Picking out a theme for the final project is a lot harder than I thought. I go onto one place and really like one of the themes and think that is going to be the one, but then I go to another place and find another one that I like even better. The worst part about it all is that I can’t decide between whether or not I really want to pay the money to get a theme or have to deal with the consequences that come with getting a free one.
Kadie Rolfzen
With the semester coming to a close, it is easy to just slack off and go half on all our assignments and projects. The only problem is when you have the biggest projects of the semester due at the end of the semester. This is the case for most classes and I also have a pretty big assignment due to show everyone How Peanut Butter Met Jelly. This project is a full site design that has some animation as well as some text in motion and hopefully, some audio music. I am hoping that this page turns out the way that I want it to because most of my elements to input into HTML and CSS are just images. I just have to figure out how to place them all in the right order and inline. Here’s to designing my HowTo Website.
I didn’t realize how easy it was to make a gif in Photoshop until we did it in class. I was nervous about figuring out exactly how to do such a thing, but I realized that making them is easy for animation.
We didn’t really get told we had a work day on Wednesday, but that is essentially what happened on Wednesday. We have a big project coming up with a site design that includes an animation, some text in motion or some sound in the site. It was good to be able to just sit and really think about exactly what it is that I wanted to incorporate into my site design and know what I want animated and such. Animations are a lot harder to do than I thought, even though the outcome of it is pretty sweet in the end.
I have never really enjoyed the whole idea of a full class critique simply because after about thirty minutes, I feel like everyone just checks out anyways. I do however really enjoy it when I go at the beginning and I actually get some feedback from people. It was fun to share my idea on How Peanut Butter Met Jelly, but it was made me a little nervous when I saw that everyone else was doing a real life topic of something that actually had some significance. But not to worry anymore, I’m excited to begin coding and figuring out exactly what I want to be animated and how exactly I am going to work that into my design. Maybe I’ll have a few PB&J’s along the way too.
As the rest of the class met at the normal Wednesday time on March 16th, I was four hours into my seven hour flight from Denver to Honolulu to begin my spring break trip. The good thing about this is that during this time, I finished my entire project design for the upcoming How To Website design. It was actually a lot easier than I expected it to be. I had planned on the design aspect of the project taking hours upon hours to finish but in the end, I probably only spent five hours to complete the whole design while being distracted by a the flight attendants as well as the two year old who was seated right behind me on the flight. In the end, it made me excited to finish the project on the coding side of it just to see if it works out the way that I want it to work out.
I am starting to lose some of my frustration from the last week simply because the animation lab today was really fun to mess with. I didn’t realize just how easy it was to make an animation via code was. I thought this was going to be a very tedious process but turns out that this might be the easiest thing that we have done.
Here’s to more animating!
I usually have a pretty high tolerance for things taking a while and for me not understanding something. I usually give myself a little while to make sure I completely understand something before I freak out. To be honest, I dont really freak out that much. I’m a pretty visual learner and it’s almost like I have a camera in my head and just snapshot the information that I need to know. But this code is really getting frustrating for me. I go in one day and completely know how to code the whole page that I want to do but than the next time I go look at it, it looks completely different and pieces of the design are missing and I cant seem to find them at all. That has been going on for about two weeks now and every time it happens, my patience gets less and less.
But here’s too having a lot of tolerance for things not working and to the two weeks left before Spring Break 2016.
I have always loved the idea and the intricacies of “how-to” lists. Our next major project involves the “how-to” of something and I could not be more excited. There was immediately like 100 ideas that popped into my head from “How to make a pb&j” to “how to do nothing” (which is more than it sounds). I just think this project is so fun and because it is so open-ended, there really isnt a wrong answer. This is a project that I am excited to get started and my ideas are endless right now.
Almost every time I turn in a project I am pretty satisfied with the way that it turned out, for the most part at least. That is until I have someone else look at it. Just when I think that I have done everything that I can to make the design the best that it will be, someone else comes along and rips it apart and it feels like I have to start back at the beginning, with a new sketch and everything. But this can also be a good thing I guess.
We did a critique all day on Monday but the fun thing about those is that you get to see the brains of other people and just what they see when you look at your design. Obviously you know what you want people to see and from your eyes, it is obvious what they are trying to look at. But not everyone’s brains work the same.
Getting feedback to make things better always intrigues me because you really are never completely done with a design. There is always something that can be changed even in the slightest. But the fun part is hearing how everybody would change my design to make it better and while adding up 30 different ideas into one updated version can be difficult, there is always information that is given during critiques that make you excited about updating your design.