Week One
Prompt: What do you hope to achieve in this class by the end of the term? Are there special projects or technologies you’d like to see covered by the end of the term? Is there a site (or two) that gives you butterflies in your stomach? What is it?
Response: In this class, I hope to achieve a greater knowledge of making websites and overall enhance my design skills to create user-friendly and creative web designs. One of my greatest interests in design is interactivity no matter how big or discrete. I’m excited to start diving into interactive elements the go into web design that really transform good websites to great websites. Below are some fun sites I really enjoy going through to find inspiration!
Inspiring site of the week: This website is very beautiful overall but I also really like the navigation and journey through the website. Leiaud
The colors and overall design of this website is super aesthetically pleasing while also having a really great type palette. I also really love the motion and personality certain elements of the website has when you scroll and move your mouse. Frans Hals Museum
This website is just super fun to play with. Project Turntable
Week Two
Prompt: What are you planning to do for project 1? What content do you plan to show? How will you make each page unique while maintaining a cohesive design across the project? How will your color palette, imagery, and typography choice complement your subject matter?
Response: For project 1, the topic I decided to choose is about Aguas Frescas or “fresh water” because I wanted to work with something fun a colorful but also meaningful to myself and my culture. My plan to make each page unique while maintaining a cohesive design across the project is to simply focus on the topic of the individual page and build what fits with the information and not just copy the page before. This will be easy since instead of focusing on a different flavor of “fresh water” in each page, the topics I’m focusing on is about Aguas Frescas, the history, recipes, and where to get them locally in Portland. For my imagery, I want to have a nice mix of photography and illustrations and mainly use colors that naturally appear in Aguas Frescas. For typography, I’m planning on using some clean san serif typefaces to not take away too much from the visuals but I also want to incorporate some fun and wavy typefaces that move on your screen to bring some motion onto my project.
Inspiring site of the week: Carbon Eight
Week Three
Prompt: This weeks journal prompt, I want you to clearly imagine one user who'll love to use your Project 1 website. This user could be you, it could be someone similar to you, it could be someone completely opposite from you, it could even be a non-human animal or an alien or an amoeba. You get to choose. Really imagine what they are like in their mind. What do they spend their time on? what are their hobbies, clothes, music, favorite foods, books, tv. what's their personality like. Once you've imagined this person. write about them. just a paragraph, three to five sentences. try to have fun with it.
Response: For project one, the user I imagine is someone who is interested in Aguas Frescas! They could be like me, a Mexican-American small town girl, looking to get a taste of home. Or they could also be a typical human in the world, specifically in the Portland metro area, looking to try something new, to either enjoy in their home or to enjoy somewhere near them.
Inspiring site of the week: Feed
Week Four
Prompt: Read this short article https://hbr.org/2019/08/learning-is-supposed-to-feel-uncomfortable and this one on resistance https://www.mindful.org/the-neuroscience-of-resistance-and-how-to-overcome-it/. Considering these articles, make a list of 5 things to keep you going when you feel resistance or discomfort.
Response: Before reading both of these articles, I have actually made rules for myself because of laziness ruling my life. One rule I have is when I wake up, I need to get up, no more going back to sleep. Another rule is limiting the amount of times I eat out to maintain a healthy diet and also save money. A good rule that my dog makes me live up too is taking my dog Lola for a walk when she asks me by scratching on the door. Another rule I follow, is with my boyfriend, which is going through our cleaning list during our days off or else we can’t treat ourselves with restaurant food that week. And one of the most important rules is really putting my free time to doing homework, which in retrospect, has gotten significantly better.
Inspiring site of the week: Mikiya
Week Five
Umoju Miller talk.
Inspiring site of the week: The Octopus
Week Six
Prompt: Why did you choose the business/cause that you chose? Why do you think your redesign will be better? What area/content will you focus on in your redesign? Look at two other similar websites. What stands out about those sites? What bothers you about them? How will you improve things in your own design?
Response: The Woodstock Mystery Hole is a strange and mystical place and I assumed their website would reflect that, but unfortunately did not. The website is a very basic design with centered aligned text, and I believe I can redesign it to better fit the mystery behind the Mystery hole. From looking at the website of Voodoo Doughnuts and The Freakybuttrue Peculiarium and Museum website, I had some fun ideas. From Looking at Voodoo, I have a love hate relationship with their background choices with a scroll animation. Sometimes they look good and other time it looks glitchy like the first page with pink brick. But other than that the website looks very nice, especially the doughnut section. The Freakybuttrue Peculiarium and Museum gave my extra inspiration to go wild with colors and really push the idea of mystery and strangeness.
Inspiring site of the week: Voodoo Doughnut
Inspiring site of the week: The Freakybuttrue Peculiarium and Museum
Week Seven
Inspiring site of the week: Lorenzo Verzini
Week Eight
Prompt: Read this article on mobile-first design and share your thoughts on mobile-first vs desktop first. https://medium.com/@Vincentxia77/what-is-mobile-first-design-why-its-important-how-to-make-it-7d3cf2e29d00
Response: I was skeptical at first but mobil-first design really grew on me. At first it felt like extra work splitting everything up and spending extra time on resizing and such, but at the end of the day I felt like my code was better and more secure. It also felt like it was a little easier than last time but weirdly more time consuming but that’s probably my only complaint.
Inspiring site of the week: Slavery Footprint
Week Nine
Prompt: This one's about "why." Read this article (try to pretend it's not a cheezy article about business success). Spend some time thinking about why you are pursuing a career in design. Really dig down, do the 7 "whys" tool in the article. OR If that's too challenging right now, consider people in your life or people who've inspired you. Think about what drives them, what their "why" is. Why did they work so hard to do XYZ, was it from past experiences they had, was it because they saw a need they were called to fill? What's their deeper "why?" Ask them if you know them, or look up some biographical information and try to figure it out. Write about either you or your inspiration.
Response: Being that my parents both came to this country from Mexico, I have a few whys. My mom is one of my biggest whys, she was very poor growing up, didn’t even have her own shoes. She faced lots of hardships in life and worked for everything she had. She even made it University on her own and began her studies to become a teacher. Although that dream was cut too short, she found love and moved to the US with my dad and started her own business in 2009, which is still open today. With so many odds against her, she made it, and I want to be better because of her. Although we did face hardships as a family and struggled to put food on the table, it was nothing compared to what she had overcome. I had a pretty easy life and I’m privileged for that, hard work is in my blood and there’s no reason I shouldn’t put my all into my work. She made long strides in her life and even though my challenges will be different, I want to make long strides too and make my family proud.
Inspiring site of the week:
The Neverlands