Inkscape tutorial: Elements
This tutorial will demonstrate the elements and principles of design which are normally taught to early art students in order to understand various properties used in art making. This is not an exhaustive list, so please add, subtract, and combine to make this tutorial more comprehensive.
Elements of Design
The following elements are the building blocks of design.
Line
A line is defined as a mark with length and direction, created by a point that moves across a surface. A line can vary in length, width, direction, curvature, and color. Line can be two-dimensional (a pencil line on paper), or implied three-dimensional.
Shape
A flat figure, shape is created when actual or implied lines meet to surround a space. A change in color or shading can define a shape. Shapes can be divided into several types: geometric (square, triangle, circle) and organic (irregular in outline).
Size
This refers to variations in the proportions of objects, lines or shapes. There is a variation of sizes in objects either real or imagined.
Space
Space is the empty or open area between, around, above, below, or within objects. Shapes and forms are made by the space around and within them. Space is often called three-dimensional or two- dimensional. Positive space is filled by a shape or form. Negative space surrounds a shape or form.
Color
Color is the perceived character of a surface according to the wavelength of light reflected from it. Color has three dimensions: HUE (another word for color, indicated by its name such as red or yellow), VALUE (its lightness or darkness), INTENSITY (its brightness or dullness).
Texture
Texture is the way a surface feels (actual texture) or how it may look (implied texture). Textures are described by word such as rough, silky, or pebbly.
Value
Value is how dark or how light something looks. We achieve value changes in color by adding black or white to the color. Chiaroscuro uses value in drawing by dramatically contrasting lights and darks in a composition.
Principles of Design
The principles use the elements of design to create a composition.
Balance
Balance is a feeling of visual equality in shape, form, value, color, etc. Balance can be symmetrical or evenly balanced or asymmetrical and un-evenly balanced. Objects, values, colors, textures, shapes, forms, etc., can be used in creating a balance in a composition.
Contrast
Contrast is the juxtaposition of opposing elements
Emphasis
Emphasis is used to make certain parts of their artwork stand out and grab your attention. The center of interest or focal point is the place a work draws your eye to first.
Proportion
Proportion describes the size, location or amount of one thing compared to another.
Pattern
Pattern is created by repeating an element (line, shape or color) over and over again.
Gradation
Gradation of size and direction produce linear perspective. Gradation of color from warm to cool and tone from dark to light produce aerial perspective. Gradation can add interest and movement to a shape. A gradation from dark to light will cause the eye to move along a shape.
Composition
The combining of distinct elements to form a whole.
Bibliography
This is a partial bibliography used to build this document.
Special thanks to Linda Kim (http://www.redlucite.org) for helping me (http://www.rejon.org/) with this tutorial. Also, thanks to the Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org/) and the graphics people have submitted to that project.
Troy Davis Deserves a New Trial
By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate
Posted on September 25, 2008, Printed on September 29, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/100313/
Troy Anthony Davis was scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday. Two hours before the state of Georgia was to execute him, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay until Monday. It had earlier agreed to hear Davis' case on Sept. 29, but Georgia set his execution date six days before the hearing.
Davis was charged with killing Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, in Savannah, Ga., in 1989. Davis had gone to the aid of a homeless man who was being pistol-whipped in a parking lot. Seeing the gun, he said he fled. MacPhail, working security nearby, intervened next, and was killed. Davis, an African-American, claimed his innocence, but was found guilty and sentenced to death. Since his conviction, seven of the nine non-police witnesses have recanted their testimony, alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining their testimony. By coming forward and recanting, they face serious repercussions, possibly jail time. Some have identified a different man as the shooter. This man is one of Davis' remaining accusers.
In July 2007, Davis faced his first execution date. Just a day before he was to be executed, the Georgia Pardons Board granted a stay of execution for up to 90 days. Then, Davis' attorneys argued before the Georgia Supreme Court for a retrial or for a hearing to present new evidence. The requests were denied, by a 4-to-3 vote. In the same period, the U.S. Supreme Court was weighing whether death by lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment (the court ultimately allowed its use).
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Monday whether it will take on Davis' case. If it decides not to, he very likely will be executed.
