An Artist Visits, Part 1

An excellent interactive artist named Paul Catanese visited Bradley University on Thursday. He was part of this year's set of Visual Voices lectures, and his visit was excellent for a large number of reasons.

Paul is much like me, in that he teaches in the field of multimedia. We swapped notes on techniques in web design classes. (He was quite impressed with Chad's idea to use a del.icio.us account to keep track of pertinent web links.) We discussed quite a few issues in teaching web design:

1. In the span of only two classes, we must take folks who are used to the drag and drop ease of Flash, and show them that to truly write standards-compliant sites, you need to have a good understanding of the HTML code of a website. (Luckily, we've begun to introduce HTML and basic web design earlier into Bradley University's curriculum.)
2. Paul said that he'd love to be able to teach PHP and MySQL in his top-level web design course, but that he just feels that there isn't enough time.
3. I was showing my class some tips on producing sitemaps and wireframes in OmniGraffle when Paul came into my web design course. If you own a Macintosh, you owe it to yourself to at least download OmniGraffle, since there it a 20-node limited version available. There are excellent free stencils available to produce wireframes, UML diagrams, network layouts, and hundreds of other types of graphical documents. Paul showed me Graffletopia, which has literally hundreds of free documents and stencils available for download.

Then Paul left for a little bit as I went to gather the stable of mobile phones for my special topics course, and I offered to let him speak for quite awhile, since Paul has done some neat things with blending gaming appliances like the Game Boy Advance into his artwork.