Overview Digital design, a term used to describe a wide variety of computer related skills, includes work in fields such

as web design, digital imaging and 3D modeling. The term can further be expanded to any digitally created visual media. Digital advertising and web design firms compete with individual designers to sell their expertise, while artists use the same mediums to express themselves. Amassing skills in digital design has endless benefits ranging from a source of income to a fulfilling weekend hobby. Types While there are countless types of digital design, a few are especially prominent. The most common use of the term refers to web design, which is in itself a broad field that includes digital imaging, coding, animation, interface design, and a variety of other skills. Web designers employ their digital imaging abilities to spruce up websites. Digital imaging ranges from the creation of simple navigation graphics such as buttons and arrows, all the way to complex photo doctoring and the creation of artistic imagery from scratch. Furthermore, web designers may expand their skills to animation to create interfaces that move organically to bring their imagery work to life. But animations aren't just for websites--digital designers create 3D models for Hollywood movies, architectural planning, and the design of product prototypes. Finally, the ability to code allows web designers to tie their skills together to create an end product. But not all digital designers deal with websites. Some individuals may specialize in a niche field such as the touch-up of photographs for printing in magazines and papers. Vancouver Film School www.VFS.edu/Game-Design Make 2013 Your Year. Start Your Your Career in Game Design! Ads by Google

Significance Digital design has become a significant part of society--almost every product and field of work includes digital design at some point. Car companies start their design process using computer drafting programs, while food distributors hire digital designers to create logos and bright boxes to help sell their products. Movies are full of computer graphics, which are often indistinguishable from reality, and online marketplaces are meticulously put together by programmers. Digital design has pervaded all of society. Before the advent of digital design many tasks that are now simple required complex techniques to create specialized printing stencils and arduous drafting, while others, such as 3D modeling, were impossible. The examples thus far have not even touched upon individual uses of digital design, such as the ability to touch up personal photographs, or as a form of self expression. Benefits The use of digital design in lieu of traditional methods provides a variety of benefits. As touched upon before, digital design has simplified many processes that were once painstakingly complex. Designing a building or a new product once required mechanical drafts that could include thousands of unique images. Every layer of a product had to be drawn from every direction with photographic explanations for every function. Now, using specialized computer programs, digital designers can create a single draft that depicts every function, layer, and perspective of an item. Not only that, but a mistaken line does not ruin a piece of work--slips of the wrist can be undone with a few clicks of the mouse. Digital work can also be transmitted and reproduced with ease. A digital photographer in Tokyo can instantly send an image to New York to be touched up and included on an online advertisement. Not only that, but the digital medium allows the end product to be reproduced instantly without cost. Training/Education While digital design can be self taught with a little determination, employers in the field prefer their recruits to pursue formal education. This ensures that workers have experience with the most current applications on top of the line computers. Furthermore, students will pick up marketable skills and may have the opportunity to make connections with people who are already working in the field. Universities across the world offer both two and four year programs in digital design, usually with focuses on specific fields such as digital imaging, web design and coding. Both
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students and self-taught digital designers can advertise their skills through portfolios that display their abilities. Job Opportunities Digital designers face a large amount of competition in the job market. Like most other artistic fields, jobs are in high demand. Some niche markets such as digital drafting and mechanical modeling offer more lucrative jobs, but also require more education and less of an artistic outlet than the more common types of design. But luckily, because of the massive breadth of positions in digital design, those with training and a strong portfolio have a good chance of finding work in their field of choice. Those without degrees in a specific field of digital design should not expect to find a salaried position without first creating a high quality portfolio, though freelance work may be available. Self-taught individuals can also find some success through the creation of their own small firm. Many of the salaried jobs in digital design exist in corporate settings, such as advertising firms and design consultation. These companies usually sell their abilities to other corporations with specific design needs.

