Student Page
I hope everyone’s enjoying the reading! These are two of my favorite books, so I’m really looking forward to discussing them with you. We’re lucky to have David Staley join us by video chat Monday night (and he’s also a big fan of McCloud’s book), so please post responses to the reading by tomorrow so he and I will have time to review them before class.
On a related note, I’ve created a Students page that lists links to individual student blogs in addition to aggregating recent posts from everyone’s blogs. There’s an RSS feed for that list that you can use to keep up with posts from other students. If you’re name isn’t listed on that page, that means you either haven’t registered for this site, or did but left the website field blank. Once you add that link, your posts should show up in the aggregated list soon after.
The Staley Book
This the first time that I have come across this book and this auhtor, although ironically a good friend of mine grew up in Tiffin OH where Dr. Staley teaches. I have to say that the book was fascinating. While the concepts of visualization are not totally alien to me especially having been involved in writing/journalism for a number of years, it was extremely enlightening to read a theoretical approach. I have always felt that adding graphics, sidebars, data in various forms adds immeasurably to the quality of an article or book if they are done right. While I can appreciate the argument put forth by some that they can be a distraction I would much rather hook someone by having interesting graphics and hopefully either pull them back to read further or to go off and explore a particular subject because of their interest in what the graphics displayed then to bore someone to death with only text. Having been a High School history teacher as well I know that the use of graphics certainly help me present data to the students in a number of different formats which I believe helped reinforce their interest. This is a book that I would like to read again in addition to following through on a number of the footnotes as to other people’s work. I do agree with the auhtor that I don’t think that text will ever be replaced only by a graphic visual representation but I for one certainly believe in their value as additions to any text.
The McCloud book was also an interesting read although I found myself being distracted very easily while going through the book, unlike the Staely book. However, I did appreciate the auhtor’s points about how comics are put together and the work involved in creating this type of genre. Like the Staley book I would like to read through it again because I am sure that there were subtle points that I as a complete novice when it comes to this field missed completely.
The CSS book was/is a great book. Ironically, I thought the strength of his exercises was the screen shots that he included that allowed me to see exactly what he was writing about as he led you through each exercise. There is nothing worse than pages and pages of text without a visual reference point to guide someone through the maze.
Altogether, a very interesting mix of readings for the first class.
Alan