The next installment of Live with Lynda, our new webinar series presented in collaboration with the New Media Consortium, is this Friday, April 29. Laurie Burruss will be talking with instructional designer and educational technologist (and lynda.com author) Chris Mattia about Moodle, the LMS and CMS tool that allows educators to interact with students outside the classroom and manage a course from anywhere.
A short description about the webinar, from the nmc.org website:
In this seminar, Chris Mattia will explain how the Art Center College of Design integrated a lynda.com site license into their campus Moodle system. Topics that he will cover include: how to ensure a seamless integration, reducing barriers to entry for faculty, Moodle modifications to ease faculty adoption of lynda.com for enhancing teaching and learning, and Moodle as a foundation for a custom campus portal. Plus, a sneak peek at the new features of Moodle 2.0.
Live with Lynda webinar: Chris Mattia on Moodle LMS Integration with the lynda.com Online Training Library® Friday, April 29, 2011
10:00 am PDT
In this week’s free video technique, Deke McClelland shows you how to use Photoshop’s Offset filter to create a repeating, or tessellating, pattern for your homemade giftwrap project, in which an image (or two in this case) is wrapped around so that it can be tiled into a seamlessly repeating pattern. So you can go ahead and spend all your hard earned cash on the gift inside, and then use Deke’s technique to print your wrapping paper at home. In fact, Deke, feeling extra thrifty, demonstrates this technique with a couple of ribbon photographs complete with bows, saving even more money, not to mention knot-tying:
And by offsetting and duplicating the images in Photoshop, you’ll end up with a convenient, delightfully intertwined pattern, as you can see below. I requested Deke re-color the final image slightly for this blog post example, creating a timely Mother’s Day-friendly theme. The beauty of creating your patterned paper in Photoshop is that it can be adjusted for the season:
Of course, even with Photoshop’s handy filter, having your pattern line up correctly at the edges is problematic, if not downright impractically optimistic. In this week’s exclusive video in the Online Training Library®, lynda.com members can see the fine-tuning that Deke applies at the seams where this pattern repeats. Deke shows you how a combination of layers, masks, and blend modes can correct or simply hide the misaligned edges of the repeating pattern.
Tiling an interesting pattern has all kinds of practical uses, even if you’re not M.C. Escher. If you’re enchanted by the idea of tessellation, and you’re an Adobe Illustrator user, be sure to check out chapter 16, Repeating Tile Patterns, of Deke’s Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced course. With Illustrator, a little math, and some attention to detail, Deke actually shows how he created this amazing set of tiled, interlocking creatures.
Every week, Deke shares a new technique, designed to inspire you in your own work or awaken your own curiosity. And lynda.com members can always review the whole course of collected techniques here. Meanwhile, we’ll see you back next week for another free technique d’Eke.
When was the last time you used a scanner? No, not the kind that prices your Oreos or peruses your carry-on bag. I’m talking about the kind of scanner that turns pictures into pixels and doubles as a photocopier and business machine.
Although photography is decidedly digital these days, the desktop scanner still has its place. You might have old photographic prints, negatives, or slides that yearn to be seen and shared along with their digital descendants. You might shoot film when you want that analog look. You might have logos and other line art that need to end up in illustrations or page layouts.
These are just a few of the reasons why we’re working on some courses covering scanners and the scanning topics that matter in today’s world.
And it’s why we’d appreciate your help.
Below you’ll find a poll containing a list of working titles for a scanning course. Which name do you like best?
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If you have an extra moment, we’d love your comments regarding scanners in general. Is yours dusty and disused? Is it an essential part of your digital life? Or does it fall somewhere in between, in that I-use-it-now-and-then neighborhood?
Most important, what would you like to see in a modern scanning course? What scanning concepts, topics, projects are important to you?
Today we’re pleased to announce the release of a new course designed to help our members market their job skills, Creating an Effective Resume. In the course, lynda.com author Mariann Siegert shares insider recommendations—based on her experience with her own resume service and her interviews with numerous recruiters and hiring managers—for creating a resume that stands out from the crowd. The course covers how to target your resume toward specific employers; how to write your resume so that employers will want to read it; how to choose from the different ways to organize your resume and format each section; how to write titles for online searches and upload to resume banks and job sites like Monster.com; how to write cover letters and thank-you notes; and much more.
