advertisements - Blog posts - NewsPageDesigner2024-03-29T02:02:47Zhttps://newspagedesigner.org/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/advertisementsLike Alice in Wonderlandhttps://newspagedesigner.org/profiles/blogs/like-alice-in-wonderland2014-04-15T22:00:00.000Z2014-04-15T22:00:00.000ZAdam Baumgartnerhttps://newspagedesigner.org/members/AdamBaumgartner<div><p>So I've been coding my buns off lately.</p><p></p><p>I feel like I'm lost in coding Wonderland. I haven't encountered the Mad Hatter yet. Just CMS-es that eat CSS.</p><p></p><p>I'm definitely still not a code expert.</p><p></p><p>But in the last 24 hours, I've published <a href="http://feature.ballstatedaily.com/knightsofthedinnertable.html" target="_blank">this piece</a>, created new ad spots for my student paper's website and worked on <a href="http://unifiedmediadesign.com/72HRSinMuncie" target="_blank">this ongoing project</a>.</p><p></p><p>Just a quick breakdown of these tasks ...</p><p></p><center><a href="http://feature.ballstatedaily.com/knightsofthedinnertable.html"><img src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7093/13879703734_612015a74a_o.png" alt="13879703734_612015a74a_o.png" /></a></center><p></p><p>The story is about Jolly Blackburn, a man who creates comics about playing "Dungeons and Dragons" based on his time at Ball State. When I read it, I loved the story, but saw definite need for elements to help break it up.</p><p></p><p>I emailed Blackburn to ask him if he could illustrate a few scenes from the story. I wanted people to see his work, but I also thought it would be totally meta if he illustrated himself for a Ball State student media story about him creating a comic based on himself and his friends during their time at Ball State.</p><p></p><p>You follow that? DiCaprio is staring in the movie about it all.</p><p></p><p>I was able to tweak the <a href="http://unifiedmediadesign.com/experiment.html" target="_blank">template</a> (for lack of a better word) that I had created a while back, so it all went relatively smoothly.</p><p></p><p>The downside? It exists outside our student media website's CMS. So I had to input all text, photos, etc. manually. Totally inefficient. Definitely motivating me to learn PHP and other server-side languages.</p><p></p><hr /><p></p><center><a href="http://www.ballstatedaily.com/article/2014/04/ads-test-do-not-publish-me"><img src="https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7256/13881861344_4fc5d0f83e.jpg" alt="13881861344_4fc5d0f83e.jpg" /></a></center><p></p><p></p><p>PRETTY PLEASE click the image to see the real ad. This static thing does not do it justice.</p><p></p><p>This is a fake advertisement I created for article pages on <a href="http://www.ballstatedaily.com/article/2014/04/ads-test-do-not-publish-me" target="_blank">ballstatedaily.com</a>. One of my projects for next year is to help link advertising and editorial a little more effectively.</p><p></p><p>Thanks <a href="http://www.voxmedia.com/" target="_blank">Vox Media</a>, for introducing me to this style of ad. (Tangent, I'll be interning there this summer, and I could not be more stoked. I'm positive I'll learn a lot.)</p><p></p><hr /><p></p><center><a href="http://unifiedmediadesign.com/72HRSinMuncie"><img src="https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2825/13881481534_92dd1eae9a_o.png" alt="13881481534_92dd1eae9a_o.png" /></a></center><p></p><p>This bit of nonsense is the development of a project in one of my classes. Using an abundance of multimedia, my instructor told my classmates to document student life at Ball State on the weekend.</p><p></p><p>I get the pleasure of piecing it all together. The content is not yet in, so I am working on creating frameworks that I or my peers can edit with relative ease.</p><p></p><p>Again, a huge challenge is that I'm not working with a CMS here. I wish I would have had the foresight to learn <a href="http://tarbell.tribapps.com/" target="_blank">Tarbell</a> for this.</p><p></p><p>My life ... would have been so much easier ...</p><p></p><p>One of the challenges is that I'm working with designers who don't have too much code experience, but who want to help. So I'm creating a bunch of classes (probably more than necessary) so they essentially have a library to work with in helping me construct this.</p><p></p><p>I hope to publish the finished product by April 21.</p><p></p><hr /><p></p><p><strong>In other news</strong>, I won first place in the <a href="http://www.snd.org/2014/02/college-news-design-contest-set-at-ssnd-mizzou/" target="_blank">SND Mizzou</a> contest's infographics category for the piece below.</p><p></p><center><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7355/11814614133_fa76e7bd93_o.jpg" alt="11814614133_fa76e7bd93_o.jpg" /></center><p></p><p>Obviously, that's a huge honor, and I'm absolutely thrilled. My staff won several other awards, and my friend, <a href="https://twitter.com/the_is" target="_blank">Emily Theis</a>, won third for student designer of the year.</p><p></p><p><strong>I'm also about a third finished</strong> with an online course I'm trying to design to help journalists learn how to scrape data. It's a huge, challenging undertaking. But I'm working with Dr. Adam Kuban and Jennifer Palilonis of Ball State, so I have awesome mentors.</p><p></p><p>More to come, including a rundown of how Ball State's Unified Media Design Studio functioned this year ... and what the UMDS is.</p></div>