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.

Flickr

There are many different programs, applications and websites that can be used to manage your photographs. But one of the most popular online tools is "Flickr." Flickr was founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake and there are 50 team members. This program allows you to publicly or privately publish your photos and videos from just about any outlet you can think of to share with as many or as little people as you'd like! Not only does Flickr want you to be able to send and access your pictures with ease but they give you a fool-proof way to organize and search within your photos and videos. You can organize them yourself or you can give family and friends access to organizing them as well. Flickr is kind of like a whole community because you can look at your favorite friends pictures on a sort of feed and they update their blog often for the latest developments. Flickr is a part of "Yahoo," so if you already have an account with Yahoo, then you're all set!

Not only is Flickr a place to upload and organize your photos, but its serves to be multi-functional. You can upload photos from your computer, including e-mail and desktop, and even from your camera phone. There are tons of edits that you can play around with as well to make your pictures fun with different fonts and effects using "Picnik" or you can simply crop and fix red eye. This is also an outlet where you can make things like photo books, DVDs, cards and much more. Another really interesting feature is the maps. This allows you to share where your pictures were taken and then you can search for other pictures from similar areas. A key feature of the "Organizr" is that it allows you to change the privacy on them. You can make one "collection" or "set" private so only you can see them, only selected people can see them or so everyone can see them. Some of the features are also similar to Facebook in that you can tag pictures and get updates on pictures, albums and videos from friends and family!

Animation

For this assignment, I was just trying to execute it properly. I wanted my image to go after my animated word poem and I was successful. I came across a few challenges when doing this leg of the project. I sat in the mac lab for a while not really knowing what to do. I didn't really take notes on the subject and relied heavily on the book. I was frustrated a lot but when I figured it out on my own it made it that much better and I even helped a few other people. The idea of putting an animation on the internet was definitely new for me. I just figured you could copy and paste the link or just drag in in there. I had no idea you had to go through firezilla which also caused me a little frustration because I had to keep resizing my image in order for it to fit in the blog because the right half kept getting cut off. So I'm pretty much a pro with firezilla now. I enjoyed getting it right though. I was glad when I put my animation together and figured it out on my own. I learned new things just by playing around. I also thought that I had lost my entire animation when I saved it as a GIF and tried to open it in photoshop but sure enough realized it's because you can't play a GIF in photoshop. So I was glad when I put everything together and I was excited once it was actually on the internet. I was most proud of myself when I was figuring things out on my own and was then able to reiterate it to others because this shows me that if I ever had to do it again, I could! But if I had had more time, I would have liked to animate my image as well. I didn't realize that I'd have to make my image in the same file as my poem in order to do so and by the time I realized that, it was too late. But for all I know I wouldn't have liked it like that anyways, so overall I am pleased with the way it came out!