Personal Essay (Final)

Though this was the only final I've ever been able to enjoy, it caused me lots trouble. The biggest obstacle I encountered was with the images and a spacing issues, at first anyways. My flash drive and private space were both full of things that I couldn't really delete. I then tried to e-mail them to myself but the file was too big (I still have yet to receive it.) I then tried to upload them onto facebook, but that was taking too long. I eventually transfered the pictures in groups using different flash drives. This turned out to be a problem later with Filezilla. But once I picked out my pictures and made the mp3 of my voice and song, it was pretty easy from there. All of the technical things were out of the way (or so I thought) and the only thing left was the artistic part. I just had to arrange the pictures to match the sound, which of course took longer than anticipated because I wanted it to be perfect. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with the final product. I put a lot of time and thought into the pictures and even the sound. It is something that I am proud of and I feel it demonstrates my progression of skills. I would not have been able to put this together at the beginning of the semester because all of the skills that I acquired built up on each other. I had to edit a lot of photos in Photoshop and I even pulled a few things into QuarkXpress. I then pulled my song file and voice file into iTunes and did the necessary conversions and edited the sound using Garage Band because I am more familiar with that program. I am also able to apply so many of these skills in other classes and even outside of the classroom. However, if I had more time, I would probably do the voice over again. I thought it sounded fine on tape and I had recorded it numerous times and tried to cut out the parts that I messed up a lot but I only had a short period of time with the Edirol and it is hard to find a quiet place with not too much echo. Once I heard it in paired up with the song, you can unfortunately, hear my breathing in some parts and I sound a little hesitant in other parts and I only had so much time to edit. Also I had a hard time trying to sound natural and not as if I was reading a script. Once I thought I was done, I wasn't. It turned out that my Sound Slide file was too big. I had too many pictures and it took too long to load, so long that it didn't even show a play button and what viewer would wait? So I had to go back in and delete some pictures. This may sound easy but I had to rearrange everything! Now that the file was much smaller it was supposed to work. But it of course didn't. This time Filezilla didn't have enough space for me. Luckily I had some duplicate websites from earlier in the year that I was able to delete and create space. Finally, it fit but this time, it wouldn't fully load in Safari. It turned out some of the files didn't transfer over from my publish to web folder. I had to go in and individually move each file into Filezilla which showed me that computers aren't going to always do what you tell them to. So hours later and with the help of Professor O'Connell, it worked and I was very relieved and excited. Not even ten minutes later, my friend was having a similar problem and I was able to help her. So even though it was a bit of a pain, I'm better off for it because I had to fix this problem and now I know what to do. This was probably my biggest learning experience of the year and I am proud of myself for not giving up or going insane. Overall, I believe this course is so valuable because even though these programs change all the time, I feel as though I can figure out new programs with this basic understanding that I now have and even when I was frustrated with a project, it was very rewarding once I accomplished it.

BiBi Card

(Above is QuarkXpress)

This assignment was very frustrating and very fun at the same time. The point of this assignment was to exactly recreate a BiBi card that we chose. I didn't have very high hopes for myself at the beginning of this assignment because last time I used QuarkXpress, I didn't really like it and I have never used Indesign so I knew that was going to be a challenge. Probably the biggest challenge for me was finding similar fonts and matching background color. Actually placing and sizing areas of the BiBi card wasn't much of a challenge at all thanks to the rulers and guides. I eventually settled on a font that I think looks almost exactly like the real one and I had to settle for a color. I knew the color was going to be a challenge because the BiBi card is neon and our printers aren't good for that kind of thing. Because Indesign was so new to me, when I first started the BiBi card in Indesign, I just kind of stared at the screen for a while before deciding what to do but because I have used photoshop, I just tried to utilize those skills, so I was able to figure out more than I thought. I enjoyed anything that I did that made my BiBi card look more like the one that was already made. It was really cool when it started coming together and I wanted to continue working on it and then I was actually looking forward to attempting it in Indesign once I successfully executed the one in QuarkXpress. I am proud of myself for finishing them on time and as accurately as I possibly could. Once I printed it out, I was able to see just how accurate I was. However, if I had more time, I would fix the recycling symbol. It was the last thing I did in both programs because it was giving me the most trouble, especially in Indesign. So I just shrunk it down to the correct size and I know I'll get docked points for that but if I had more time and patients, I was only able to fix it kind of in QuarkXpress, which is the one I posted, but Indesign didn't work as well so if I had more time, I'd definitely like to fix it.

(Below is Indesign)

Website

Bare Essentials to my Website

I found this assignment to be very interesting. I have never even thought about what goes into making a website before this. I wish that we had more time to play with Dreamweaver and really develop the website into a fully fuctioning site. Because this coincided with my PR class, the website is about my client for that class. It is a great starter for me and I can hopefully expand on the site so my client can actually use it. I was very interesting to see the back bone of a website. It is obviously not very aesthetically pleasing but it is usable and I am proud of it. I never thought in a million years that I'd be creating my own websites. I feel as though learning these skills will help me navigate websites better, appreciate websites more and I have a very very basic understanding of "geek speak" and html's. I feel as though I will be able to make my own websites in the future and it was actually all very easy. Though this was not the most exciting assignment, I am glad that I had to do it because it definitely taught me things besides graphic design type things like we've done before.

