Thursday, April 11, 2019

Create Your Own Custom Culture With My Vans Digital Design Decks

While my elementary kids are too young to enter the annual Vans Custom Culture Contest (where high schoolers can win $75K for their art programs), I have still found ways to spark creativity with their free templates available on the contest site.

While the printable templates are fun for some unplugged creativity, I have converted the lace-up model into digital form for Keynote, Google Slides, and PowerPoint. Because Keynote is just so stinking rad, there is a ton more functionality because you can fill shapes with images or mask images with precision as shoe parts. PowerPoint has its own cool abilities like filling with images and adding textures.   The slides version will let you click on a part and then customize your colors. Users on all platforms can then do further customization by applying graphics with transparent backgrounds on different parts.

The process started by uploading a digital image of a coloring template into Keynote and then I edited shapes (Right click a shape. Select "Make Editable".) to match each part. It's a pretty easy process to master with some practice. Just turn down the opacity so you can see the image you are copying.

The forefoot section, as are all parts of this shoe, is really a shape made in Keynote.

Once I was able to create each part of the shoe, then the real fun started. I was able to simply color some parts and mask other parts with images. One of my all-time favorite photographers is Clark Little, a Hawaiian surfer who braves the shorebreak of the fabled North Shore to create incredible images. Right up there with my love for Clark's work is my love for Vans themselves. So, I imagined the perfect art vs. fashion collaboration and mocked up my own dream set of Clark Little Vans. I then took one more step and put to use the new export as "animated gif" feature and created an image to show them all off.

.Gif created in Keynote with new export feature .

So what kind of cool "custom culture" will you or your students create with the templates?

Keynote Deck 
Google Slides Deck
PowerPoint Deck


Saturday, April 6, 2019

CUE Masterclass: Transform Teaching with MacOS - Enroll Today - $69

Apple's  Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and iMovie have long been considered powerful tools for the classroom but applying all of that potential can be a real challenge.

CUE's six week Masterclass "Transform Teaching with MacOS", will not only help you amplify your skills with these apps more but also develop a whole quiver of new ways to amplify your teaching.

Engage learners with multimedia rich "SuperDocs" in Pages and have them export their learning as multitouch iBooks. Discover a minimum of 20 ways to use Keynote for everything but presentations. Get organized with Numbers and overhaul student-created videos with professional techniques.

Apple Distinguished Educator Andy Losik will host three live Zoom conferences and provide on-demand assistance throughout the class and get you prepped to gain AppleTeacher certification. All of this for just $69.

Sign up today as class begins on April 16.