Week 15: Outside of Class

This week I focused on working on the feedback I received from my professor and my fellow classmates. Pretty much everything was related to design elements. A lot of the issues were with tying things together to create unity. I had changes my feature area background to a gray binary pattern that faded in and out. However, I was told it was still a little too present. I decided to tone that down a bit more. My biggest issue was figuring out how to display the character's descriptions. My first take on it seemed too empty and blocky. I asked some other people in my class and one of my fellow classmates suggested adding color since my my design so far had only 2 colors and was very clean in that way. This is what I came up with:

I decided to soften the edges and add a gradient. Each character has a different color which matches something in their design. I think this is a better way of displaying the information in a way which owns the space without cluttering it. There is still quite a bit to touch up, but I feel more confident in my design as a whole.

Week 15a: Moving towards finishing the website (70% completed)

On Monday, I received some critique on my website. A lot of it was minor things such as line spacing, font choice for body copy, and so on. I took this critique along with what I said I would do in my last post and continued to better my website. I changed the body copy to something more fitting for the tone of my website and increased the line spacing so it wasn't so tight. Then, I changed my feature area so that it didn't go all the way across. Instead, I created a graphic of fake binary and faded it out so it would be a subtle but present texture. I also changed the way I was going about doing my "Meet the Cast" section and decided to play around with styling there - although I think it still needs more work. Finally, I added a working "navigation bar", that jumps down the page. I felt it was a nice touch. I think from here, the only thing I need to work on is design elements. I definitely have ideas in mind for what to change and make more interesting. Anyway, here is the website at this point:

Week 14b: Website 50% Done

For this coming Monday, we were asked to have the website at 50% done. Since my previous post, I added some more content in the form of paragraphs and I also created some new graphics. I decided to take away some colors from my original style-tile, and instead will be sticking with a gray and blue color palette. I also began the "Meet the Cast" section, which I am having a little trouble with formatting-wise. Another strange thing that keeps occurring is that the site will not display single quotation marks, which means that as of right now, there is some incorrect grammar throughout the page. I am not sure if this is just the particular font I am using (Open Sans), or if it is something else. The double quotations obviously work. Regardless, these are small issues which I am sure I will be able to easily fix.  Here is the updated site:

From here, I plan to add descriptions for the characters (the problem I previously mentioned), a "navigation bar" that jumps throughout the page, a better feature area graphic, and links to the Tiny Tech Academy Kickstarter page and social media. I am also considering another set of three statistics in the "Why is this show important?" section. I hope to receive some beneficial feedback that will help me further my project even more so that I will be able to finish making something that I am truly proud of. .

Week 14: Outside of Class (Off-Campus Event)

On Tuesday I went to an off campus event in Harrisburg that was hosted by the Central Pennsylvania Adobe Users group. Originally, there was supposed to be a speaker there who would be presenting on Adobe XD, an upcoming prototyping software. However, when I arrived, the people hosting the event notified us that the speaker was no longer unable to come, but that the host, Megan, would speak instead. She told us about how Adobe XD's biggest competitor right now is Invision. I thought this was interesting, given that we had just used that program in our previous project. She mentioned that in order to truly compete, they would have to make sure that they included everything Invision had, and more, otherwise she felt it likely wouldn't take off in the same way. After she spoke briefly on Adobe XD, she then went on to talk about her personal experience working as a project manager for a company called gun.io. Since I didn't really know a lot about the project management aspect of design and development, I found her speech to be interesting. She talked about the difference between a project manager and a product manager, something I didn't even know existed. The difference was that a project manager focuses on the logistics of the project, and a product manager is expected to be the expert on the project. When asked about some of the most difficult or unexpectedly problematic parts of her job, she talked about working internationally. This is difficult, obviously, due to time zone differences, but she also talked about the positives of working with people across the globe. The biggest one was the ability to essentially keep working 24 hours a day, as they would pass the project from one to another and the day went on. This causes an increase in productivity, as opposed to a localized business, which is confined to one time zone and therefore fewer hours. Another interesting aspect about her job and the company that she worked for is that they have a huge pool of people from all sorts of different design/development backgrounds. Because of this, she is able to pull different people who specialize in a variety of things and delegate them to a specific project. A lot of these people are actually temp employees who can pick up odd jobs here and there, similar to freelance. Finally, one of the other most interesting things she spoke on was the relationship between a developer and a customer, in that, they shouldn't have one. She said that this can cause a variety of issues in terms of a he said/she said situation. It is for this reason that project and product managers exist, to avoid conflicts that can arise when the developer and the customer talk in private. I had never really given any thought to difficulties between a developer and customer in any other sense than miscommunication and misunderstandings. Although the event ended up being not exactly what I came for, I still found it to be interesting and useful as a different perspective into what could potentially be my future.