Have you discovered Instructables?

Recently, I needed origami instructions for a dead simple box (a Year 7 class assignment had the class members voting on each other's work, and so each kid needed a box for the raffle ticket 'voting slips').  Googlegooglegoogle and this box from Instructables is perfect - simple, fast, works with any rectangle of paper/cardboard.

Instructables (Make, How-To and DIY), if you haven't come across it, is an almost inexhaustible supply of how-to, from the sublime to the Unusual, and every byway in between.  Here, for example, are some of the links from the home page when I looked at it recently:

• Vertical Garden
• How to make your first real robot
• Iron Man - how to make various kinds of gear from the recent film/s
• Easy origami
• How to make a dog bone shaped cookie cutter
• Mobile veggie garden
• Turn signal biking jacket (with light-up left/right arrows)

And so it goes.  Usually step by step pictures with instructions on the tools and materials you need, sometimes video tutorials as well.  A cornucopia of ideas.

One to share with a whole lot of faculties - Science, Industrial Arts, Design and Technology, Agriculture....

Once again, no pics because Blogger won't play nice.  Sigh, again.

Cheers

Ruth

PS The science teacher who points out the absence of science-y entries on this blog can note that's two science-relevant entries in two days...!!

How a book cover is designed (Blameless, by Gail Carriger)

One of my holiday reading books was Soulless, by Gail Carriger.  In a most useful comment, Tehani Wessely gave a link to this YouTube video, which shows the design process for the third book in the Parasol Protectorate series, Blameless (Soulless, Changeless, Blameless comprise the series so far).  So, in case you don't read the comments on my blog as assiduously as I do...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoDCiTsS7dU .  One to share with Visual Art teachers, English teachers...

Here are the three Parasol Protectorate covers so far.  I do rather like the combination of vintage and modern.

source of images is the author's website, www.gailcarriger.com

Cheers (and many thanks, Tehani!)

Ruth

PS. I do rather like the moment in the video when they go ooops, the Eiffel Tower has to go - and also watching cars being erased.  Fascinating to see the process of graphic design.

PPS.  Blameless isn't out till September. Having really enjoyed the first two, I'll be definitely reading it.  How could one not wish to know more about Alexia Tarabotti?  And parasols, vampires, dirigibles, werewolves and so forth?

PPPS Gail Carriger has one of the best author bio pieces I've read:

Ms. Carriger began writing in order to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She escaped small town life and inadvertently acquired several degrees in Higher Learning. Ms. Carriger then traveled the historic cities of Europe, subsisting entirely on biscuits secreted in her handbag. She now resides in the Colonies, surrounded by fantastic shoes, where she insists on tea imported directly from London. She is fond of teeny tiny hats and tropical fruit.

GIFSL* 50: The COOL clock

Most school clocks are plain and functional, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But when you're a school library aiming to present an exciting environment for learning, reading, working, being...

...and you go to somewhere like Target when they have one of their semi-regular 40% off all clocks sales...

...which means that for less than thirty dollars you can have a clock like this behind the borrowing desk...

Oh, you'd like a better view?

I know, a plain 'school clock' would do the same job.  So does a plain vanilla anything vs a snazzy version.  But we've had a lot of (spontaneous) positive comments from kids and teachers, for such a simple change (and if you're wondering about the previous one, no clock goes to waste in a school where they're needed for exams as well as on walls).  It adds sizzle to the library for not many dollars and not much time/effort (just keep an eye on those discount store catalogues, or take a look around half-yearly sale time).  Maybe some years down the track it might look dated, but right now it looks modern and has a nice energy to it, with the interlinking design.

If you'd like to explore some fabulous clocks made from recycled junk by Pixelfish  (I only found this Etsy seller after buying our clock), take a look at these:

(screenshot from Pixelfish's store - click this link to see the current selection)

They're fabulous.  Every one a conversation starter and statement of style and panache!

And the day after I drafted this blog entry a colleague came by, commenting on the clock and on the hunt for an interesting/cool one for her husband's birthday - I showed her the Etsy site and her eyes  lit up.  Ha!  The flypaper mind I have proves its worth again... it just amuses me how things coincide, sometimes.

Cheers

Ruth

PS. Will I admit that the fact that you can't tell the time on our new clock to the exact minute is a little bit handy when you've had an extraordinarily busy lunchtime and you want to call pack up time a minute or two early without a charmingly pedantic kid pointing out that you ARE calling pack up time early?  Dunno.  You might think less of me.  But I'd rather tell you the truth... Which is why I didn't make up some ridikkulus guff about the design representing the library linking you to information, or whatever.  Could've - but nah. 