Brochure

For this assignment, I was able to accomplish a lot actually. I had to make a brochure for whatever I wanted and it just so happened that I needed to have a visual tactic for my public relations class, which is why it is about the south coast of Massachusetts—my client. The biggest challenge I came across was with the margins. It took a few tries of trial and error with printing before I was able to get everything centered and not chopped off within it's panel. I eventually learned how to print in properly and once I had set the correct margins using picture boxes, I was able to get everything squared away. Doing a brochure was new for me in general. I had to do one in high school and I had to glue the back and front to each other and it didn't look very clean. I really enjoyed finding the perfect picture for the backgrounds. It took some playing with because some of the pictures were too dark and it threw off my whole idea. So I am most proud of the inside because I really like how it is a legitimate brochure for these places with an actual picture from one of the locations. I think it lays nicely and peaks interest. However, if I had more time, I probably would have played around with more colors and themes. All of the writing is black and I really liked the outside background at first, but now that I look at it, I would have liked to do something else. It doesn't necessarily look like it's a brochure for a vacation.

Sound Slide

I was much more excited for this assignment than I was about the poster because I was really happy with the way my powerpoint came out. The point was to get my powerpoint up on the internet. I was trying really hard to make the music fit together just right when it was looped so that it would be hard to tell where it was cut but I don't know if I succeeded. It was really challenging to do because I tried so many cuts and what I ended with was as close as I could come. It was probably due to the fact that I have never played around with editing a piece of music like that before and I have never used audacity. This of course, gave me much frustration. The program is fairly easy to use but, similar to quarkxpress, it would do exactly as I told it to, so you need a pretty steady hand to line up clips of music to fit, I couldn't get it on an exact tenth of a second that I wanted it to be a lot of the time. Overall though, I am proud that I was able to complete it. I think that it sounds as good as I could get it in this short period of time. Playing around with the soundslide program was a lot of fun because I got to be in control of the music coinciding with my powerpoint. If I had more time, I would have focused a lot more on the cutting of the music. It took me about and hour and a half to familiarize myself with audacity before I could start doing legitimate work on the sound and I kept messing up. I would also probably add more elements of the song and really cut it up. I would also work longer on making the clips loop better so it sounded more realistic.

Poster

I had a lot of frustration with this assignment. I'm not sure if it's because I wasn't as into it as I was with earlier projects or if it was because I was using a new program, Quarkxpress, but I'm not fond of the final product for the first time. I was just trying to create an eye-catching poster that would give you basic information if you passed by it quickly. I was hoping it would be interesting to look at but I'm not sure now that it is done. The biggest challenge that I encountered was using this new program. I was used to photoshop and layers are different in the two programs so that was annoying for me. Also because your options are endless, I was almost overwhelmed with the things that I could do, so I would play around and just kind of leave it at the last setting I had it on. But I eventually figured out the basics with lots of playing. So the fact that I could literally do whatever I wanted, as long as I told it too was very new for me. Photoshop has a setting and you are limited within the setting. Though this hasn't been my favorite assignment, I really enjoyed working on such a large scale. It was cool to have all that space to fill with only a few requirements. It was fun to make the lettering and starbursts large. I am most proud of finally getting "Atmosphere" to go vertically and the fading backgrounds of the starbursts. Overall, I don't really like my poster but I'm not really sure why. I like elements of it and some of my ideas but I don't like the way it really came together as a whole. So if I had more time, I probably would have tried to put "Atmosphere" in different ways on the page and played around with a different background, maybe I would have even left it white. Though I was overall frustrated, using Quarkxpress was a good learning experience and I'm hoping to get better at it!

Power Point Slides

For the assignment, I wanted to accomplish something that was aesthetically pleasing. My first thought was what pictures could I use for the backgrounds and then I worried about what was actually going on the slides. Overall, this assignment wasn't very challenging for me since I have used powerpoint before, it was just figuring out how to do little details like animations that was a bit of a challenge but even then it was pretty easy to find. Plus it took a lot of time to play around with which animations I liked best for specific pictures and phrases. The newest thing for me was putting a table in powerpoint. I have never really thought about doing that before so it never occurred to me that you could do that. But once I found it, it was very easy and was just like using a table in another program. The thing I enjoyed doing most was putting together the pictures and backgrounds on slides. I got to play with photoshop to get the images how I wanted them and I enjoy using photoshop so that was my favorite part. I think I am most proud of the assignment overall. I really like the first slide how there is half of his face and the record company logo on the side. I also really liked that I was able to execute all of my ideas for the backgrounds. The second slide was just some cool graffiti that I found and the third slide was lemons because of the name of their latest album. The fourth slide is actually a picture of Minneapolis and I altered using one of my favorite filters. The fifth was actually kind of difficult to make but I really wanted to put all of the album covers together as a background. However, if I had more time, I probably would have made the final slide more interesting. I don't know what it is but I feel like it's kind of boring even though it actually took me forever to do the background images as well as the foreground image.