Olivia

The tour of Hudl was pretty great in my opinion. From experience, it’s really hard to work in a small room and sit in front of a computer for 9 hours and still come up with great ideas and do my best work. I thought the playfulness and having a game room is such a great way to get your workers up and moving.

I thought the whole paid and unlimited vacation tim was interesting. It’s nice to see that their workers don’t take advantage of the system. And it just goes to show you of what kind of people they hire.

I wish we could’ve seen a lot more of the graphic design aspect of things.

My animation has officially has gone in the dumps. Partly because I don’t have enough motivation to even look at it. It’s just not something I enjoy. Although, I know that there’s going to be aspects of graphic design I don’t enjoy – I just need to get over it and work on it.

We had a work day in class, I’ve made more progress on my portfolio site. I can actually see it being something I use in the future.

I really need to clean it up though If I really want to use it.

SAToday, we spent a lot of time working on our online portfolios and animation. I know I decided to do animation so I wouldn’t be as stressed out – but turns out that it didn’t help!

Ha! I’m just frustrated I can’t get my gifs to run smoothly when exporting them and putting them on my bechance page. Technology will always be the stress factor for me. Wonderful if you can get it to work. Terrible if you don’t.

I’ve just been continuing to do my two projects. As always I’m getting pretty far on the portfolio site and not so far on my style sheet. It’s intimidating to even look at because I know it’s code. Sometimes I think about switching it to a bechance page with a little bit of animation because I’ve already got a foundation started for that.

Today was a lot of going over different animations in Photoshop and after affects. Looking back I wish I would have focused more. It’s so hard to focus sometimes when I have a hard time catching up. I find it so helpful on making gifs in aftereffects because I know that program well enough to do it. For anyone who hasn’t used after affects, I’m sure making a simple gif could be pretty intimidating.

We’ll see how it goes.

In class today, we went over the options we could do for our site telling site. I chose to to do a style sheet. I thought this would be interesting to learn – the only thing I’m worried about is code. It looks easy but any coding to me can be a struggle. Animation is not my favorite thing in the world – because I do like simplicity and honestly I’m just a little boring. We’ll see how it goes.

Holy cow. Break just flew by. Here and gone.

Today, we had a critique. A couple things to say – very lengthy & we need a new crit space. Critique are always nice because feed back and constructive criticism is great. I felt like mine was towards the end of the critique and everyone was just ready to get out of class so it wasn’t as great as feedback as I’d hoped. But good news is, there wasn’t too much that said that was bad about my project. Just a few things here and there. Colleen gave me an idea of doing another section playing off of the “Get to know your Camera” and do a “Get to know your photographers” and another student suggested doing a page on the history or actual art of photography. Those suggestions were nice and I ran with them.

I also played on the textures a little bit and added in a few elements like a pattern background, polaroid photos, and drop shadows.

Here is my updated design so far:

In class, we looked over a lot of different animation sites and coding them. It was interesting and definitely not as difficult as I thought it would be. Definitely gives me hope for coding more animation in my site design.

It was also another progress day for our Site Design. I have kept working on it and trying to make different improvements. I switched my color palette to be be more color tones rather than just black and white (updated in last blog post).

It was a work day in class and I got to catch up on trying to figure out a design concept for my Site Design project.

I want this site to be a website that somewhat plays off of “Art of Beer Making”. I liked that website, the layout, the design, mostly everything about it. I mainly used that as my inspiration for mine. My site will be called “Art of Photography”.  Photography is an art form that means a lot to me and I want others to find the love of photography as well. It’s often though that people want to get into the hobby of photography, but they don’t really know where to start. That’s where this site will come in play. I want this site to be a resource to others who want to have more skills and knowledge with the art. It will be a place to learn more about the camera, how to use manual, the basic history of photography, different photographers, etc.

Here is my basic concept:

On Monday, we got our grades back from our first project. I was happy and disappointed all at the same time. Happy with my grade and sad at my mistakes. I need to continue to watch for little mistakes like hyphens and grammar while designing. Something to continue to work on. Overall I was proud of my work and I was proud that I kept up with the coding and never gave up despite the frustration. Attached below is the design of my terms with the corrections made.

I didn’t get a chance to speak with Colleen about my wireframe for my next project. I would have liked the advice she could’ve given me, but I know it will come eventually as I keep working on it. Here’s to fresh start at a new project!