Lessons Learned
This unit taught me a lot about being slow and consistent with my work over trying to rush completion. In doing so, I was able to refine a lot of my previous work to be of a higher quality to really meet the requirements. This can be seen in my block assignments, especially in my dream lifestyle one, where I was able to be more concise about the writing aspects over the visual ones. Along with that, applied the slower pacing of completion towards my website layout, and created a new tab for block assignments which made the initial tab of assignments feel less overwhelming to hover over. Overall, this unit was definitely hard content wise but I feel very proud of what I accomplished.
The Unexpectedly Easier and Hardest Aspects
The Design unit presented both difficult and easy aspects when it came to assignment execution and creation. I found it harder to meet the writing requirements, length wise, for a lot of the block assignments because of their necessary creative nature. Writing creatively in longer formats has always been a challenge for me, and this unit added onto that pressure, as I struggled to come up with good ideas for writing many of the stories for them. On the flip side, the actual creation of the designs was very enjoyable, as I liked getting to make my own designs for each assignment. The website Canva made a lot of the process very easy with their editable templates. It really added value to my photo collage assignment as it allowed for multiple visuals to exist on age nicely. Therefore, I really enjoyed the creation aspects of this unit over the writing ones.
The Frustrating Moments
Throughout this entire unit, the most frustrating moments, for me, came from trying to optimize the layout of the website without losing any completed assignments pages. I found myself re-organizing the order of the tabs and their corresponding sub tabs multiple times due to errors made when trying to simplify them. As a result, it become increasingly worrisome that as I completed work that the pages they were on would be deleted somehow. It was in these moment that I really had to slow down and make sure I did't click a bunch of random bottoms that would make certain design choices go away permanently. Outside of all of that, I also really struggled to come up with ideas of the storytelling aspects of my writing, since I have a lot of differences with idea generation when left open ended. In the end though, it ended up become easier as I asked for help from others as a way to be more efficient.
What made this Unit Fun
When reflecting on this unit's assignments, one of my favorite's was definitely the design blitz because of it's asking to play around with different types of everyday objects in photos. Specifically, I really enjoyed taking a terrible photo for the balance category, as I basically live in unbalanced chaos, design wise, so it was very easy to find examples of that. Additionally, I got a kick out of realizing how easy it can be to make terrible design choices. Beyond that, I really got to thoughtfully think about why advertisements are designed the way they are which I found very interesting when analyzing them. In conclusion, despite a lot of difficulties, this unit was enjoyable to do.