Kadie Rolfzen

Those are like the best words ever to a college student who has projects to complete and not much time to complete them. It’s also crazy how little you actually get done in a three-hour class when you have the whole class time to work. We are designing a navigational system right now and I have known for a few days what exactly my design is going to be so the first thing that I did today was figure out how everything is going to connect to each other. Little did I know, this was going to take up two-thirds of the class time. I was expecting this to be a twenty or thirty minute task but quickly learned that making a navigation with over 80 terms is more time consuming than it sounds. My hand is tired of writing and my brain is tired of trying to fix everything to fit as one big system. But not to worry, the puzzle-lover inside of me got it all worked out. Now onto the design process and designing what is in my head, which almost never works out the way that I intend it to. Here goes nothing!

I finally figured out what I want to do for my navigation design today. It’s not really that I did not have an idea of what I wanted to do, but more of the fact that my two ideas were both ones that I thought would be very interesting and entertaining to create. I have loved board games designs for as long as I can remember and I really wanted to do a Monopoly-themed navigation system for all the terms, talents and technologies.

The only problem with that is that I also really liked my other idea of a subway navigation system. Like subway as far as the train station stops. An easy way to get from point A to point B without having to think too much about directions. I went with this idea because I thought it would be easier to navigate than a Monopoly game.

I am not 100% sure how I want to do the design yet, but what I do know is that I am going to have one really big subway system. With 28 terms, 28 talents and over 30 technologies to all incorporate into one system, it will look like the subway system of New York City, only better. I hope.

I have not missed a single class my entire three and a half years that I have gone to UNL. I mean I have missed them for traveling and sporting events simply because I have to in order to play the sport. But besides that, I have not missed a single one. That all changed on Wednesday. First ever class missed, but hey, that just means I had a whole day to design for the next upcoming project and the wireframe that is due.

I did not really have an idea as far as what I wanted to do for my navigation design, but I had plenty of time on Wednesday to be able to think about it and really get into the thick of my ideas. I came up with what I think are three pretty fun ideas, but the problem is that I can not pick one over the other.

I am really into games and how you have to win games. I’m talking like board games and trivia games. I want to hopefully do my design on something that is related to games because I think it is a fun way to keep the audience involved and make them wonder what goes next. Kind of like the game Memory – once you pick up one card and dont find the match, you have to keep going in order to find the next match but at least you know where two of the cards are located on the board.

I think that is the fun part about it. You know what pieces are on the board, but one by one you have to figure out where each one is but also must know where the like pieces are as well.

Okay it really wasnt tests on tests but the most adventurous test of my life was taken today, thats for sure. While learning about Interaction Design in this class, it is also important to know what is all involved with the makings of “interaction design.” This includes things such as Responsive Design, Design Strategy, Wireframes, CSS, Human-Centered Design, User Interface and so on. Along with this also comes knowing who goes with what as far as what artist/designer goes with each term. This was actually a pretty fun process to learn about who goes with what and what is their background to get them to that point. Examples would be Susan Weinshenk and how she studied psychology but she really wanted to know how design and psychology can correlate with each other. This was just an example of what the test today entailed but it was pretty interesting to understand how certain parts of interaction design came about as well as what kinds of agencies or products have came about through Interaction Design techniques, methods or processes.

Now the fun part begins where we get to figure out how to put all the terms, talents, and technologies all together into one big navigation page. So I guess you could say that the fun is just beginning.

During these past couple weeks in class, I have found myself struggling to figure out how to insert certain aspects into my webpage design. Well after today, I have realized one thing. Insert: Illustrator. I knew that you could get the CSS Properties on your Illustrator but little did I know, with enough precision, you can truly get everything that you want from your Illustrator file to show up on your HTML file. It is a work of art. I cannot believe that I didnt know this sooner. It would have made life so much simpler.

While it may be a little time consuming naming every character and object in Illustrator, I would still rather do that than have to figure out how to insert an object that I have no idea how to code in DreamWeaver. I learned that while I still have to do the coding, all the intricate details can really be coded behind the scenes in Illustrator.

I’ve said it everyday, but it is like a puzzle and boy, do I really like puzzles.

When asked to do the “hands-on” activity where we took one of our typesets and had to write out the code to it, my mind immediately went into panic mode. I have no idea how to do all that stuff. Like no idea. But the more and more we talked about it, the more and more I understood exactly what we had to do to program pages. It made it so much easier to understand. It actually clicked for once.

I realized how important divs and sections and ids really were in that exercise. I realized that really everything in coding (at least what we have learned so far) can all be simplified into those two or three codes. It makes it so much easier. When I used to try to code one of my pages which included boxes, I had no idea how to do that. I just punched in numbers and pixels and words and hoped that it fixed the problem and did what I wanted.

After doing the hands on activity, things finally started clicking> My puzzle became more clear.

Every single day that class concludes, I get more excited to get to go work on homework. You can call me crazy that I said that, but I love learning more and more about coding everyday. When doing the “lab” in class where all we had to do was change the colors of the sections of the Genealogy of Morals project, I loved going in and just typing random combinations of letters and numbers to make a color for the background. I love being able to type in the code and looking at the web browser and be able to actually see changes.

When going home and working on my typesets, I really got the feel for how frustrating coding can be when you have no idea what is wrong with your code. I know that I do not know how to do certain things in coding but when the things that I do know aren’t working, it really gets me heated. I have started all six typesets for the website, but the worst part about it all is that I do not know how to code some things such as horizontal and vertical lines, how to make the paragraphs all line up with each other on the left and right and just how to change one word in a sentence to a different color and font without the whole sentence changing.

I think I have said this in every blog so far, but I really enjoy the challenges of coding and am stoked to be able to move ahead and learn more and more as the days go on.

Every time I do another Lab in class, I feel like I am upgrading to a bigger sized puzzle. Like instead of having the 100 piece puzzle, I get to move on to the 200 piece puzzle the next day. The good thing is, I love puzzles. When I look at what the end piece is supposed to look like in our tutorials, I immediately think to myself that there is no way that I will know how to do that. Good thing a step-by-step tutorial awaits me before that. The things that can be accomplished just by typing in something as simple as text-align: center is so intriguing to me. It seriously is like the puzzle. You have the end pieces that everyone always starts with, or in this case, the <body> <head> <title> and <style>. The four corners as I like to call it. From there, everyone always just fills in whatever fits. In my mind, code works the exact same. Once you fit one piece in, all you have to do is find another piece that fits and if it doesnt, you move on and find another one that does. Coding is pretty much a puzzle and I love that.

Learning more and more about Code everyday is actually quiet fun to me. It all seems like one big puzzle and every piece that you put together makes the picture just that much more clear. The only problem is, this puzzle doesn’t really have pieces that fit together and pieces that don’t. This puzzle, also known as coding, can mix a bunch of different pieces together to make one puzzle, but multiple pieces can be anywhere. While working on Code in class, I could not figure out why my text wouldn’t change color or get a certain background. I quickly learned that if you put a period in front of a word instead of a hashtag, it wont do the same thing that you think that it will do. While typing in a CSS document, #data { } and .data { } do two completely different things when you go check your page. At least I learned that at the beginning of the coding process instead of making my brain explode later on down the road.