Reflections: Blog 7

A few weeks away from the blog and already it is missed.  Thankfully it scrolls in the opposite order of the education I have had in multimedia design.  There was a purpose in not making any changes to layouts, typography, color uses, etc.  I intended to see the mistakes made in the onset as the course continued to gage my progress.  The initial assignment of the media critique and the layout for the Thinkfinity groups were very basic and contained many design flaws.  It is delightful knowing that I can point that out now, though embarrassing since everyone else can too.

Mini-Art School

The grueling hours spent laying out designs using new skills and software have been missed.  Mini-art school and the readings that accompanied it helped me develop artistically and forced me to look at everything I created in entirely new ways.  I use to hate reversing, centered everything and crammed as much information as possible into a document. But now I utilize the “Works-Every-Time Layout”, provide plenty of margin space around everything, and utilize column layouts and rectangular design elements for chunking the information. (Golombisky & Hagen, 2010 p. 21-26, 36, 79)  As I create classroom materials and the website for the MMP project I am constantly trying to avoid the “layout sins” especially in regards to trapped negative space that ultimately kept happening when placing movies, buttons, and files within two and three column layouts. Abstaining from the usage of all the great gadgets available at Weebly has also helped to avoid the sin of clutter. (Golombisky & Hagen, p. 33, 38) The font activities enhanced my love for typography, but also taught when and how to properly employ it.  I now primarily stick to sans serifs for most of my website to promote readability.  I plan to utilize more drop case and typographic conveyance to the website once the initial development and implementation are complete.  When rereading my posts I realize how much I enjoyed those activities and should continue to practice them.

The Work of Others

Perusing through the creations of colleagues was very beneficial to my development as well.  In the initial stages of this course I was extremely hesitant about sharing projects with strangers.  As the course progressed I looked forward to seeing the work of others to gain a deeper understanding of how that weeks’ concepts were interpreted and utilized.  Ali’s isolated merry-go-round in the cropping activity, Katie’s swirling ice cream background on the color echo activity, and even Vanessa and my eerily similar typographic conveyances extended my view of how these skills were put to use in a wide variety of displays.  (I swear Vanessa and I did not copy off each other though I wish I had thought to use a paintbrush rather than cropping tools to shred words!)

For the Future

As I reflect back to the beginning modules of this course I realize how much I have learned about the importance of design within multimedia as well as how far I still need to go to fully employ all that I have learned.  I took giant leaps with many of the mini-art school projects.  However, with the MMP I have focused on layout, unity, and not committing any of the layout sins.   After reviewing the blogs, I see how important my overall design will be to the success of the class website as well as all of my future creations.  For this reason I will to continue to revise the website and apply the other techniques I have learned to maximize its potential and keep student interest high.

Golombisky, Kim, & Hagen, Rebecca (2010). White Space is Not Your Enemy. New York: Focal Press.
Krause, Jim (2004) Design Basics Index. Cincinnati: HOW Design Books