Here I discuss how I learned to create different types of images and applied them to my page.

Creating a Favicon

I set out to create a unique site icon know as a “favicon”, its a small symbol that is seen next to the name of the website on the tabs of your browser. I created the image above with the Affinity graphic design software. It took some time to learn, but it functions similarly to most Microsoft programs. If you have used PowerPoint or any other program that allows you to crop, edit, or draw over an image, you’ll be familiar. Before I started to draw anything I created a new square canvas with an aspect ration of 1:1. I chose the 1000-pixel grid and manually adjusted the page height and width to 512px X 512px, this is important or it wont work as a favicon. To make the shape of the radish I used the “Heart Tool” to drag and manipulate the heart until it resembled the classic elongated carrot/radish shape. I used the “Path Brush Tool” to draw on the horizontal accent lines and adjusting the width and color of the stroke. Once the lines were drawn, I used the “Stroke Width Tool” to create the uneven taper for the lines. For the sprouts, I used the Path Brush tool again but this time I only drew a few lines at the top of the sprout. It didn’t look like a leaf until I used the “Blend Tool” to replicate and connect the lines to form the leafy sprouts. When I was finished, I exported the image as a .png file, since this is the recommended file type for a favicon. The software that I used can be downloaded for free here: Affinity Download page.

Header Image

This turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be, in fact I had to use my “phone a friend” life line. Finding and altering the image was easy enough, I found it on flickr then uploaded it to Canva digital design webpage and applied a filter to increase the color contrast. Now comes the part that tripped me up, editing and creating a custom theme that allows for a banner photo. Once you have entered the editing portion of your WordPress page, on the tool bar on the left of the screen select appearance and then themes. If you have an active theme already, select customize at the bottom of the page. You will be brought to a page that allows you to make edits to your current page, a new set of options will appear on the left, select patterns. It will display a bunch of premade patters (most you have to pay for) but on the left there is a section for headers, that will present you a few options. Pick one that has a header image already. It will open a new editing page, click on the image, then the top tool bar select replace to either upload or open from your media library. I made sure to save my image as a .jpg as WordPress recommends. Now your photo should be in the banner, you can adjust the image focus and width of the header from there. Once saved, check to make sure that this header is displayed throughout your whole page.

This week I want to go over what I have learned in class about copyright, creative commons, and attribution.

What is copyright?

From the reading assignments web article The Cyberlaw Guide to Protest Art: Copyright, an explanation of what copyright is, what I understand copyright to be is the legal protection of a person’s creative works. Those works could be any kind of art; meaning drawings, music, videos, photos, writing, etc. The copy right protection means that only the creator/owner of the work, unless they give permission to someone, has the sole right to sell their work. Preventing someone else from copying their work and selling it for themselves. The purpose is to ensure that people who spend time, money, and effort on creating something will get to make money buy selling their work. If as soon as someone created something new, everyone could just copy it and sell it as their own, the creator would lose a lot of the profit.

What is the Creative Commons?

I chose the creative commons: CC BY-NC 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license because the blogs on this subdomain are all projects for the University of Mary Washington Intro to Digital Studies: DGST 101 Course. Since they are all school projects, I chose to make the work in this blog to be the most permissive. By doing so, re-users have the most freedom to, as creative commons summarizes: “to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator” creativecommons.org summarized explanation of the six types of creative commons licenses.

What about attribution?

Attribution is when you cite the creator when you use, quote, talk about someone’s work. Some people will state on their website how they want to be cited, you will see that on peer reviewed journals also. If they do not specify or you cannot find the original creator, you do you best to cite where you found it. Essentially, you are giving them credit for their work. However, some people will chose not to share their work for free, generally you will see a watermarked or reduced image posted on their website. Some work can be considered “public domain” if the copyright has expired, has been removed by the creator, or was produced by the government. However, it is still good practice to cite whenever possible.

What about “fair use”?

This gets tricky, typically you are not allowed to use another person’s work for your own gain. Unless you are criticizing it, because it would be unreasonable to have to ask permission of someone to write negatively about their work. However, using a work and transforming it into something else is generally considered fair use. As well as using it for educational purposes. A good example of fair use is Calvin and Hobbes, a common sticker seen on the back of cars is a depiction of Calvin urinating on a logo. According to the Palette Swap web article by Kevin Podas the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson did object to the depiction of Calvin Urinating. Only later did he decide to allow that image to be considered fair use. The bottom line is, be sure cite the creators whenever possible and do you due diligence prior to using someone’s work.