Resources for Digital Rhetoric and Design

On this page, you'll find a wide variety of resources and tools for designing and presenting your work, including new technologies, asset repositories, user documentation, conference opportunities, examples, and more. It will grow substantially over the course of the semester.

Assets

Images, illustrations, animations . . .

iStockphoto.com: http://www.istockphoto.com
A vast collection of low-cost, high quality, royalty-free photography, illustrations, and animations.

Flickr Color Selectr: http://color.slightlyblue.com/
Searches Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flikr by color profile

Music . . .

Incompetech: http://incompetech.com
Royalty-free music by Kevin MacLeod for use with digital projects, film, and animations.

Color Management

Color, Contrast, and Dimension in News Design: http://poynterextra.org/cp/colorproject/color.html
A Flash movie that teaches the fundamentals of designign with color

ColorMixers: http://colormixers.com/mixers/cmr/

Color Blender (Eric Meyer): http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/

ColorMatch: http://www.neteffect.dk/colormatch/

Digital Presentation Tools and Reference Guides

Animoto: http://animoto.com/
Helps you make Ken Burns-style music videos using your own image collection (and music, if you want to), for posting to personal websites, Facebook, etc. You can get a free account to make short animotos. These may be useful for promotion and marketing, digital scrapbooking, and more. Try one out as a "preview" (or overture) before a live presentation to get the audience in the mood. Check out our class-generated examples.

Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/
Perhaps best described as "YouTube for documents," a free tool for publishing a wide-variety of documents in iPaper format for distribution at the Scribd site or for embedding in social networking sites and local websites. For an example, see the 680S course flyer.

slide:ology: http://www2.lib.purdue.edu:2425/9780596522346
A book on professional slide design by Nancy Duarte, who helped engineer brilliant slide presentations by, among others, Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. This is a Safari Online book and is only available to Purdue students and requires log-in before you can access it. It's well worth the visit.

Drop.io Assets for Class Projects

Chris: http://drop.io/chrisarnold
Ehren: http://drop.io/epflugfe/
Jeff: http://drop.io/jbacha680
Josh: http://drop.io/jprenosi
Karen: http://drop.io.karenkaiserlee1
Kristin: http://drop.io/ldhandbook
Mark:
Morgan: http://drop.io/mptpf4223

Project Management Tools

drop.io: http://drop.io
A free resource for sharing files and managing complex projects. This is one of those "must-haves" for digital designers and others working collaboratively to develop projects.

Typography Tools

Typechart: http://www.typechart.com/
Lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.

Typetester: http://www.typetester.org/
Lets you compare type on the screen, on the fly, with CSS exporting. Very handy!

Resource
GUIDELINES FOR TYPOGRAPHY IN NBCS, an excellent overview of typographical design by Charles Hedrick. PDF document.
http://www.nbcs.rutgers.edu/~hedrick/typography/typography.janson-caspari.11515.pdf

Web Development Tools

Firefox Add-Ons
These free add-ons for Firefox give users a wide array of tools for analyzing Web pages, CSS, images, colors, and more.

Web Developer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Firebug: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843