by melaniebrown2015

Relay for Life with Alpha Phi Omega

Last weekend Furman held it’s annual Relay for Life. At Relay, different organizations have teams to raise money for cancer research. Each team has to have at least one person walking the entire event, which lasts from 6pm to 1am. The event is lots of fun but its main goal is to raise money. Check out my video!

http://youtu.be/fSY93flYosU

by melaniebrown2015

Composition and Information Hierarchies

{Reading Images by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen}

“The positioning of the elements in a composition endows these elements with different informational values in relation to other elements.”

Composition is the placement and arrangements of elements in a piece of digital media. How text, pictures, and graphics are placed creates an information hierarchy. Composition determines what we see first and what we think is important. Kress and van Leeuwen write about how position on a page or screen determines the importance of a design element. Continue reading →

by melaniebrown2015

Grids, Logos, and Critiques

{All tips and ideas come from Allison Goodman’s book, The Seven Essentials of Graphic Design.}

Chapter 5: Grid Systems. Why are grid systems good? They provide a structure and rhythm to media. They also create visual consistency across pages, packages, or magazines. Goodman provides three reasons to develop a layout grid. 1. A grid creates a consistent design look that can be reused over and over. This is useful for a multipage or multi-issue publication. 2. Grids provide an underlying logic for layout decisions. 3. They help make vital information clear and easy to access. Typography, color, and photography should all be used consistently across the grid to create a cleaner and more organized layout. Continue reading →

by melaniebrown2015

Discourse

{All quotations are from The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language by Michel Foucault. In his lecture, Foucult discusses discourse, how it’s formed, and it’s place in society.}

“None may enter into discourse on a specific subject unless he has satisfied certain conditions or if he is not qualified to do so.” How quickly do dismiss someone when they’re talking about something in which they have no experience and have done no research? I am very quick to tune out as soon as I realize an individual has zero qualifications to discuss what he is discussing. Smith believed that qualifications must be had in order for discourse to be affective. We see this all the time as college students. Professors have to have a long list of experience and published papers. The more books they have written, the more we believe that they know what they’re talking about. This goes along with the idea of verification, which I’ve previously discussed. Continue reading →

by melaniebrown2015

Net Neutrality

{A first try at filter blogging co-written with Brooks Dame and Matsuri Ogawa}

What is net neutrality? CNET described net neutrality as,“the idea that traffic on the Internet should be treated equally. That means your broadband provider, which controls your access to the Internet, can’t block or slow down your ability to use services or applications or view websites.”The provider also can’t get the internet users to pay an additional fee to have an access, such as Netflix, faster. [ CNET / Marguerite Reardon ] Continue reading →