Lara Schenck
Artist, programmer, researcher
All Posts
Ordered reverse-chronologically.
-
The Boy Who Wanted to be a Lion
via Short of the Week
-
Analysis of Temple Run for iPad
I want to start playing as many games as possible and doing brief-ish analyses of them, so here’s a start: Basics Name: Temple Run Platform: iPad Time played: 25 mins Overview Temple run is a free (and ad free) 3D platform game. You are a man running from a herd of what appear to be […]
-
The Online Class Club [Idea]
Every semester since I’ve graduated (which I guess is only 3), I’ve said I was going to unofficially take a course at CMU or Pitt. Which basically means sitting in on a class and hoping no one would care that I’m not actually a student. I never did this, but I still want to. Along […]
-
From the vaults [lnfnmo][NODOI]
Since the relatively recent renewal of my artistic/conceptual energy, I’ve been looking through some old projects and writing a bunch (won’t be posting that though). I am at last reintroducing NODOI and lnfnmo. It’s been about a 1.5 year break. I totally forgot how far I had gotten with both of these – the biggest […]
-
The Saxifrage School
From their website: The Saxifrage School is redesigning higher education by lowering costs, re-thinking the campus, and reconciling theory and practice. We teach students to make what is valuable and to question the value of what is made. Watch this: One of the most inspiring projects I’ve seen in the past year (or ever). I […]
-
Some definitions of games & Game
There are many many definitions of a game, most of which differ only subtly. Some are dependent on the definition of play, but that’s a whole other discussion. Maybe I should have written about that first, oh well. Anyways, here are a few ways to define a game, accompanied by thoughts: Katie Salen and Eric […]
-
made myself a logo
The font is Geometric Slab 712 BT. Nabbed that from the school computers. There is a free alternative called Arvo that I’m using for some of the heading styles on here.
-
Raph Koster on how to become a game designer
Be sure to check out the links he lists at the bottom, exceptionally useful.
-
to dos over the next year
Grad school is on the horizon. Well, I’ll apply next December, but it’s time to start preparing and pick up where I left off after school. Which is where? My ultimate goal (in life I think) is to design games for college curricula, ergo I will go to grad school for game design. In undergrad, […]
-
Site Redesign Preview
Only the blog so far. The header still needs work, but I’ve got some baller post formats in there. I’d like to post about them in more detail because until this point I’ve thought post formats were a little useless, but with some work they can be great. Of course there’s a nice responsive deal […]
-
Bones has made me like WordPress again
That’s right, I didn’t like it for a while. Had a pretty scarring experience with a WordPress/BuddyPress site running on 20+ heavy duty plugins, and I fully realized why people say it’s messy on the backend. I had been doing a lot of custom coding, and dealing with WP hooks and filters, misc filepaths, and […]
-
Freelance project: Cast Partner
Recently launched a portfolio site for Castpartner, a Hollywood casting company. The site design is by Nate Harrison and hand coded by yours truly. I have to say it was a relief to not be responsible for the design – it’s nice to just be told what to do every now and then. Also, custom […]
-
Digital Placemaking logo
Here is a logo draft for Digital Placemaking, a spin-off philosophy/blog about using digital tools in (guess what) placemaking for local communities. Read more about Digital Placemaking here.
-
What I’ve been doing the past 6 months
It’s been a crazy few months. Working 60hrs a week at times, but I guess that comes with the territory when you’re talking about startups. The startup in question here is Scenable, the app for local communities. There is an active startup and co-working scene here in Pittsburgh, definitely loving this city. Read about Scenable’s […]
-
Book recommendation: Designing for Emotion
I’ve been reading Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter, the lead designer for MailChimp. It’s a quick read, very engaging, and infinitely useful. I’d been in a bit of a creative slump, focusing on navigation patterns, getting inspiration from great work other people are doing, and generally avoiding the being creative part. This book has […]
-
Scenable Intro video: about animating to narration
Introducing Scenable: A New Platform for Bringing Communities Online. Over the past week, I made an animation introducing Scenable: a new platform for local communities online (i.e. my job). This was my first experience animating to narration, so I thought I’d post some tips as well as the video. Brainstorming the script and initial storyboarding […]
-
If localhost/PhpMyAdmin is 404
Then most likely you’ve been sloppyily setting up configurations – this was my case at least :/. First make sure phpmyadmin is installed, then include its configuration file (httpd-phpmyadmin.conf) in your apache’s httpd.conf. On a Mac, httpd-conf will probably be in /opt/local/apache2/conf, and httpd-phpmyadmin.conf in conf/extra. If that’s the case for you, add this to […]
-
Productivity Scene in Pgh
I went to a great talk at Assemble (art/tech gallery on Penn) the other night by author of SharePgh.com Connor Sites-Bowen. The event is was called Manifestto:DO: getting Sh*t done in Pittsburgh. Not your standard/redundant life hacks information, great, real info from real people. During the talk, everyone named good work/inspiration environments in the city. […]
-
WordPress Maintenance Mode
Why haven’t I encountered/thought of this before?! If you noticed earlier, this site and the WPF2 demo site where giving off some 404s…embarrassing but oh well. Planning to write a post about all of that later. Anyways, maintenance mode is a setting you can turn on to let viewers know things are being changed/updated. There’s […]
-
pgh art/tech/hacker community
I’ve officially relocated from Boston to Pittsburgh and have researched the active artist/tech/hacker community here. OMG!PGH and Pittsburgh Art + Technology are excellent resources for local art & tech happenings, and below are a few great IRL things I hope to be involved in/investigate further: assemble “…a community space for art & technology” in the […]
-
Responsive web design – SMFA freelance project
Working on a freelance project for an exhibition of SMFA students’ artists’ books in Turkey entitled Textual Image/Visual Text. The site includes a splash page with some basic jQuery fades and effects and pages for each artist/work. Here are the mockups: I’m using this project as an opportunity to learn responsive web design using the […]
-
mozilla firefox ‘Mark Up’
So, the other day Firefox reinstalled itself for reasons unknown. But that’s okay! Because I found out about this cool thing called ‘Mark Up’ and ‘Mozilla’s Web O'(pen) Wonder’ (a gallery of awesome HTML5 and WebGL creations). There’s a link to all of this on the default Mozilla search home page (in Firefox, go to […]