Among Davis' defenders is former President Jimmy Carter. He said: "This case illustrates the deep flaws in the application of the death penalty in this country. Executing Troy Davis without a real examination of potentially exonerating evidence risks taking the life of an innocent man and would be a grave miscarriage of justice." Georgia Congressman John Lewis also supports Davis. I spoke with Lewis at Invesco Field in Denver, just before Barack Obama's acceptance speech. It was 45 years to the date after the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Lewis recalled that historic day: "We were in Washington, more than 250,000 of us, black and white, Protestant, Catholic, Jews, people of different background, rich and poor. ... In many parts of the South, people could not register to vote, simply because of the color of their skin. And we changed that."
Yet this week, in light of Davis' plight, Lewis told me: "In spite of all of the progress that we've made as a nation and as a people, we still have so far to go. The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in every corner, in every aspect of the American society." He went on to say, when I pointed out that Sen. Obama himself supports the death penalty: "It is troublesome. You know ... someplace along the way, some of us must have the courage to say -- and I'm moving closer and closer to this point -- that in good conscience, I cannot and will not support people who support the death penalty. I think it's barbaric, and it represents the Dark Ages. .... I don't think as human beings, I don't think as a nation, I don't think as a state, we have the right to take the life of another person. That should be left for the Almighty to do."
The death penalty is a noxious and racist practice. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, of more than 3,300 people on death row in the U.S., over 41 percent are African-American -- more than three times their representation in the general population. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973 there have been 130 people exonerated -- people wrongly sentenced to death -- in 26 different states, including five exonerated on death row in Georgia. Evidence even suggests that at least four innocent people have been executed in recent years. There is no physical evidence in the Troy Davis case. After the stay was announced, Davis asked his mother to have people pray for the MacPhail family, and to keep working to dismantle this unjust system. He told her he wouldn't be fighting this hard for his life if he were guilty. This is a case of reasonable doubt. Troy Davis deserves a new trial.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
2008 King Features Syndicate All rights reserved.
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3 Principles for Online Community Building (on Blogs)
If you have ambitions beyond communicating to people and actually want to communicate with people these three principles will help you when starting an online community. Since this is a blog have I chosen the blog as an example, but it could also be a mailing list, a message board, etc. Remember that nothing is set in stone and that planning everything isnt possible. Change is everywhere and only the flexible survive. Nonetheless or maybe exactly for this reason you need a backbone, a foundation, a root or whatever you want to call it and these principles can in my opinion serve as just that. They will help you set up the essentials and plot out the course, but in a way that allows you to develop, grow and expand.
Design for growth and change
Every successful community starts out small, simple and focused. Some remain in that state because they choose to, but others do so because they do not have the necessary prerequisites for organic growth. Most communities are meant to grow, adding breath, depth and complexity in response to the members changing needs and wants as well as the changing conditions of the environment. Ensuring that your community can grow and change is not as simple as it sounds and thinking about it should therefore be one of the first things you do as it influences a lot of the basic decisions you have to make when starting a community. If you simply get the idea and implement it you risk having to start from scratch more than once because you chose the wrong approach, the wrong platform or the wrong design to name a few examples.
For a blog this would mean finding a name that is precise enough for people to know what it is about, but broad enough to be able to cover eventual adjustments of your subject or subjects. Whether you pick a free service or set up your own script should you consider where you want to go and what you want to do. Setting things up and then realizing that the feature you depend on the most isnt available for your platform can be avoided by thinking ahead. The same goes for your design. It has be constant enough to be recognizable and useable over time, but it also has to be flexible enough for you to add features and ads for example without having to redesign from the ground up.
Create and maintain feedback loops
Helping you design for growth and change when you get off the ground is the feedback from the community. When building a successful online community you will constantly have to balance your efforts and those of your members. Regardless of how well you plan, organize and manage the community you will run into problems if you do not listen to the ideas, suggestions and needs of your community. With feedback loops built in will you not only benefit from feedback on what you are doing right and wrong, but also on what you could or should be doing instead or in addition to your current efforts. Do not forget that it is a balance act though. Simply implementing everything that people want is as bad a solution as not listening at all. Everything have to work together in harmony for the community to develop and you as the community builder is the only one who can ensure that it does.
