As you might have noticed, I haven’t updated my blog in a while. My faculty life is coming to an end. And anyone who’s ever been to the faculty knows, the last days are the busiest.

Besides that, I’ve been teaching Sabina a little bit of photography. Shooting people, especially. Which means I have to model a lot lately. But I like it. Look.

As one of the projects in this semester I had to do a paper on quality. Quality on just about anything I can think of.

I decided to write about the quality of professional photography. Is it really worth all the expenses and time spent?

The paper is in Slovene, but even if you’re not fluent in the language, there are some pretty photos to look at.

The paper:
Kakovost profesionalne fotografije

Slides from my presentation:
Kakovost profesionalne fotografije - predstavitev

As part of my last year’s photography class, I had to make a photo album with some of my work. Rules of the game were:

• Needs to include 95 photos - 40 coloured, 40 black&white, 15 photoshopped.
• Format has to be at least A4.
• Each photo needs a photographic assignment and some notes on things you have learnt from it.
• Each photo must also be accompanied by information about camera model, aperture, ISO, etc.
• No photos of “cute pets” and “gorgeous sunsets”.

After postponing it for months, I’ve finally decided to finish the album last month. I did the layout and sent the pdf for printing to DigiFot. They did a great job printing it, and here are the results:

You can also view the PDF version of the album:
Photography - Dušan Smolnikar

Photos have been compressed, so may not look their best on screen. Colors also seem to show up more correctly in Adobe Reader than they do in Apple’s Preview. To view better versions of most photos, plus some of the newer ones, I’ve put up a gallery on flickr. It shall be regularly updated.

Best of
The photos I consider to be my favorite.

As some of you know, I was part of Zero.99 seminar in Zagreb, talking about web accessibility with Jasna Medar.

All in all, we had a nice trip. The seminar was quite interesting, some reports very informative and we got to see some funny videos as well. Professors were all very impressed with us (ego boosting effect). We got to see Zagreb afterwards as well. It’s a nice city. Looks good trough the wide angle lens, plus a local girl took us to a pub with home brewed beer. Tasty.

There are a couple of ways how you can experience what was going on. Non-slovene speaking readers may have a few problems with these. Just skip to the photos.

Videos
Open these with VLC. It’s best if you just copy the url and paste it into the url field of VLC’s “File -> Open network”

• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb01.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb02.ts
• http://x3.ntf.uni-lj.si/~ucakar/zagreb03.ts

I’m not telling when I am on, but Jasna may be the first in video #3 ;)

Slides
You can scroll trough the slides we used for our presentation.

Photos
As always, I have a few …

If you’ve just tuned in, and want to know more about web accessibility, head over to Slo-Tech version of our paper - part 1 and part 2. If you either want to know even more, or don’t understand a word of this funny language, try the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Is it time to update the blog yet? Might be …

I’ve spoke about accessibility before. To be exact, Jasna, a classmate of mine, and me did a paper on it last semester. The professor liked it. So we decided to publish our paper online (part I, part II). We’ve got some positive feedback on it.

A few weeks ago, the professor offered us to present the paper on a student seminar in Zagreb, Croatia. Naturally, we said yes and are quite excited about it. It’s taking place on October 10th, 10.00. There are going to be a few Croatian and a few Slovenian students speaking on various topics relating to print and interactive media.

Our speech will be in Slovene, but we were told to prepare the slideshow in English. It’s still in its beta stages, but I’ll publish it here when it’s done. For you to know and learn :)

My recent typographic homework was creating a study calendar for our faculty. We got a bunch of dates (faculty-related as well as red-letter days) and the following requirements:

• This would be a table calendar
• Paper size is 140 x 100 mm or smaller
• Each month should fit on one piece of paper, allowing for max 12 sheets (+1 for the title page)
• There should be some space for students to write down their notes and appointments
• It’s a study calendar and therefore starts with october and ends with september
• Design should be typographic

My first concern was the really small page size. How does one fit 31 days along with empty space besides each of them on 100 x 140 mm? i did some googling on table calendars, and found a shape I quite liked. This would allow for easy access when writting down notes, plus double my paper size (after all, a sheet of paper has two sides and we can use both!).

It took me a week o two to finish my design (not working on it all the time of course), but here it is:
Calendar - student year 2008/09
It’s best viewed in book mode enabled in your pdf viewer (2 pages, or facing pages), so you can see one month’s sheets side-by-side.

Font used is Anivers by Jos Buivenga, which is the same font I use on this website for main headings. Extra typographic elements are in Times.
I’m using two colors - black and pink, again, same as on this website. I was planning to replace the pink with a similar pantone, but forgot when working on it on the last minutes before the deadline. So the color used is C0 M80 Y15 K0.
Monthly poetry was found on this website.
Oh and it’s obviously in Slovene, along with old slovene month names

I also have the print version, if anyone is interested. Use it if you wish and do notify me if you find it useful. :-) Dates are specific to my faculty (NTF), but drop me an e-mail if you’d like a different version.