Artist, graphic designer, & tech consultant in Nelson County, VA
Author:lemsy
John LeMasney (lemsy) is an artist, graphic designer, and technology creative. He is located in beautiful Nelson County, VA, but works remotely with ease. Contact him at: lemasney@gmail.com to discuss your next creative project.
In this session, local graphic designer and technology consultant John LeMasney will demonstrate how to get started with digital graphic design using free (open source) software, and will introduce the concepts of color choice, font choice, visual inspiration, best practices, and resources. If you ever find yourself tasked with putting words and images on a page in an interesting way, but have never had any training in how to do that effectively, this class is for you!
Hi all. This is just a note to let you know that our recent move from ‘filehost a’ to ‘filehost b’ is complete, and that our broken links, images, and other issues should now be resolved! If you see anything out of place, please don;t hesitate to drop me a line at lemasney@gmail.com.
Location: Princeton Public Library Technology Center
Interested in creating your own blog? In this two-part course, social media and technology expert, John LeMasney will teach how to start and manage a blog for free through WordPress. Prior web design experience is not needed. Session 2 will be held on Tuesday, May 21.
A bulbous linear illustration by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
A bulbous linear illustration by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I am fascinated by serial linear illustrations that reveal form simply by altering the sequence of lines. It’s not a new idea, visually speaking, but one that I’ve seen executed beautifully many times and have tried to emulate several times. I once had an introductory graphic design class that challenged my feelings about whether I was capable of doing design because the assignments were often about how steady you could hold a pen, and I’ve never had an especially steady hand. One assignment in particular was an introduction to serial line as illustration in which we were to examine using repeated lines in order to show emotions. It was a glorified lesson in Gestalt principles, but Gestalt was never mentioned. At any rate, my solutions to the problem were hard to see because my work was marred by sloppy penwork, uneven lines, and a very specific expected aesthetic. I think that’s one of the reasons I adored the move to digital design. No longer did the steadiness of my hand or the cleanliness of my penwork get in the way of someone seeing what was in my head. I would have gladly presented the image above as an answer to the emotion of joyous, and likely would have been deemed successful.
You may have heard how important it is to consider security while using technology.
Image from 1928 US patent 1,657,411 (Enigma machine) by Arthur Scherbius (died 1929). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is rather abstract. A more concrete example of technology security is to choose great passwords. If you choose a great password and keep it in your head and not on paper or in anyone else’s head, you immediately offer yourself more security against someone using your devices and services as though they were you. You might be tempted to write it down on a note in your office, or share the password with a trusted friend, but the minute you do that you immediately offer a chance for the password to get into the wrong hands, eyes, or ears. Also, if you believe that you are not important enough to be targeted for password theft, or that it’s about money or fun, you are overlooking the possibility that your account might be used to simply disguise the activities of the person who uses it, making it seem as though you did something illegal, immoral, or sinister instead of them.
Make your password hard to guess, hard to crack, and easy for you to remember.
English: This is a screenshot of windows password unlocker, which is a professional windows password reset tool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For example, let’s look at creating a great password from a not so great one.
‘06011960‘ is a horrible password. It’s a birthday, and anyone who can find out your birthday (not as hard as you might think) can try to log in with it to your accounts.
‘jimmy‘ is also a very bad password, for a few reasons, namely I probably chose it because it is significant to me, and anyone who knows me might be able to guess it. Even if they don;t they might use what’s called “brute force attacks” with dictionaries of common words, names, and strings used for passwords to automatically get into my account. With simple passwords like this, they emphasize the ease of you remembering it, rather than the difficulty of bypassing it.
‘JimmY‘ is a better password, because I have introduced shift characters (capital letters), which extend the time that someone would need to brute force attack and discover the password. It’s still kind of short and common, though.
‘JimmY&jAne‘ is better yet, because it is longer, uses shift characters, and uses a non-alphanumeric character.
If we take this to an extreme, we might choose ‘!32%tRuH&k*9‘, which would be incredibly hard to guess, and difficult to crack, but there’s a problem in that there is little chance that you will remember it.
A good compromise, and a great password, is something like ‘The4WallsOfMyR00mAreFriends‘ which introduces some great features.
German / Deutsch Enigma Machine: World War II Museum, New Orleans, Lousiana, USA (Photo credit: Bogdan Migulski)
It’s both memorable and nonsensical. It’s long, which makes it harder to crack. It has alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric characters, making it harder to crack. It mentions a personal keyword (friends) for the site that I am using the password for (facebook), because I am choosing a different password for each site or service. This is a good thing for when someone guesses one of my passwords, they would not necessarily know my other passwords. It uses many shift characters. This password would be very hard for others to guess or crack, but very easy for you to remember. You might choose a favorite song lyric, quote, or statement as the basis for your password. If you are a Rolling Stones fan, perhaps ‘DidY0uGuessMyName?’
HTTP vs. HTTPS
One last point: If you are using public WiFi, such as at a Panera, you should be extra careful about logging into important sites (e.g. banking, email, social networks) unless the URL for the site begins with https:// because otherwise someone could capture your password as it travels to the site over http:// using what’s known as ethernet sniffing software. https:// is an encrypted protocol, and provides some (if imperfect) protection from password capture and other activity.
If you want to know more about how you can stay protected while you are using technology, please contact me at lemasney@gmail.com. The first session with new clients is always free.
Libraries, the original co-working space by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Libraries, the original co-working space by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I have recently had some discussions with people considering co-working spaces and thought immediately of how many times I’ve used the library for this purpose. Thanks to Janie Hermann for the idea to make a quick graphic on it. Libraries have community, technology infrastructure, comfort, services, facilities and amenities. If you have a cafe there, extra points. 🙂
The Graphic Design Experience Every Student Needs to Succeed
Blogging platform WordPress celebrates 10th birthday