On a blog this would mean enabling comments and actually reading and responding to them, making sure people can contact you in at least one other way if they dont want to comment publicly (or alternatively allowing commenting without asking for personal information) and encouraging feedback in what topics you cover and not least how you post. Asking questions, soliciting comments and suggestions and generally signaling openness will help you a lot. Sadly do I not see much feedback when visiting blogs and I think these bloggers are really missing out on something. Staying on topic (while never making your blog or subject the topic), providing answers (never asking questions) and not to blog too much about yourself and your thoughts are perhaps all good ideas most of the time, but if thats all you ever do then you may very well find yourself flying blind and maybe even solo at some point.
Empower your members progressively
Even if you are the community builder and designer you alone are no community. To actually get something you have to give up something. In this instance what you have to share is power. Obviously you will be the one contributing and influencing almost everything to begin with, but just as obvious is it that this is no lasting formula for community growth. You will have to define the initial purpose, features, design and tone, but as the community grows your influence should diminish as the that of your members grow. You will still be the formal owner, but if no one else feels ownership then the community will cease to evolve and will never mature.
There are two ways that this could work on blogs. One progression were to add contributor profiles to the about page, highlighting people who contribute with the most or best comments, promoting people who comment to actually write posts as well, etc. All more inward oriented activities, but as I see it effective nonetheless. An even more progressive way would be to add guest bloggers and thus draw people from other communities into the blog. This can also be done with linking exchanges in one form another with other blogs and communities. Again could you argue that you arent empowering your members, but at best creating new ones. However, if you consider how strong these new members are will it inevitably mean that the power is distributed, which is the point. The community have to start defining itself at some point and if you can help that along while growing and expanding it, why not?
The principles themselves are from the book Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim, while their interpretation and adaption is mine.
Suggested further reading: Choosing the Domain Name for your Blog, Choosing a Blog Platform, A Primer for Building Online Community, The Three Dimensions of Blogging: The Vital Combination Every Blog Must Have, Blogger. Know Your Readers 10 Traits, Blog Relationships: Are You Listening To Your Readers?.
BloggerCon post mortem 2: Blogging and empowerment
Second post-mortem piece on BloggerCon, trying to dive into the hype and document why I think blogs are revolutionary.
Most of the discussion at BloggerCon, at least on Day One, focused on ways that blogging and the lowered threshold of entry to self-publication facilitated a more empowered, more aware population. I heard an emergent theory of blog empowerment that goes something like this: voice, connection, power. (For background on this piece, read my strawman definition of blogs from the conference.)
Blogs providing voices
By providing a central place for the bloggers work, the blog collects everything the blogger writes in one place, in a chronology. By reading the bloggers past writing, we can discover that the blogger has held the same opinion over time, or has changed it; who the blogger likes, whom he or she distrusts; what subjects engage the bloggers energy; and (by following links back to the blogger) who has opinions about the bloggers work. By providing this ongoing trail of words, this rich back history, and links, the blogger creates an online voice with history, chronology, evolution, and context.More importantly, the act of posting thoughts in a blog on the Internet (as opposed to in a private document) enables others to hear that voice. If the bloggers words are heard, and others enter into dialog, the blogger has ceased to be a passive observer of the Internet and has instead become a creator of it. This enables peoplewhether 12-year-old confused adolescents, 24-year-old software programmers in cubicle farms, 30-year-old Iraqi translators in Baghdad reporting from inside a war, or sixty-year-old grandmothers with a passion for presidential politicswho might never have written anything before to be read around the world.
In education, blogs are being used as teaching aids to help students, from elementary school through graduate programs, to learn to express their thoughts, read and evaluate other sources, and to enter into dialog. Seminarians who blog learn to take responsibility for their daily thoughts and actions. Business students who blog learn how to cooperate with others in loosely distributed groups to have open and constructive discussions and defend their views. Students in impoverished nations who find gaps in curriculum ffor their native languages are encouraged to fill the gaps with their own writing.
