Blog

Just 6 more days of class before the semester ends. I’m gonna end the semester of a bang, and will provide my best work towards the end to prove to myself that I have improve greatly.

Right now we are ending many projects, in Tony’s classes we are working on the final pages of our magazine. Currently I’m on the featured article spread and got two out of the four pages done. After finishing all four I’ll move onto the 2nd article.

Another project we are working on is with Rick’s class with New Media Dev. We’re coding our websites for our quote on quote client Chef Jacquline finally. It’s fun, but that does give me an idea for our personal websites for portfolio. I could code it myself, cause I heard it’s more impressive.

Looking back on this Semester, I’m glad I made it this far. It just shows how much hard work I put into it.

Surprisingly the semester is closing up soon. Which was so fast. So that means we’re revving up with the assignments. That means we have a lot of magazine pages to do now. Luckily I like to be ahead with my projects, so they don’t pile up as I got my lead-in spread mostly completed now. Just gonna work on revisions on that before starting on the most important thing in the magazine. The Main Article.

A side note I have, I wish I could go back and redesign the entire magazine so it would fit together even more. But I like the current state of the magazine as it shows the evolution of my skills and design.

Another thing is that I will be only posting one blog post this week as it’s Thanksgiving Week.

I don’t really have much to blog about this week. As we’re still working on the same projects, and it’s the same routine. Though Winter Break is approaching and I’m excited about that. Winter Break would allow me to focus on my personal projects, instead of projects that my instructors assign. I had many ideas brainstorming for Winter Break that I want to create. Plus Winter Break is a perfect time for me to relax as these past few months have been kinda tiring and stressful. I also know from graduates that the final semester is the most stressful so I have to take all the relaxing I can before.

This week so far, we started on the project called Chef Jacqueline’s Baked Goods. Which right now I’m working on the mockup for. I’m really feeling these last two projects I been working on. Yeah layouts are fun and all but doing them for a few projects straight can be boring. Plus I think website design and packaging designs are calling for my name. They help bring out my eye for creativity. Maybe it’s because I been doing all these magazine layouts for a bit that I been bored and needed a change of pace.

Recently we been doing projects that have been great for me personally, as it has helped me unleash some creativity I have stored inside. We been doing layouts for so long I gotten kinda bored of them. These new projects help to break him the boredom of doing the same thing everyday.

Firstly we started working on the package assignment, which I made a blog post a few days ago. This was fun because as younger me loved making up hypothetical products for companies. Makeup Products was one of them, so you can see my excitement when I created the packaging for this project. Which was a lipstick box and I printed it out and folded it. It looks so pretty and professional and it healed my inner child.

The other project I’m excited to work on was actually introduced today, we are creating a website for Chef Jaqueline Baked Goods. Which excites me because I get to create a brand identity for this hypothetical person! I had fun creating the mood board. Huh this does give me an idea of what I want to go into for my job. Something with designing packaging or brands for people and companies.

Today we went on a little field trip during our New Media Development class to the Carsforsale.com building near Lake Lorriane.

I’m going to be honest but I preferred this trip compared to the AAF student day. The reason why? I got to see the actual industry full of people who I can relate to. AAF was full of people who were being professional, but this field trip allowed me to see the raw truth of the industry. They are nerds just like me. Which gives me hope that I can make it like them.

I learned a lot during this trip, specifically about coding. Each year learns much more coding than the year before. Apparently in 2015, they only gotten one semester of coding. Compared to our current I believe 2-3 semesters(?) I’m glad I’m decent at coding cause technology and graphic design is constantly evolving and I have to evolve with it. Not fight it.

Nothing like amazing has happened, I’m gonna be honest. But isn’t that life? Not everyday is going to be memorable. And that’s okay.

In class this week we didn’t do anything new, It was just worktime to work on our current projects. In Tony’s classes we are working on packaging design and components to our mega project aka the magazine. Doing the magazine is a massive learning objective as there’s so much in there.

Plus there’s the packaging which has so many details you don’t notice at first, but when you look closely you see so many important details. Couldn’t you say the same with life?

Anyways, we have a tour of CarsForSale.com next week and it’ll be a refreshing break from class.

Time passed by so fast, it felt like yesterday I was a first year. But look how far I have gotten. My designs have improved dramatically, as I have gotten much better. I’ma be honest, my designs from first year were bad compared to now. But that shows progress. Which is always good.

Moving on from that, Coding is very much fun now. Building something and figuring out the mistakes and once you figure out whats wrong with it and you fix it, you get this rush of relief and proudness after doing so.

Plus right now we’re designing packaging and I’m having so much fun designing products for my made up brand. My brand is called color&play and our concept is that the products look like art supplies.

An Update from my Dreamweaver post from this week.

Everything’s clicking for Dreamweaver as things make sense now. Coding’s fun when you know what you’re doing instead of struggling. It’s similar to when people say they hate Math, it’s most likely because they don’t understand it properly yet and are struggling. But just like Coding, once you understand it, it all starts making sense and you start having fun.

So I’m working on the Last Thursday Project and it’s going well, I managed to recreate the layout created in Photoshop inside of Dreamweaver. Only issue I am facing is that I cannot figure out how to change the color of the navbar. But I’ll eventually figure it out. I always do.

I thought Dreamweaver was behind me, but it’s always lingering around. Taunting me. So I decided to master it. Quit complaining and understand the program. My goal with all these programs I’m learning/working with is to master them. Or at least be a Jack of All Trades. Where I’m competent enough in each software so I can at least get things done in them.

If I had to rank myself from my strongest to weakest performance in each adobe program it would be:

1. Photoshop

2. Illustrator

3. InDesign

4. Premiere Pro

5. After Effects

6. XD

7. Dreamweaver

Even though it’s my weakest program I know, I am not gonna let it drag me down. This week we got introduced to a new project, it’s called Last Thursday where we are replicating a design from a PSD file into Dreamweaver. I am rusty at Dreamweaver as it has been a while since I been in the program. But I know it’ll be important for me to retain this skill as it will open up many chances for me.