Tools, materials, and resources

Collaboration and communication

This website hosts the schedule, syllabus, and assignment sheets.
Turn in final projects through Canvas .
Zoom for videoconferencing (Link and password on Canvas .)
Miro as online whiteboard (Invite link on Canvas .)
Discord server (Invite link on Canvas .)
Any critical, all-class messages will go as announcements within Canvas.

Creative Cloud

Access

The Art Department/Design Program provides students with access to Adobe Creative Cloud.

Signing in to Creative Cloud:

In the first week of classes, you will receive an email from “Adobe Creative Cloud” that gives you all of the information you need in order to create an account and then download whatever applications you need.
Please check your spam folder if you don’t receive this message.
When you sign in and are asked what type of account you are using, choose “Enterprise.”
If you have any issue with the link provided in the Adobe Creative Cloud email, you should be able to go directly through the Adobe.com site and sign in/create an account via the main page using your xxxxxx@student.american.edu email.
If you continue to have issues, please tell your instructors so they can coordinate with the Department.

Illustrator tutorials

If you’re new or moderately-skilled with Illustrator, start working through the tutorials on LinkedIn Learning. Here’s a list of the most relevant tutorials for this course.

Other design and visualization tools

Visualization

RAWGraphs (free)
Flourish (free)
Workbench (free)
A spreadsheet program. Excel, Numbers.app, Google Sheets, and OpenOffice are all fine.

Mapping

Mapbox, a software-as-a-service product. The free accounts will serve you well.