Blogs mediating connections
A big conference theme was blogs as mediating transformative connections. By providing alternative outlets for publishing commentary on other materials on the web and for relating first-hand experience, blogs enable individuals to publish opinions and other material that might not otherwise be publishedthis is empowerment by publishing.Blogs written by individuals inside institutions also, through their personal nature, offer the readers of those blogs a connection to the institution at an individual level that they would not experience otherwise. This empowers them through connecting them more closely to that institution and enabling them to better understand the institution. This is empowerment by access.
Finally, when the blogger outside the institution publishes a comment and a link to the work of the blogger inside the institution, and the institutional blogger reciprocates with a link, a relationship develops between the two, the outsider and the institution, that helps the outsider to understand, and in some cases affect, the institution. This is empowerment by relationship.
In journalism, the effect of this empowerment is to greatly expand the power of the non-institutional observer of events, formerly only a reader or consumer of journalism, to create and publish his own version of events, to enter into dialog with the institution that published the first version, and occasionallyas in the case of Trent Lottto change the tone of the institutional coverage and affect the course of events.
This is an expanded version of Jim Moores thesis of the Second Superpower, because in this scenario blogs empower the people inside the institution as well. By providing voices to the powerless, and by giving a voice in the same sphere to individuals inside institutions, greater understanding between the two parties can be reached, opinions can be formed and shaped, and change can be effected.
At the conference, Chris Lydon, Doc Searls, and others observed that this is a process that has been going on for a long time, since the printing press became available to Tom Paine as a means of disseminating his thoughts on political theory. Dave Weinberger posited that blogs put the nail in the coffin of objective voices and help to expose the myriad of overlapping subjectivities by which individual thoughts become part of the public record, shape policy, and create history.
Me? I think theres a lot of promise. I think a lot of conference attendees were right to point out that blogging is a limited empowerment that presupposes a level of access and literacy that are by themselves pretty empowering. But there is something about the way this particular method of communication has shaped up that gives me hope.
BloggerCon post mortem 1: What is a blog?
Ive been sitting on a few short responses to BloggerCon since last Sunday. Im not pleased with them yet, but if I sit on them any longer theyll get even staler, so here goes.
What is a blog?
BloggerCon started by taking an explicitly technology neutral view of blogs, one that discussed the implications of blogs rather than what they were. On Day One (the only day I attended), there was no discussion of the construction of blogs and fundamental operations of blogging. A brief definition, then:
Blogs are personally published documents on the web, with attribution and date, collected in a single place, generally published with a static structure to facilitate incoming links from other sources, and updated with some regularity and frequency from every few days to several times daily. Blogs are generally understood to be subjective, with no authority other than that lent by their author generally. Many blogs consist of links and commentarycomments about something or some entity with a web presence, links to enable the reader to discover the original object being commented on and explore it for themselves. Bloggers leave link trails, hyperlinks back to the subjects of their commentary, and the link trails enable others to go beyond the bloggers subjective opinion and find the original source so that they can evaluate it and form their own opinions.
Blogging thus differs from general web pages in frequency, intent and practice. Rather than claiming authority, blogs assume subjectivity and let the reader make up his own mind. Rather than a collection of documents that define an object on the Internetfor instance, a company, a university, a persons family treeblogs are glosses on those objects, marginal annotations that unlike other forms of web comments such as the sticky note feature in IE have permanence of their own on the Web. Unlike a threaded discussion group (web board or Usenet), where there are generally no authoritative methods to find a prior message and no central record of a persons contributions and opinions, blogs host the authors comments in a single place, at a personal address, and in a chronology so that others can review the bloggers thoughts and comments in one location. By keeping a permanent record of the bloggers writings in a central place, a blog implies a certain amount of accountability for the authors words and opinions; in other online communities, this accountability is generally left up to the community to enforce.
StumbleUpon | biddybiddybop's comments & reviews
Most people are wary of the idea of blogging because they think of it as another, separate activity they have to do on top of their other responsibilities. The term "blogger" has become an acceptable job title, like "journalist" or "pundit". The beauty of blogging, however, is that it's so easy you can do it as part of your everyday web travels.
