SMICK.NET - Graphics Guy » training

Get some video tips

mike smick — Tue, 09 May 2006 04:49:53 +0000

With all the effort put into making my friends wedding video, I thought it would be appropriate to offer some tips in case you have to do this kind of thing yourself.

Read my Video Tips article.�

Typography Learning links

mike smick — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 02:38:08 +0000

Found a course on typography today from looking at the Open Courseware finder. If you want to take a class on typography, check this out first, it’s full of resourses. In fact, all the links could be bottled up and saved and that would be most of the course anyway. Hmm, I think I’ll do that. See below. Oh yes and the course page: link

Typography Links

Also, a nice little Flash Course, Documentary Film Class, HTML Class, and How People Learn

My InDesign CS2 video series at Atomic Learning

mike smick — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:52:10 +0000

My InDesign CS2 Series is online. Mike Smick InDesign CS2 Atomic Learning.

Communiversity

mike smick — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 04:34:27 +0000

Just finished up my Adobe InDesign class for Communiversity. Originally I was teaching one three hour class, but then they asked me to add a session because of all those interested. In both sessions everyone was great. A lot of really interesting and fun people. I didn’t get paid for teaching these two three-hour classes because I wanted to share my knowledge. Everyone seemed to feel it was worth their nine dollar registration fee, which I’m happy about.

I haven’t decided what I’ll do next fall session for communiversity, perhaps I’ll teach the same classes, or branch out. I could teach a Wiki class perhaps or some other desktop publishing class. That would be pretty cool.

Free Software Class at the Communiversity

mike smick — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 04:40:50 +0000

At UMKC I taught a FreeSoftwareClass for the Communiversity program. It went well I thought, though it was boring at times for the four attendees. I wasn’t sure if I’d have three hours worth of information to talk about, but after talking about the different software licenses and the Open Source community, I could have went a little longer with demos. We covered office, graphics, and other utilities that they might make use of. I hope I impressed upon them the benefits of mindmapping.

mindmaps

mike smick — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 04:56:57 +0000

My sleep schedule is so out of whack. I’m feeling it’s like 9pm, but it’s almost eleven. Yikes! I didn’t realize that DST would throw me off so much. It’s either that or it’s the creatine powder I’ve been seasoning my rice with. I wanted to mention something about mindmaps here because it’s something I use quite frequently.

Mindmaps are drawings of your ideas, plans, anything. Instead of a list, you make a sort of tree or flow chart. It’s purposefully flexible, so you let your instinct take over and categorize things. I learned about it originally in a franklin covey class at work. Remember making outlines in school. numeral 1, then letter a, then roman numeral IV. what the hell? I never understood that! Just like most of english classes, you get stuck in the grammar, and forget how to create.

FreeMind is a popular and free mind mapping software used in the open source community. I love it. I have seen tonight though that there are more things you can do with it than I have done. Somebody created a flash freemind viewer so you can view your map online. That is really excellent. You can do it anyway with Freemind’s java plugin, but there is something about this use of the XML that really impresses me.

When I get around to it, I have a plan for a mindmapping article I want to write. After seeing some uses of freemind, I have a lot to learn before I can teach it.