Product design Product design is concerned with the efficient and effective generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products. Product Designers conceptualize and evaluate ideas, making them tangible through products in a more systematic approach. Their role is to combine art, science and technology to create tangible three-dimensional goods. This evolving role has been facilitated by digitaltools that allow designers to communicate, visualize and analyze ideas in a way that would have taken greater manpower in the past. Product design is sometimes confused with industrial design, industrial design is concerned with the aspect of that process that brings that sort of artistic form and usability usually associated with craft design to that of mass produced goods. Process Product designers follow various methodology that requires a specific skill set to complete. Initial Stage

Idea Generation can be from imagination, observation, or research. Need Based Generation can be from the need to solve a problem, the need to follow the popular trends, or the need for a product to do a specific task.

Mid Stage

Design Solutions arise from meeting user needs, concept development, form exploration, ergonomics, prototyping, materials, and technology. Production involves fabrication and manufacturing the design.

Final Stage

Marketing involves selling the product. It can either be client based which mean the a client buys the design and manufactures it and then sells it to customers. Or it can be user based where the product is sold directly to the user by the designer.

Application Product design ranges from furniture, electronics, lighting, tools, toys, and general everyday objects.
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Instructional design Instructional Design (also called Instructional Systems Design (ISD)) is the practice of maximizing the effectiveness, efficiency and appeal of instruction and other learning experiences. The process consists broadly of determining the current state and needs of the learner, defining the end goal of instruction, and creating some "intervention" to assist in the transition. Ideally the process is informed bypedagogically and andragogically (adult learning) tested theories of learning and may take place in student-only, teacher-led or community-based settings. The outcome of this instruction may be directly observable and scientifically measured or completely hidden and assumed. There are many instructional design models but many are based on the ADDIE model with the phases analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. As a field, instructional design is historically and traditionally rooted in cognitive andbehavioral psychology. History Much of the foundation of the field of instructional design was laid in World War II, when the U.S. military faced the need to rapidly train large numbers of people to perform complex technical tasks, from field-stripping a carbine to navigating across the ocean to building a bombersee "Training Within Industry (TWI)". Drawing on the research and theories of B.F. Skinner on operant conditioning, training programs focused on observable behaviors. Tasks were broken down into subtasks, and each subtask treated as a separate learning goal. Training was designed to reward correct performance and remediate incorrect performance. Mastery was assumed to be possible for every learner, given enough repetition and feedback. After the war, the success of the wartime training model was replicated in business and industrial training, and to a lesser extent in the primary and secondary classroom. The approach is still common in the U.S. military. In 1956, a committee lead by Benjamin Bloom published an influential taxonomy of what he termed the three domains of learning: Cognitive (what one knows or thinks), Psychomotor (what one does, physically) and Affective (what one feels, or what attitudes one has). These taxonomies still influence the design of instruction. During the latter half of the 20th century, learning theories began to be influenced by the growth of digital computers. In the 1970s, many instructional design theorists began to adopt an information-processing-based approach to the design of instruction. David Merrill for instance developed [http://tip.psychology.org/merrill.html Component Display Theory (CDT)], which concentrates on the means of presenting instructional materials (presentation techniques). Later in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s cognitive load theory began to find empirical support for a variety of presentation techniques. Cognitive load theory and the design of instruction Cognitive load theory developed out of several empirical studies of learners, as they interacted with instructional materials. Sweller and his associates began to measure the effects of working memory load, and found that the format of instructional materials has a direct effect on the performance of the learners using those materials. While the media debates of the 1990s focused on the influences of media on learning, cognitive load effects were being documented in several journals. Rather than attempting to substantiate the use of media, these cognitive load learning effects provided an empirical basis for the use of instructional strategies. Mayer asked the instructional design community to reassess the media debate, to refocus their attention on what was most important: learning. By the mid- to late-1990s, Sweller and his associates had discovered several learning effects related to cognitive load and the design of instruction (e.g. the split attention effect, redundancy effect, and the worked-example effect). Later, other researchers like Richard Mayer began to attribute learning
