This is the last day of class and therefore this is my last blog post. Looking at everyone else’s web portfolios was inspiring. I know that I want to change a lot of things about mine now. I know for sure I need to go back and check all my files to make sure they are as high resolution as possible because I still feel like they look blurry. I also want to make some gifs to get some motion going, especially on the pages for the website designs. Right now they look silly and I need them to look more like a behance page. Generally the pages just need to be more designed. But, on the plus side, I did finally figure out how to get rid of this weird line that was appearing in the middle of my resume page.
Ally Frame
Kind of regretting the word press theme i bought. I’m getting frustrated with the layout of the portfolio pages. For some stupid reason it has a little box with the tags and other details about that project right below the picture. But it’s in such an ugly position, it’s driving me bonkers. Plus then when I have a super long image, like for my website, the box forces the image to the left side of the page so there’s this huge empty space on the right. But then the stupid little box thinks it’s cool to just chill all the way below the bottom of the image still, even though there’s so much space next to the picture. Hopefully there’s a way to customize it that I can dig deeper into over the summer.
The Hudl tour was pretty interesting. I’ve never seen the inside of a large ish company or thought about how they worked. I really liked the concept of working in tribes so everyone has their own little group. I also love the idea of having unlimited vacation days and just treating people like responsible adults. It’s so hard to get work done and be productive if you are forced to be there when you have something else important going on in your life. Work isn’t everything so I appreciate that they recognize that and trust that their employees won’t take advantage of that system. I wish more companies had similar beliefs. However I don’t really like Hudl for anything besides their work values. Like the sports coaching thing is cool and a unique niche, but I would never be happy working on sports things all day. They also depend a lot on advertisements which kind of disgusts me. I just hate consumer culture. But overall it was fun to see how they work.
Time goes so fast when you’re working hard on something. In class I wanted to get all the work I have in my printed portfolio onto my website. That was too big of a goal. I didn’t realize how long it would take to go back and re-save everything optimized for web. And then I was having trouble getting my images to not look blurry because they shouldn’t how I was saving them. And then deciding the order of your images and whether they look better full screen width or as tiles is a whole other task I went back and forth on for probably an hour. I think that means I need to be more decisive. I’m running out of time to be overly frivolous with it. I did get my resume uploaded though and it looks nice.
I’m super glad I went to the Fred Dust lecture. He is a very interesting person with many interesting stories. I could listen to all those stories for a long time. It definitely helped me understand design thinking and how to apply it to solve many different problems. My favorite one was when some city decided to use mimes to stop people from j walking instead of police officers handing out tickets. That’s such a cool solution that probably no one besides IDEO would think of. It was definitely inspiring and makes me want to think completely outside the box. The mime thing probably sounded stupid to a lot of people. But as Fred Dust said you just have to believe in your idea and go do it. Even if it doesn’t work at least you learned something. That’s better than not trying anything at all.
I have a website! I purchased my very own WordPress theme which was a terrifying experience. After Colleen’s horror stories of themes containing bugs or just straight up not working I was nervous about picking one and buying it on my own without Colleen looking at it first. To professionals a theme probably is probably nothing to their check book but to students it’s a lot. Fortunately I think I got a good theme that seems to be working smoothly. I looked through the set up screen and was able to start customizing my theme to get it to look more like the demo. I’m getting the hang of it and it’s really exciting. Mainly I’m just glad I don’t have to do a ton of coding to get it to look nice.
In class we began to look at wordpress themes to use for our portfolio site. Going in I knew I wanted one that is a masonry style where the page is just filled with images. That is my favorite way to display work on the web. I think it would be nice to have one that could filter what images are being shown too. So you could show just design or just painting or whatever. After looking through several I decided that I like having the menu bar on the side. I think I found one that I really like called Alona that is simple and clean and also follows what I want in a theme.
Sometimes with code it seems like the most simple basic things cause the most trouble. Right now I’m struggling very hard to just get my body copy into the position I want. It only wants to stay to the very left side. I know it shouldn’t be this hard but I’ve tried all I can think of. I know I’m forgetting one thing that will end up doing the trick. This is where having Colleen’s examples from class would come in handy. It’s much easier to just copy all the basic code from her pages that are already done and then add in the more complex that make your site unique. Apparently I just like making things difficult and am trying to code from scratch all by myself. In another hour of fiddling around I’m sure I won’t be so stubborn anymore.
Today we were able to see everyone’s animations so far. There are lot of cool things going on in other people’s sites. I was pretty excited about the hover thing I had going on in mine though. It took a solid several hours of intense work to figure out the code for just that section so I was pretty excited to show it off. I’m learning that there is just way too much code out there for one person to know all of it off the top of their head. The internet is an invaluable resource for discovering all of the code in existence. I searched a long time to find the code for putting pictures into a grid. Holy smokes. That ended up being way more difficult than the actual animated part. And I thought I would never have any use for an unordered list tag.
Today we discussed server space and all of the things you need to purchase to run your own site. I’m still not entirely sure what a server space does. Like why can’t you just hold all of your information on the website? I don’t think I understand the internet. But using Colleen’s server space makes me nervous for several reasons. Mainly, what happens after you graduate and don’t have contact with her anymore. I don’t want to lose anything important. The Pair website seems like a cool idea. You can own your own server but share it with other people so you don’t have to pay so much. It’s a good idea for people who don’t have ginormous amounts of stuff to put online.