Reflection

This project was really different for me than the previous two. On the last two, I struggled with design and ended up completely changing everything at some point in the process. For this project I started out with an idea and it worked well throughout the whole process. I had to tweak some things along the way, but I never completely scrapped my design and started over. That was nice, even though I felt like I was slacking because of how much less time it took me to do it. Then I remembered that I was spending twice as much time as I needed to on the previous projects and I felt better.

I think my technical struggles and weaknesses are definitely getting better. I really can’t think of anything I really struggled with technically on this project. I’m even getting to the point where creating layer folders and naming all the layers is second nature and I feel like the project is incomplete if my layers are a mess. I feel like that is a good sign for my infant web designing skills.

Conceptually, I did have to come back and rework a few things. In my first comp, I didn’t have a place related to each post to tell readers which category each post was related with. I had to go back in a reorganize things a bit to fit it in cohesively. I think I may have some areas on this project where I’m not using a web safe font where one is needed. I tried to correct this, but I think maybe this should be a technical struggle, but I’m not entirely sure where web safe fonts should and should not be.

I think coming up with a solid design idea from the beginning was definitely a sign of improvement to me. I don’t know if that was specific to just this project though because I spend most of my internet time on people’s personal blogs rather than corporate websites. It could be that I’m just more comfortable and familiar with blog themes and that’s what made this process easier.

My sketching got better! I have a few more this time, but I do need to continue learning how to work things out on paper first. I think in the world outside of school, sketching will come more naturally when I have longer amounts of time to commit to projects throughout the day. Frequent interruptions in the schedules of my day make it difficult for me to get in the mind set of sketching. I will keep trying here though!