Author: David Sheridan

The digital cutter is like a printer.  But instead of rendering a digital design with ink on the surface of paper, the cutter uses a small blade to cut the digital design.  I wanted a little bit of intricacy to show what the cutter can do. Working on my design in Illustrator, I used a few tricks that students have taught me over the years.  For instance, you can create interesting shapes by copying a simple shape over and over, rotating it a little each time.  Illustrator automates this process. Illustrator’s Shape Builder Tool is useful for creating designs that are meant…

A Maker Mentality Toward Writing David M Sheridan Elizabeth Wardle (2012) relates this example of a rhetorical intervention devised by her students: [S]tudents in my “Medical Writing” class were asked to consider a public health problem and mount a campaign to address it. One group found that students were drinking and driving late at night to find food. As a result, they mounted a “Don’t Drink and Drive Through” campaign that entailed doorknob hangers with the phone numbers of restaurants that delivered after midnight. There were many possible responses to this problem, and they creatively explored many of them before settling…