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effects to cognitive load. Mayer and his associates soon developed a Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. In the past decade, cognitive load theory has begun to be internationally accepted and begun to revolutionize how practitioners of instructional design view instruction. Recently, human performance experts have even taken notice of cognitive load theory, and have begun to promote this theory base as the science of instruction, with instructional designers as the practitioners of this field. Finally Clark, Nguyen and Sweller published a [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0787977284 textbook] describing how Instructional Designers can promote efficient learning using evidencebased guidelines of cognitive load theory. Instructional Designers use various instructional strategies to reduce cognitive load. For example, they think that the onscreen text should not be more than 150 words or the text should be presented in small meaningful chunks. The designers also use auditory and visual methods to communicate information to the learner. Learning Design The IMS Learning Design specification supports the use of a wide range of teaching methods in online learning. Rather than attempting to capture the specifics of many strategies of instruction, it does this by providing a generic and flexible language. This language is designed to enable many different styles of instruction to be expressed. The approach has the advantage over alternatives in that only one set of learning design and runtime tools need to be implemented in order to support the desired wide range of teaching styles. The language was originally developed at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL), after extensive examination and comparison of a wide range of pedagogical approaches and their associated learning activities, and several iterations of the developing language to obtain a good balance between generality and pedagogic expressiveness. A criticism of Learning Design theory is that learning is an outcome. While instructional theory Instructional Design focuses on outcomes, while properly accounting for a multi-variate context that can only be predictive, it acknowledges that (given the variabilities in human capability) a guarantee of reliable learning outcomes is improbable. We can only design instruction. We cannot design learning (an outcome). Automotive engineers can design a car that, under specific conditions, will achieve 50 miles per gallon. These engineers cannot guarantee that drivers of the c Digital divide The digital divide refers to the gap between people with effective access to digital and information technology and those with very limited or no access at all. It includes the imbalance both in physical access to technology and the resources and skills needed to effectively participate as a digital citizen. Knowledge divide reflects the access of various social groupings to information and knowledge, typicallygender, income, race, and by location. The term global digital divide refers to differences in access between countries. Origins of the term Initially referring to the gap in ownership of computers between certain ethnic groups, the term came into usage in the mid-1990s, appearing in several news articles and political speeches. PresidentBill Clinton and Vice PresidentAl Gore both used the term in a 1996 speech in Knoxville, Tennessee. Larry Irving, a former United States head of the National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce, Assistant Secretary of Commerce and technology adviser to the Clinton Administration, noted that a series of NTIA surveys were "catalysts for the popularity, ubiquity, and redefinition" of the term, and he used the term in a series of later reports. During the George W. Bush Administration, the NTIA reports tended to focus less on the availability of the necessary hardware, more on Internet access, broadband in particular, and the disparity of access between the developed and developing worlds. The term digital divide is a "new label" for the knowledge divide, which was already a distinct concept with considerable accountable literature.
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Current usage There are several definitions of the Term. Bharat Mehra defines it simply as the troubling gap between those who usecomputers and theInternet and those who do not. More recently, some have used the term to refer to gaps in broadband network access. The term can mean not only unequal access tocomputer hardware, but also inequalities between groups of people in the ability to use information technology fully. Given the range of criteria used to assess the various technological disparities between groups/nations, and lack of data on some aspects of usage, the exact nature of the digital divide is both contextual and debatable. Lisa Servon argued in 2002 that the digital divide is a symptom of a larger and more complex problem -- that of persistent poverty and inequality. Mehra (2004), identifies socioeconomic status, income, educational level, and race among other factors associated with technological attainment, or the potential of the Internet to improve everyday life for those on the margins of society and to achieve greater social equity and empowerment. The conclusion from the various existing definitions of the digital divide is that the nature of the divide, and the question if it is closing or widening, depends on the particular definition chosen. Based on the theory of the diffusion of innovations through social networks, a common framework can be set up to distinguish the main approaches researchers have taken to conceptualize the digital divide. All kinds of studies and approaches to the digital divide can be classified into these four categories:

WHO (level of analysis): individuals vs. organizations/communities, vs. societies/countries/ world regions; with WHICH characteristics (attributes of nodes and ties): income, education, geography, age, gender, or type of ownership, size, profitability, sector, etc.; connects HOW (level digital sophistication): access vs. usage vs. impact; to WHAT (type of technology): phone, Internet, computer, digital TV, etc.

