabilities do seem pretty huge, bringing it more into the AfterEffects realm of productivity.

Microsoft Office? Don’t need it.

How can one get along today without Word, Excel and PowerPoint? You need the functionality that these programs offer if you’re going to share documents with co-workers and clients, plain and simple. I have been using various Web-based [free] alternatives and one [Apple] alternative that have proved to work extremely well on my new computer (MacBook Pro). I didn’t want to install my really old version of Office on the new computer. I just didn’t seem right, and I didn’t want to buy a new version of Microsoft Office. So I downloaded and installed NeoOffice, built on top of OpenOffice, which offers all of the main functionality of Microsoft’s office suite and seems to be compatible, with spreadsheets, documents, presentations/slide-shows, databases, etc. It’s great if you like the feel of a OS-platform-based client suite and find yourself without an internet connection, not to mention keeping your files secure on your own computer if needed.

The other, more modern and sleak, way is to just use the Web as your platform and utilize Word and Excel-style tools right in the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc.). The beauty of this is the sharing potential. Instead of E-mailing out-of-synch versions of a document around to other people, everyone collaborates on the single version of the document in one spot. The downsides are that your file lives on “someone else’s” server and you must have an internet connection. Some of these tools are from Google or 37 signals.

I’ve been known to use Apple’s iWork stuff, too, mostly Keynote, because it’s an amazing alternative to PowerPoint, with much greater usability and interface. Same with their Pages.

Advising

The advising fair is Wednesday from 12:30 – 2:00, and I’ll be in my office all day on Tuesday for appointments.

Rock House Cave pictograph

The Typography students should know a pictograph when they see it. This one, barely visible, is found in the Rock House Cave in the Petit Jean State Park in central Arkansas. I found three, but most are gone it seems. This form of communication was made using mineral pigments mixed with animal fat or eggs.

“Picture” animated music video

Josh Wagner just posted this latest music video/animation for his band Smooti. It was done mostly in Maya. I worked with Josh at the University of Arizona and he was an outstanding design student.

Chocolate Lab inside?

Chocolate Lab inside

A truck at the circus the other afternoon. I love countrified, clever type, especially the patriotic red and white on blue. I actually heard people discussing whether there was a laboratory inside the truck for making chocolate. No, really.

What’s after Terabyte?

I recently received my 1 terabyte drive for some video work I’m doing. It got me wondering about what type of “byte” comes after terabyte. A few years ago I saw a list of what comes after gigabyte, as those were the biggies of the time, and here you go: gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte. Wikipedia page on this.

Cool new course in the fall

Fred Limp of CAST sent this over to me and it might be of interest to students in my classes. It’s called “Visualizing the Roman City,” and it’s taught by an impressive array of faculty from around the college. This is going to be an awesome course over two semesters.

As the title implies, this sequence addresses how we “visualize” the past, using the Roman harbor city of Ostia as its test case. Over the course of two semesters, students will learn how reconstruct the buildings of Ostia using 3D software like Archicad and Sketchup, apply fresco and mosaic decoration using Photoshop, and produce animated fly-throughs of the city using rendering software.