I think of blogging as leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others to find the very best of the web, with my voice as a guide. The trick, then, is to find a way to quickly and easily save your web travels in a way that's easy for others to follow. For me, the answer is a couple of great plug-ins to my Firefox browser that let me quickly grab, comment, and post from right inside the browser window. Let's look at a couple....
Post to your blog without ever leaving Firefox
ScribeFire, an extension of Firefox , can pop up right in front of the pages you're browsing, allowing you to drag photos, video, and text right into a blog post, then comment and post. I love it because I can post to multiple blogs from this one window and it quickly and easily handles all the formatting for me.
Part of the Google Toolbar extension (for Firefox and IE) is a great little button called "Send this" which allows you to send anything you find in your web travels to your Blogger blog (or to your friends via email or text message).
Again, this makes it incredibly easy to make sure that those great
sites don't get away, and that your audience can see them in an easy-to-read format.
Finally, the beauty of most major online blogging software is that you can post to your blog with a simple email address. Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, (and probably all the rest) just give you an email address that you can send messages to and instantly post to your blog. This makes it easy to post from your cell phone or your Inbox.I hope these tools help you start to think of blogging as an easy way to share your personal taste with an audience of people who are interested in the same things you are.
Let's be honest-- there are times when we all have to make that terribly uncomfortable phone call. You know the one-- "I accidentally killed your cat" or "It's not you, it's me"-- the kind of message you'd really rather leave on the voice mail than risk a full-blown argument about it. With SlyDial, you can do just that-- make sure your message goes to voice mail. SlyDial [via Webware]
Spell checking phrases in TextEdit. Direct download to .mov file if above clickiness doesn't work.
Getting Things Done with Thunderbird
<table style="border-top: 1px solid rgb(47, 124, 170); border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(47, 124, 170); font-size: 10px;" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td align="left">posted at 16:48:25 GMT
By Flipping Heck!</td><td align="right">Posted In
GTD/Productivity</td><td>This post has been viewed
9176 times</td></tr></tbody></table>
Updated: Please see the bottom of the article
Well, I have been at my new job for 3 weeks now and my GTD implementation seems to be holding up quite well at least in terms of my email anyway!
As I have mentioned before the company I work for uses Thunderbird
as its main email system (although Outlook Express and Entourage are
available for those that prefer them). To begin with it was a bit odd
having to tell half the office how to spell my surname a
centrally stored address book is certainly a big advantage that
Microsoft Outlook has over other systems. However I'm finding the
functionality of Thunderbird brilliant in my GTD habits.
Teachers and students alike come to me on those horrible days when their files have suddenly and inexplicably disappeared without a trace. Here is a great article about recovering your data when it goes missing....
How to Recover Deleted Files with Free Software
Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We've all been there at
some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle
Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it's disappeared into
the ether. But before you hit the big red panic button, there's a very
good chance that your file is still alive and kicking somewhere on your
hard driveyou just need to know how to find it. With the right
tools, finding and recovering that deleted file can be as simple as a
few clicks of your mouse.
Part I: The Overview
Ok, so you've lost an important file. Don't panic. Take a breath, and let's see if we can find it. Before you go into full-on file recovery mode, make sure you double-check the folder you had saved it in and the Recycle Bin or Trash. Still nothing?
1. Stop What You're Doing
When your operating system deletes a file, all it really does is mark
the space on your hard drive that your file occupies as free space.
It's still there, but your computer is now perfectly happy to write new
data on top of itat which point the file recovery process
becomes a lot more difficult. That means you should do as little
computing as possible until you find the file you're looking for, since
every time you save a new fileevery time your computer writes
information to your hard driveyour chances of recovering the
file go down.
2. Find the Right File Recovery Program
Windows: You've a lot of really great freeware options for file recovery if you're running Windows. Notable apps include Undelete Plus (original post), PC Inspector File Recovery (original post), and Restoration (original post).Undelete Plus is the most user-friendly option of the bunch, with
advanced filtering options that make it easy to find your needle of a
file among the haystack of deleted garbage, but in my tests I found
both Restoration and PC Inspector File Recovery to be more effective at
recovering files. (Of course, your mileage may vary.) As an added
bonus, the bare bones Restoration is portable, which makes it an
excellent addition to your thumb drive.
