We ran a session on trying to figure out what we should do with the Surveillance Observatory site.
What it is now
The site is basically designed for the community to submit news, research, and personal stories. I think it’s pretty easy to do technically. I even added a bookmarklet a while back in an attempt to make it even easier. I could be wrong, but I don’t think the issue is a technical hurdle.
The presentation
So the idea was to propose some speculative futures for the site. We decided to do it based on loosely on the the Tarot Cards of Ed Tech. People in the session would indicate which ideas seemed good and add post-it notes with details, extensions, etc. to the topics of their choice.
I had a good time designing the cards based on descriptions that Brian, Anne-Marie, and Amy came up with. I spent more time in Illustrator than I ever have before. It was interesting. Illustrator has more interfaces and options than just about anything I can recall. The stuff is all hidden in weird nooks and crannies. I would know where it was one moment but then I’d lose it.
I also printed it out the cards on 12×18 posters at CVS. I don’t think I’ve printed anything beyond standard printer paper since the early 2000s. I exported it in about 8 different styles as I tried to make sure it’d print well and still be small enough to upload to the site. I thought SVG would be the way to go, but it was not a supported file type. I ended up creating some PDFs with the DPI set to 355 or some something like that after some basic searching.
The image files are included below in case they’re of interest to anyone. AI files and exports are in there.
Agree 100% on your take on Adobe Illustrator. Boy, that thing has been around even longer than Photoshop. I think the first version I bumped into was named after the year it came out Illustrator 88: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Illustrator. And I think the years like the sediments at the bottom of the ocean it’s acreted more toolbars, menus, pallettes, plug-ins and functions than the whole Creative Suite. There’s a lot there and no surprise you may have found a pallette but then lost it again.