Our last class ended with having a tour at the software company Hudl down in the Haymarket. It was an interesting experience to have. The working environment there seems very casual but still competitive. One of the touring guides, Cliff, was a very enthusiastic person and clear in communicating with us and had a quite an inspiring attitude towards Hudl and thoughts on design.
Truly Wu
The gif I made for my story-telling site isn’t working so well. It is way too small for the page and I can’t seem to find a way to enlarge it. The next try will be going back to Photoshop see if there is anything I can change from there.
I am probably repeating myself, but still I can’t believe how fast time goes. Working on several projects at the same time is just chaotically stressful. Anyway, the good news is that with a lot more practicing in the story-telling site design and the labs, I think I will be able to go back and fix my very first coding project. The struggle I had back then was mostly trying to place the images and text in the right positions. Now I have sort of managed a system to position them correctly. One thing to be mindful of is to keep each container the same width and height, which really helps the entire layout stay consistent. (I know it might be a silly tip or the most basic idea, but I had my width and height all over the place back when I first started coding. That was a terrible experience.)
Another workday! I can’t believe we have one more class left till the end of the semester. There is still a lot left to accomplish. I have been working on my online portfolio site. The theme I bought has a quiet and clean look and feel, but a lot of my designs are filled with bright colors. When I put them all together and see them display on the homepage, everything feels incompatible and disorganized. I am trying to figure out a way to break that phenomenon.
Time goes by so fast these days; always feeling like there is so much to do but so little time. It was a workday in class today. I mostly focused on building my online portfolio. It is a huge relief that I don’t have to code the entire thing, so I can pay more attention to the design and not worry about my lack of ability to achieve it. So far I am planning on getting all of my presentable work onto this site. I have to shrink down all of my image files first, that was such a buzz kill, but I keep telling myself it will be worth the effort and time. There are some issues with customizing; such as when I hover over an image it would show the logo for the theme that I bought. I still haven’t found where can I change it. There are definitely more steps that I need to go through than I had thought. In addition, I had some good feedback from Colleen on my site design. That was very encouraging, I will keep my spirit up and fix the problems that she has mentioned.
I have made a lot of progress this weekend on my site design. I am so glad that I can finally see there is so much potential in coding that I am capable of handling. For the next step, I am thinking about throwing in a gif file. I will have to watch more tutorials on that particular process. I tried it myself, but I couldn’t quite manage to move it to the position where I want it to be and it ends up messing with my other containers. It is quite difficult to think about the entire site as whole while remembering the fact that each section is in a separate container.
Around 4:00, we all went to Sheldon for Fred Dust’s talk. I am glad that I went. I think I now have a better understanding of what Design Thinking truly is. My previous understanding of the term was more like a way of thinking during the design process that would apply to a variety of thinking systems in interaction designs. I have to admit that was an inaccurate and quite limited thought. After observing his talk, I think a more proper answer would be a way of thinking that is influenced or inspired by people’s daily behavior or natural behavior that could possibly unlock and motivate potential creative development in our society. Moreover when art holds a position in the society it directly speaks to people and it becomes more empowering.
We purchased our WordPress themes in class today. The process of installing it was quite intimidating, I was afraid if I did any step wrong that it would end up wasting the theme that I purchased, which don’t make any sense. I am glad it all worked out at the end of the class. This weekend I will start to customize my portfolio site to see what possibilities there are. Overall, I am very excited! I like the one I have, and the front page has the images in a grid system and when you click on one, it will show more pictures and the description on the side, which exactly fits my ideal style.
In class today, we looked at a lot of WordPress themes on themeforest.net. It is exciting to think about having my online portfolio. I have been looking for an inexpensive but good-looking one. That is not going to work out. I would love to have a template that is clean and well organized. It would be great if I can have one that I can write project descriptions right next to the images. So far I have seen many templates that are for photographers, but they don’t provide the option to have fill in text.
This weekend, after I named my character styles properly in Illustrator, I finally started coding my website, and I was not surprised that it did not work the way I wanted when I linked my CSS with the html file I had created. Life is just tricky sometimes I suppose. But after I searched more on the Internet, things began to work out. Now I am struggling with how to move my text around on the page. The text box is just lying on top of my image with a super stubborn attitude. I know it shouldn’t be this hard.