UPDATE: Per several readers advice, you may also want to check out Recuva (original post), another freeware Windows file recovery tool.
Mac: If you're on a Mac and aren't afraid to lay down a few bucks in the name of data recovery, the $99 Data Rescue II is the go-to application for file recovery with a friendly graphical interface.
All Platforms: If you're not afraid to crack open a terminal window or command prompt, the free, cross-platform command-line tool PhotoRec (original post)
is a crack shot at recovering photos (as the name implies) as well as
virtually any other file type from your removable media or hard drives.
3. Recover Your Files
Onceyou've picked a tool, it's time to scan your hard drive for your lost
file or files. This process varies depending on the app you're using,
but it's basically the same for all of them: Just point the program at
the hard drive or folder that was holding your missing file and start
your scan. Once the scan is complete, you're going to see a big list of
jumbled file names. Often most of these files are nothing more than
system files that your operating system has created in the course of
basic operation, and you won't need to worry about them. You're just
looking for the file type and name that matches what you've lost.
Once you find what you're looking for, saving it is a matter of right-clicking the file and choosing where to save it.
Went through steps one through three and still aren't having any
luck? It might be worth trying again with a different application,
since there can be a lot of variation between apps. If you're still not
having any luck, part two discusses a few other ways you can try
addressing more specific problems when your data goes missing.
Part 2: More Specific Problems
Above you got a basic overview for recovering deleted files from your
computer. Now we'll take a closer look at some more specific problems,
methods of data recovery, and tools that may be of help in your quest
for your elusive lost data.
Recover Files from a Wiped or Unbootable Hard Drive
Soyou didn't just accidentally delete a file or two and empty your
Recycle Bin prematurelyinstead you've got a whole hard drive
worth of missing data. You can still use many of the applications
mentioned above to recover files from these drives as long as you have
or can get the hard drive into a bootable computer. For more details,
check out how to recover files from a wiped hard drive with PhotoRec (original post) or how to recover data from a crashed hard drive with PC Inspector File Recovery (original post).
If you can't or don't know how to get your unbootable drive into another computer, a Linux live CD can be perfect for rescuing files. If the Linux route scares you off, give the popular BartPE (original post) a try.
Finally, if none of these options can even read your hard drive, you
still might be able to get it working for just long enough with a few
tricks of the data recovery trade, like putting the busted hard drive in the freezer.
Recover Lost Photos
Ifyou need to resurrect photos from a damaged flash memory card from your
digital camera, you'll be happy to know that most of the applications
listed in part one above will do the trickyou just need plug in
your camera or insert the card into your computer's card reader before
running your data recovery application of choice. That said, you can
find other applications, like Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery (original post), that are focused specifically on image recovery that you may want to add to your data recovery toolbox.
Recover Lost Word Documents
If your lost dissertation was saved as a Word document, you've got a
few more interesting options for getting to your lost or deleted
documentsread more about them here and here.
Recover Data from Scratched or Corrupted CDs and DVDs
Ifyour munged data is sitting on optical media like a CD or DVD, the
recovery process can be slightly different. Freeware application CD Recovery Toolbox (original post)
is made specifically to read the portions of a CD that are readable in
an effort to rescue as much data as possible from a damaged disc. If
that doesn't work, you may want to give a look at the 30-day trial of
shareware application CDCheck, as recommended by a reader. Then again, if scratches are the issue, you may be able to get away with simply fixing your scratched CD or DVD yourself.
Part 3: Don't Let This Happen Again
Whateverthe cause of your lost file, the best method of data recovery is a good
preemptive data backup plan. If you're on Windows, we've taken you
step-by-step through how to automatically back up your hard drive
so that this sort of thing never happens again. If you're running a
Mac, do yourself a favor: Get an external hard drive and flip the
switch on the easy-to-use Time Machine. Linux users should check out backup options like FlyBack, TimeVault, or the time-honored rsync.
Have you ever raised deleted files from the hard drive graveyard?
What software did you use to do it? Tell us your tales of file recovery
victory and woe in the comments.
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