PPS: FIFTY IDEAS FOR SCHOOL LIBRARIES! How cool is that!  Got any particular favourites?  Let me know in the comments...

*GIFSL = Good ideas for school libraries

Think like a designer

In re-imagining our library over the last while, we've changed a bunch of things, and tried new things, and looked at what's been working, and tweaked, and....  I guess we've been designing - experiences, spaces, signage, all sorts of aspects of our school library.
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Helene Blowers has a brilliant entry on her blog, LibraryBytes about 'thinking like a designer'.  And I quote:
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In reading these tips, I think it’s important to recognize that these tips aren’t really related to the craft of “designing” stuff. Instead they’re related to the craft of “thinking about design” and as Garr* also notes most can be applied to any profession.

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1) Embrace constraints. Constraints and limitations are wonderful allies and lead to enhanced creativity and ingenious solutions that without constraints never would have been discovered or created.
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2) Practice restraint. Any fool can be complicated and add more, it takes discipline of mind and strength of will to make the hard choices about what to include and what to exclude.
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3) Adopt the beginner's mind. As the old saying goes, in the expert's mind there are few possibilities, but for one with the beginner's mind, the world is wide open.
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4) Check your ego at the door. This is not about you, it's about them (your audience, customer, patient, student, etc.). Look at the problem from their point of view -- put yourself in their shoes.
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5) Focus on the experience of the design. It's not the thing, it's the experience of the thing.
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6) Become a master storyteller. Often it's not only the design — i.e., the solution to a problem — that is important, but the story of it.
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7) Think communication not decoration. Design — even graphic design — is not about beautification. Design is not just about aesthetics, though aesthetics are important. More than anything, design is about solving problems or making the current situation a little better than before.
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8) Obsess about ideas not tools. Tools are important and necessary, but they come and go as better tools come along. Obsess instead about ideas. Good advice is to go analog in the beginning with the simplest tools possible.
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9) Clarify your intention. Design is about choices and intentions, it is not accidental.
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10) Sharpen your vision & curiosity and learn from the lessons around you. Good designers are skilled at noticing and observing. They are able to see both the big picture and the details of the world around them.
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Bonus:
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(11) Learn all the "rules" and know when and why to break them.
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Read the full post to get more of Garr’s insights to each of the tips above. There’s some great thoughts that I think can be applied to many areas of library services. You don’t have to be a designer to think like one. You just have to be willing to embrace some new approaches.
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*This is based on work by Garr Reynolds: 10 tips on how to think like a designer, from his blog Presentation Zen.  He expands on each of these points - it is worth reading his thoughts.
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Now what else can we design and change and improve....?
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Cheers
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Ruth
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World wide Twilight book covers

If this is indelible in your mind as THE Twilight book cover (and I note with interest that on Australian best seller lists, this cover outsells the movie tie-in cover - as well of course as the movie including a reference to this image), then take a look at the huge range of cover art used on editions of the book in different countries here.  I've blogged about different book covers before.  It's fascinating to see.

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Culture Now: a social magazine about art, design and media

What is this?  It's a Playpump.  The Playpump is a great way to make clean water available to people in third world countries. The pump is essentially a merry go round which is powered by kids or adults and serves to retrieve water from deep below the earth. With most schools in deprived regions not being able to afford playgrounds for children, the Playpump addresses more than one problem simultaneously.

I found this, and a cornucopia of other items on modern culture, art, design, media, at Culture Now.

The Playpump is an example of its offerings in the Objects section (read more, and see a diagram of how it works here).  The Objects section has a bunch of fascinating subsections:

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  Art
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  Exterior
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  Extraordinary
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  Gadgets
• 
  
  Graphics
• 
  
  Interior
• 
  
  Personal
• 
  
  Utilitarian
• 
  
  Vehicles

The Interior one, for example, has great examples of current modern design featuring designers such as Kareem Rashid.  Useful for Design and Technology and other subjects too.  Explore.  Tell your colleagues and let them explore too.

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One book, three covers

It is fascinating to see how one book can have a multitude of covers (as I've blogged about previous-like ) - and the assorted, varying, interpretations associated with them.  The Allen and Unwin blog, Alien Onion, has the US, UK and Australian covers for Teen Inc - and a description of the book - in this blog entry .  Worth reading (and seeing).  Which one would trawl in the most kids in your library?

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Hexadecimal Colour Codes

When I switched the background colour of this blog to pink, in the coding what changed was its six digit hexadecimal colour code. If you'd like to see more colours than you'd imagined, and their codes, take a squizz here.

To quote from the page:

This page demonstrates the six-digit hexadecimal representation of color of the form #RRGGBB, where RR, GG, and BB are the hexadecimal values for the red, green, and blue values of the color. Using a hexadecimal code is the most reliable of the several ways you can define colors in HTML or style sheets.