The chosen definition of the digital divide has far-reaching consequences with immediate practical relevance, and should therefore not be seen as a yet another intellectual quarrel of sole academic interest. Evolution Typical measurements of inequality distribution used to describe the digital divide are the Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient. In the Lorenz curve, perfect equality of Internet usage across nations is represented by a 45-degree diagonal line, which has a Gini coefficient of zero. Perfect inequality gives a Gini coefficient of one. However, the question of whether or not the digital divide is growing or closing is difficult to answer. The Canadian document Bridging the digital divide: An opportunity for growth for the 21st century includes examples of these measures. Figures 2.4 and 2.5 in the document show a trend of growing equality from 1997 to 2005 with the Gini coefficient decreasing. However, these graphs do not show detailed analysis of specific income groups. The progress represented is predominantly of the middle-income groups when compared to the highest income groups. The lowest income groups continue to decrease their level of equality in comparison to the high income groups. Therefore, there is still a long way to go before the digital divide will be eliminated. Divide and education One area of significant focus was school computer access. In the 1990s, better resourced schools were much more likely to provide their students with regular computer access; and, at the end of the decade, these schools were muc Digital art
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Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process. Since the 1970s, various names have been used to describe the process including computer art andmultimedia art, and digital art is itself placed under the larger umbrella term new media art. The impact of digital technology has transformed traditional activities such as painting, drawing and sculpture, while new forms, such asnet art, digital installation art, and virtual reality, have become recognized artistic practices. More generally the term digital artist is used to describe an artist who makes use of digital technologies in the production of art. In an expanded sense, "digital art" is a term applied tocontemporary art that uses the methods of mass production or digital media. Digital production techniques in visual media The techniques of digital art are used extensively by the mainstream media in advertisements, and by film-makers to produce special effects. Desktop publishing has had a huge impact on the publishing world, although that is more related to graphic design. It is possible that general acceptance of the value of digital art will progress in much the same way as the increased acceptance
of electronically produced music over the last three decades. Digital art can be purely computer-generated (such as fractals and algorithmic art) or taken from other sources, such as ascannedphotograph or an image drawn using vector graphics software using a mouse or graphics tablet. Though technically the term may be applied to art done using other media or processes and merely scanned in, it is usually reserved for art that has been non-trivially modified by a computing process (such as a computer program, microcontroller or any electronic system capable of interpreting an input to create an output); digitized text data and raw audio and video recordings are not usually considered digital art in themselves, but can be part of the larger project of computer art and information art. Artworks are considered digital painting when created in similar fashion to nondigital paintings but using software on a computer platform and digitally outputting the resulting image as painted on canvas. Andy Warhol created digital art with the help of Amiga, Inc. in July 1985 when he publicly introduced at Lincoln Center Amiga paint software.

Digital photography and image processing Digital photography and digital printing is now an acceptable medium of creation and presentation by major museums and galleries. But the work of artists who produce digital paintings and digital printmakers is beginning to find acceptance, as the output capabilities advance and quality increases. Internationally, many museums are now beginning to collect digital art such as the San Jose Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum print department also has a reasonable but small collection of digital art. One reason why the established art community finds it difficult to accept digital art is the erroneous perception of digital prints being endlessly reproducible. Many artists though are erasing the relevant image file after the first print, thus making it a unique artwork. The availability and popularity of photograph manipulation software has spawned a vast and creative library of highly modified images, many bearing little or no hint of the original image. Using electronic versions of brushes, filters and enlargers, these "neographers" produce images
unattainable through conventional photographic tools. In addition, digital artists may manipulate scanned drawings,paintings, collages or lithographs, as well as using any of the above-mentioned techniques in combination. Artists also use many other sources of electronic information and programs to create their work. Computer-generated visual media There are two main paradigms in computer generated imagery. The simplest is 2D computer graphics which reflect how you might draw using a pencil and a piece of paper. In this case, however, the image is on the computer screen and the instrument you draw with might be a tablet stylus or a mouse. What is generated on your screen might appear to be drawn with a pencil, pen or paintbrush. The second kind is 3D computer graphics, 6