Final Exam is in the top on the top navigation of this website.
Monday, December 15th, 2008
Tomorrow's class will be the final exam class. It will be an open internet exam and will consist of questions from this semester. You will have all of the class time to complete this exam but it must be completed within that time.
Here is FTP info again for this class. Please make sure I have everything you have done from this semester so I can give you an appropriate grade.
# Username: classfiles@brianjdurkin.com
# Password: @rt177
# FTP Server: ftp.brianjdurkin.com
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Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Today is the Faculty Appreciation Night art show so we will not be learning anything new. I expect everyone to be working at home on the banner ad which WAS due today but I am extending it to the end of class, the final project which is a full website of your choice showing a few pages and some flash, and trying to work on the CSS Zen Garden. After tonight we have 1 class and then the Final (which will be open-internet like the midterm was) so the next class will be a studio class as well in which I want everyone to work and show me your work in Flash and or the last assignment.
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Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
UPDATE: Today's class will be covering a few things including masks and animation preloaders. I will add more here but for now I want you to have this link because you will be going through this tutorial.
http://www.smartwebby.com/flash/Flash_simple_preloader.asp
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Tuesday, November 18nd, 2008
UPDATE: Assignment for November 18th's class I want you to create a Banner ad for this class. This will be due Dec. 2nd, 2008. Due to low turnout, the class was a studio class/review class. Please read the rest of this page to see the last assignment as well.
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The last class was cancelled due to sickness and so I wanted to make sure you had a resource to review what we have gone over already as far as Flash is concerned. I will also lay out here what to do to furthur your studies outside of this class.
So far in our class we have gone over the basic structure of Flash the program and reviewed what each area does. The areas get broken down like this:
The Stage: This is where the magic happens. Anything done "off-stage" does not get seen by the viewer.
The Timeline: This is where you control frame by frame the action that happens to your flash.
The Tool Bar: This is similar to other adobe products and consist of the selection tools, drawing tools, painting tools, and modify tools.
The Edit Bar: This is your debug friend and one of the most useful tools to help you really understand what is goign on. This tells you what you are editing and you will see it in a hierarchical structure.
The Panels: The Panels have so many different functions. You get to see them by opening them from the windows toolbar option and then selecting the right one OR you can see them on the right usually. Some commonly used ones include the library, Align,color, transform, swatches, and actions.
Panels > Library:
The library is where you keep all your work to drag out to the stage. Think of it like these are the actors and you are molding them into characters in your play. Those "actors" or what we call Symbols consist of Graphics, Buttons, or Movie Clips.
We went over all 3 of these things and found out that you can actually place one in the other. For example, you can create a movie clip, then place that movie clip in a button, which you would eventually drag out onto your stage.
More on The Timeline:
On the timeline we went over some important elements. These elements include Keyframes which basicly tells flash something important is happening here.
We also went over layers and that placing all your elements on different layers will give you more control and make editing easier.
The playhead is the red bar that tells you what frame you are looking at on the stage.
After we went over Motion Tweening, we noticed that we could have an object move from one side of the satge to the other by adding a keyframe and moving the object on that ketframe and adding a motion tween and then we added a stop action to the same ending frame on its own layer so the animation would not repeat.
Here is a list of great Flash websites for you to reference:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/
http://www.kirupa.com/
http://www.flashgeek.com/
http://learnflash.com/
...and this one is my favorite:
http://www.flashkit.com/
make up assignment for last class: Due - by December 9th
I want everyone in the class to pick one tutorial from the flashkit website and email me the .fla of that what you have done. We have gone over enough where I know you can handle any intermediate tutorial but those of you who have taken a flash class already can choose to do something more difficult. Go to http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/ and get started today.
see you soon.
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Things from before October 18th, 2008:
Last class we went over peoples Zen Gardens. If you did not show one that is OK, you will eventually.
The second half of class we went over an advanced CSS technique called "Sprite" which is based on floating list elements to the left, placing a background image to every Anchor tag, and then using background positiong and a width to move that background image based on the link.
Here is a great blog that explains it A List Apart: Sprites
You can also look at the website I work on for another example of how to use this technique: parentsconnect.com
I am sure you noticed I changed this site around too...well I did it for a reason. I changed no HTML at all (except adding a link to my facebook) and changed the nav and look just by altering the CSS. Look at the comment I left in the CSS.
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Things we went Oct.7th:
This was a review class and we all worked on our Zen Garden.
Remember to go to these links for reference:
...and remember to look further down for links to Floats and Positioning
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Things we went Sept. 30th:
Advanced CSS
First thing is first: Go get the html from the css Zen Garden.
REMEMBER: Make a new zenGarden.css file in your styles folder. Then in the HTML file, change this code:
@import "/001/001.css";
to this
@import "styles/zenGarden.css";
Now your file will know where to get the styles from and you can edit those styles. Start by making overall edits to the body tag. Think about setting up basic styles...go "steal" the css from my website and use the eric meyers styles. I will give you extra "points" if I see you have done that.
OK so now what we really talked about:
Positioning your content
So this last class we talked about using absolute positioning. Well here is a really good tutorial on that for you to run through.
http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/html-training/css/positioning/
That tutorial is a really good one in understanding the relation between absolute and relative positioning.
Another topic I discussed was using the "float". Floating something can actually be the same thing as using positioning if used right.
Here is a good tutorial for that as well:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/
The one tip I forgot to mention to you was how to clear a float and what that means. tutorial 3 goes over that. I told you about the "clearfix" I am using but I should have explained how to clear your floats first. Go to the tutorial 3 and read about it and then go to this page to read about my favorite tool, "clearfix". http://www.webtoolkit.info/css-clearfix.html
Please have fun fun fun floating and placing elements on the page without using tables!!!
We will take a look at your work next week.
remember:
update your work and then overwrite your FTP'd work on the server. Update your work frequently and get into the habit of writting something and then overwritting it. This is not graphic design, it is web design and can change whenever you want it to.
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Info from the class before you might still need:
Download a FTP client like the FireFTP add-on for the FireFox web browser
Everything you work on should be placed in 1 main folder called first letter of your first name, and your last name like this for example: "bdurkin"
These are the FTP settings for the space I have set up for you:
(please be kind and dont go into other peoples folders. I am trusting you)
# FTP Username: classfiles@brianjdurkin.com
# Password: @rt177
# FTP Server: ftp.brianjdurkin.com
upload your work there and on Tuesday before class I will copy everyones folders and place them into the web directory so you can see them. I have done it with a few people to show you as an example.
Once I do this you will see that your page is something like http://www.brianjdurkin.com/art177/jsingtokaew/
I am expecting everyone to work on there very own CSS Zen Garden. We will go over them in class next week.