PS. I could have gone into the blog template and changed the colour in the html forest there, but instead I used an option from the WSYWG layout mode in Blogger - (What You See is What You Get) because it's easier. If you know about these codes, though, you have an idea of what to look for if you do go into the forest...

Reworking YA book covers

Print online magazine has an interesting discussion of young adult book covers in the US - eg the variations which have taken place on The Outsiders over the years (image above from this article). It's interesting to note that it's not just old favourites being re-covered, but one book mentioned has had five different covers over ten years. Read more here.

It's true to say, though, that covers can seriously influence a book's borrowability by our students - thus my cheerfulness at finding newer covers on Rosemary Sutcliff's novels (recently blogged).

Image source.

Twilight fonts

If you're after the fonts used in Twilight, particularly the title one (Zephyr),

here's a link with downloadable zip files of each of the four above from one of the largest Twilight fansites.  

It also has instructions for unzip/installation.

Could be useful for signage/display purposes in the library.

The picture above is a cropped screenshot of the page: http://bellaandedward.com/funfonts.php

Edited to add: that page now includes the Alice Cullen font too - so follow the link above for all five fonts.

Further edited to add: a commenter has said that Zephyr is no longer available on that page, but can be purchased from fonts.com.  Be aware that the internet is dynamic: this blog entry was written in July 2008, and links that are correct then can of course change.  There just isn't time or reason to check all the links in this blog.  I'm too busy finding new ones! 

Breaking News: try this link, as it has the Twilight cover font for downloading, plus several others.

Fontstruct - building fonts online

Fontstruct is an online place to build fonts. It's set up very simply, so you can set a grid size and choose from a wide variety of blocks and elements.

I'd highly recommend viewing the introductory video (runs under 10 minutes, and the narrator has a lovely Scottish accent), and if you're going to use this with students, show it to them too.

Requires registration (free) and an email address, and offers possibilities for storing/sharing/sharing under Creative Commons licences.

Offers possibilities for a number of subjects, and not necessarily a whole alphabet - maybe just students doing a single letter (eg. their initial). Or, from a teacher librarian point of view, it's another way to devise a distinctive library logo.

Technology, Entertainment, Design: resource of online talks

Sourced from Ali Edwards' blog (her entry is here), I found Technology, Entertainment, Design.
To quote from the TED site:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.

It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free.

Click here to go to the TED site and explore an extraordinary range of talks to see and hear, online. For example: Sir Ken Robinson on "Do schools kill creativity?"



which is part of the theme How We Learn.

It's the kind of place where individual teachers should explore to see what they can find for their subject areas and interests. The A-Z list of themes (each theme has a number of talks) is a good place to start.

Each Tuesday on this blog, I'll highlight a different talk from this amazingly rich resource. They'll all be labelled with the tag TED, so you can look at them at a group if you wish.

˙˙˙ɹǝpun uʍop puɐן ɐ ɯoɹɟ ǝɯoɔ ı

˙"ɹǝpun uʍop" ƃuıǝq ɐıןɐɹʇsnɐ ʇnoqɐ sǝʞoɾ pɐq ǝʞɐɯ oʇ ɹo ˙ƃuıʇıɹʍ uʍop ǝpısdn pǝǝu noʎ uǝɥʍ sǝɯıʇ ǝɥʇ ɹoɟ pǝǝu noʎ ʇɐɥʍ ʇsnɾ ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ƃuıʇıɹʍ ¿sıɥʇ sı ןooɔ ʍoɥ

˙ǝɹǝɥ ɟןǝsɹnoʎ ɹoɟ ʇı ʎɹʇ

Fancy fonts

Fonts are a wonderful tool. When money is tight (as it so often is in education) and you want to produce interesting signs/learning materials/posters/badges, interesting or unusual fonts are indispensible. The standard Microsoft ones get used so often they become a tad yawnsville, overfamiliar, not cutting through to communicate.

With the explosion of popularity of scrapbooking, the availability of different fonts (some for $$, some for free) on the net has also widened. One site I've used is Scrapvillage - the fonts page in its library section has a bunch of good ones that are easy to download. Here's the link.

I'm not sure of copyright in relation to these - my use has been restricted to school-use materials. For published works, eg. for a book or some such, the printer may need to purchase rights.

We're about to make more Harmony Day badges, and it's the combination of eyecatching fonts and intriguingly patterned scrapbooking papers that makes them sell well - they're graphically interesting and varied.

Design link: Australian International Furniture Fair

Today's Sydney Morning Herald features an article on young designers at the Australian International Furniture Fair, and a photo gallery of their work.

Useful for Design and Technology inspiration.