The guys over at wired basically summed up IMD year one today:

Overview: The purpose of this six-week course is to provide a practical introduction to the skills needed to create the most useful and popular images for web publishing. Students will need a copy of Photoshop CS2, familiarity with Mac OS X or Windows, and a rich fantasy life.

Week One: Captioning Cat Pictures

Students will learn to use the text tool to add humorous captions to photos of cats. Emphasis will be placed on Impact, Helvetica Bold Condensed and other fonts that allow you to squeeze more exclamation points onto the picture. Homework: Dump nontoxic liquid on your cat, take a photo and add a caption that implies the cat is feeling remorse for having done something inappropriate.

Week Two: Sig Images and Forum Avatars

Students will learn to create animated images using frames from a movie or television show. In addition, they will use last week’s captioning skills to add quotes from the movie or television show. Homework: Create an appropriate avatar and sig image, and post them to an online forum along with a message that serves no purpose but to call people’s attention to the images.

Week Three: Removing Watermarks and Adding Your Own

Many images published to the web have someone’s name or URL rudely attached to them, making it so that you can’t get the credit for your hard work finding and downloading them. Students will learn to use the cloning tool — or the crop tool — to remove the offending identifier. They will also learn to add their own identifier, so that nobody rips off their rip-off. Homework: Convince someone that you made that one picture with the kitten running from Domo-Kun.

Week Four: Head Transplants

Given a photo of a female celebrity, and another photo of some underpaid soft-core porn actress, students will learn how to cut out the celebrity’s head and place it on the porn star’s body in such a way that they can pretend they’re seeing the celebrity naked, at least if they’re really desperate and don’t look too close. Students will learn the basics of using the selection tool, shading with the airbrush tool and keeping their hands out of their pants long enough to finish the assignment. Homework: I’m sure you’ll be motivated to put your new skills to use without me assigning anything.

Week Five: Photomontages

Building on last week’s skills, students will learn how to make any image “funny” by adding one or more of the following: an Imperial Stormtrooper, the guy from “All Your Base,” any fat person in swimwear, Jesus or Domo-Kun. They will be urged to explore the upper limit of how much these things can be used before the whole exercise becomes tedious, then ignore that limit entirely.

Homework: Add these elements to Vietnam-era photographs of napalm attacks in order to make them hilarious.

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