Websites That I Heart

www.facebook.com – Obviously : ) This is my favorite and, perhaps, most frequently visited site. It keeps me connected and thoroughly entertained. As a marketer, Facebook is a great way to get the word out about our company and to get feedback.

www.anthropologie.com – This is the website for my favorite store. Not only is it a great store to shop, it’s a great website to shop. The navigation is easy to follow and they have a lot of fun features that make the site more interactive and interesting to visit.

www.opentable.com – If you’re not familiar with Open Table, it’s a great site to use to check restaurant availability and make reservations. It’s also a good place to start if you don’t know where you want to eat as it provides restaurant listings for different cuisine types by location and price point.

www.kayak.com – Kayak is a fantastic travel search site that will help you get the best deals on flights, hotels, car rentals, and other vacation packages. It’s super easy to use, and allows you filter your search to get exactly the results you’re looking for.

www.dcist.com – This blog is where to start to find anything you need to know about DC. From crime to culture, food to festivals, they cover it all. Like it, tweet it, tag it. It’s the talk of the town!

ilovetypography.com

The other day I came across this blog on typography that I thought was definitely worth sharing.

http://ilovetypography.com/

The blogger, John Boardley, posts interesting mini-articles related to typography—on everything from typeface histories and analyses to the announcement of new typefaces on the market. Overall, his blog layout is visually appealing and very appropriate for the subject. Interesting graphics are incorporated throughout and illustrate the article concepts well. While some of the articles may seem a little dry, the blog is purposeful, educational, and surely worth reading.

Enjoy : )

The Washington Design Center

This week I was fortunate enough to visit the Washington Design Center with a few colleagues. We attended two lectures on marketing for interior design and a chair build demonstration. The lectures and demonstration were pretty interesting and informative, but really, my absolute favorite thing was walking through the showrooms. They are A-MAZING!

Each showroom is like entering an art gallery for textiles. Perfectly staged rooms, set with beautiful furniture and accessories. Walls draped in rich, colorful fabrics. Glamorous designers, impeccably dressed and playing their roles flawlessly.

My favorite showrooms were Duralee and Kravet. The fabrics these companies carry are out of this world. There are too many to classify with a few adjectives, but the combination of them all draped along the walls and showcased on elegant furniture pieces is certainly a fabulous sight. I was a kid in a candy store : )

Unfortunately the Design Center is not open to the public—you need to be accompanied by an interior designer to get in, but if you ever have the opportunity to go, I highly recommend it!

Here’s the link to the Design Center website if you care to learn more!

Project 4: Video Remix

Project 4 started and ended in confusion for me. Luckily, the middle wasn’t so bad : )

To start, I spent about two hours downloading Adobe Premiere Pro onto my Mac only to be told that the system was not compatible. Fortunately, I spend one night each week at my mom’s house and was able to download the program on her PC. Getting to the lab at AACC is quite out of the way for me since I work in Towson and live in downtown DC.

In the meantime, I spent some time looking at clips on archive.org and creativecommons.org to see if they had what I was looking for, and I actually found a lot more than I expected. I developed a storyboard with the idea of compiling video clips of people dancing various styles of dance, and pairing them with music that was totally uncharacteristic of the style being danced. I had the idea to call it “Dance to a Different Beat.” Here’s my storyboard, if you’re interested to see where my concept started.

When it came time to put the video together, I did another quick search for dance clips and came across some that were more offbeat and comic, and it occurred to me that this would be an even more perfect fit for a video titled, “Dance to a Different Beat.” So that’s the direction I ended up going in. Between the Michael Jackson wanna-be, the ballet dancers and construction workers dancing in the streets of DC, and the groovy rollerskaters, I think it’s more entertaining than it might have been if I had gone with more serious dancers. I’ve also always love watching people just have fun dancing and letting loose, so watching these clips over and over again was quite entertaining for me.

When I finally got to using Premiere Pro, I was so happy to see that there were video tutorials—and that they were good and helpful! It didn’t take long to do the editing and I was actually enjoying myself by the time I got to the titles, transitions, and effects. It will be really helpful in my job for me to have an understanding of video editing software, like Premiere Pro, so I’m glad it was a part of this class.

I was, however, thrown for a loop at the end when I had to select the right formats and file sizes, and when I was trying to get resize all of the clips to be the same size. I ended up enlarging them all to fit the frame because I couldn’t locate instructions on how to resize each clip, so it resulted in pixilated clips. I wish I could have fixed it, but I was totally out of time and now my mom’s computer is crashed! Hopefully in the future I’ll have the chance to figure it out : )

Anyway, here is my video. Hope you enjoy it!