In the following video, Mariann answers resume questions that blog readers sent in or posted as comments. As you’ll see, Mariann is passionate about helping people, a passion that is reflected in all the useful tips and techniques in this course. Please let us know what you think!
Want an easy way to create new fields in Access 2007 or 2010? Gone are the days of painstakingly creating each new field, setting its data type, and then modifying the properties, especially for commonly used groups of fields like addresses. This time-saving shortcut from Alicia Katz Pollock shows how you can use field templates to do the job quickly and easily. You’ll find this tip along with lots more in Alicia’s courses on lynda.com, Access 2007 Power Shortcuts and Access 2010 Power Shortcuts.
For this week’s free Photoshop technique, lynda.com author Deke McClelland takes an ordinary photo, applies several filters (two of which he claims to never use under any other circumstances), and transforms the photo into an ink drawing. With the application of Gaussian Blur, Smart Blur, High Pass, Notepaper, and yet more Gaussian blur, you’ll learn how to start with a photo like the one on the left below and apply a pen-and-paper drawing effect like that on the right.
I have to admit, I find these creative transformations to be my favorite flavor of Technique of Deke. I start wanting to apply these treatments to random photos of my friends and family. And for more fun and creative possiblity, this week lynda.com members have an exclusive video awaiting them in the Online Training Libary® in which Deke takes the very same photo and applies a pencil drawing effect. Here’s a preview of what you’ll see:
I’m particularly charmed by the way Deke thinks in the language of Photoshop filters in order to create recipes for final outcomes that have nothing ostensibly to do with the random ingredients he throws in the mix, but still come together to create a comprehensive effect in the end.
What sorts of effect (paradoxically created from obscure filters or otherwise) would you like to see Deke apply his Photoshop-brain to in future episodes?
We recently received the following via our site feedback form (available at the bottom of every page):
From: Nancy White, April 7, 2011
Hi. Where can I leave feedback about a particular course? I’ve been taking the best course EVER!
I responded and let her know she could simply use the same form again, click the course feedback button at the bottom of every course page, or simply reply to my email. Here is her more detailed response, which she graciously agreed to let me share here as a blog post:
I have been singing the praises of lynda.com for many years. It’s hands-down the best learning place online.
I’ve worked in print and online publications for many years. I’ve enjoyed most of the courses I’ve taken at lynda.com, but often it’s on subjects that I am already quite familiar with, so I’ve picked up some great tips and tricks.
But I’ve known next-to-nothing about WordPress. I’ve always considered it a platform for a personal, mom-and-pop-type blog, something I had no need for. But as you know, WordPress has come a long way! As my clients are getting smarter and more tech savvy, they are demanding web sites that they can easily update themselves. So, I’ve learned the fundaments of Joomla! and WordPress, but was very limited when it came to customization.
I gained an incredible amount of knowledge from this course. I’ve been able to convert a rather complicated HTML site into a custom WordPress theme! I am ecstatic! It did not happen overnight, but it happened. I am happy, and the client is happy!
The lessons in this course are a great reference I keep coming back to. I would be happy to see more from Chris Coyier. He’s very practical and easy to follow.
Thank you again for this and all the other great content from lynda.com.
Loving it!
Nancy White
Thank you for sharing your success story with us, Nancy. It always excites us to hear how our members are applying what they learn from the Online Training Library®. In this day and age, it is so important for designers to start getting comfortable and savvy with designing for multiple mediums. Feel free to share your own stories with us via the site feedback or course feedback buttons, or add a comment below. Yes, we really do read every single one.
On Tuesday, April 19th, we’ll be screening Richard Koci Hernandez, Multimedia Journalist on campus at UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive Theatre, located at the Berkeley Art Museum, 2575 Bancroft Way in Berkeley, at 7:00 p.m.
Director Scott Erickson and I will be there to introduce the film. After the screening, Koci will take the stage to be interviewed by Jeremy Rue, a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. We’ll have cameras at the event to record Koci’s interview for publication on lynda.com at a later date. Hope to see you there!
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