For your very first entry, please use this space below to write five learning goals. These could be broad goals like, “I want to improve my overall digital literacy,” or program-specific like, “I want to learn how to use the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator efficiently.”  

Learning Goal One 

I want to become more proficient in Adobe tools, since I only have experience in photoshop. 

Learning Goal Two 

Strengthen my graphic design skills; specifically in regard to color usage and composition. 

Learning Goal Three 

Become more comfortable making minimalistic work (I’m crazy for detail/maximalism) 

Learning Goal Four 

Pursuing/growing animation skills; I’ve always been really interested in animating but rarely had the time/opportunity.  

Learning Goal Five 

Similar to animation, I’ve always wanted to learn more about working with 3D designs in a digital space.   

Entry Two: Learning Journal (reflecting on week one) 

Why are you interested in what we are exploring in this class? 

Digital art has been my passion for many years, but I never had the resources to fully explore all of the possibilities the medium provides. I’m really interested in exploring Adobe apps (I.e. Photoshop) over the course of this class, and developing professional graphic design skills.  

What are you most excited about? 

I’m really excited to start using these new tools for artistic projects; I don’t have a lot of experienced in vectors so illustrator will be a fun challenge, as well as the other programs. This feeling is lessened for Photoshop since I know how it works already, but I’m still excited to finish this self portrait. 

What have you learned about your learning preferences? 

I definitely prefer in-class learning, especially for computers. Maintaining my zoom screen as well as my photoshop window is surprisingly hard, mainly because it takes a toll on my laptop to run both. I’ve dealt with this a lot using photoshop; it uses so much ram that loading other windows, especially those with live webcams, tends to buffer and cause issues on my display. This tends to distract me, and makes it hard to keep track of the lesson. 

  

What will you change for the next phase of your learning journey? 

Checking the canvas more thoroughly & writing down assignments that were vocalized. I checked the assignments tab when seeing what was due the next day, and I didn’t look at the modules tab, which contained the actual assignment that was due. It was especially regrettable because it was also said in class, and I clean forgot. From now on I’m going to write down assignments, and check both assignments and modules, that way I don’t lose points or miss out on critiques. 

How do you think that what you’ve learned and accomplished will help you in your educational/professional goals? 

I haven’t really made any mindmaps before; I thought it was a little tedious at first, but I ended up really appreciating it while finding photos. I plan to use this technique of mindmapping again while doing character designs, worldbuilding, or just working on other projects. 

What are you most excited about? 

I’m really excited to start creating the album art. I’ve already done this project before in a color class last year, and I’m excited to try it again on a new program with a very different type of song. I really struggle with minimalistic work, but I’m excited to take on the challenge! 

  

Did you learn anything that surprised you? 

I was pleasantly surprised when learning about the modifications you can make to selections, I.e. feathering. It’s an extremely useful tool that I didn’t know about beforehand, and I’ll definitely be using it more. 

Evaluate your progress with respect to your goals. On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you that you put your best effort into achieving your goals? 

With the creation of the album art, I’ve progressed with my goal of creating more minimalistic designs. I’m fairly happy with the overall piece, especially due to the text and color schemes, but I still feel like it’s missing a sort of clean / professional look. I’d like to refine my designs and make them look a little more professional in the future. 

If you were giving advice to someone else who wants to take this course, what would you tell them? 

Definitely to make use of the ruler tool, Photoshop’s automatic alignments that try to center things on your canvas often do not actually center them. It gets thrown off dependent on selection, image size, and the number of other objects you have on the page. This is why the ruler tool is so helpful; multiple times throughout the project photoshop would center something and I would intrinsically sense it was off. By double checking with the ruler, you’re able to make a more polished image overall. 

  

When I was creating the clothing mockups for the patterns, I initially thought they had to be created on illustrator instead of photoshop. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to make that work, and ultimately it was a waste of time I could’ve avoided by reading the deliverables more carefully. 

This group project was a bit of a challenge, which surprised me since I’m usually pretty good at working in a team / collaborating. This time though, since we had to make icons that matched and felt very cohesive, I had to relinquish a lot of design choices I was passionate about. My initial designs for my wasp were a little more detailed & overall less conventional, but I was really proud of how they turned out. However, the group decided they wanted all of our icons to be front facing and simple shapes, so I had to scrap the idea and make something more simplified, which I was initially disappointed about. However, when we put all the designs together into the patterns, I ended up really liking the final result. Ultimately, I think it created a more effective pattern design than my ideas would’ve. Overall I think I really learned how to compromise and relinquish control over my design ideas, which is important when working within a group. 

I think learning to relinquish control when in a group is really important for working in teams in general, especially professionally. I tend to take on leadership roles concerning art/design, so being in a small group with other assertive designers forced me to be more open to their ideas, which worked out well in the long run. I also think we communicated really well, that way we stayed on track and got everything done efficiently. Also, using Miro to post progress sketches was super useful in developing and discussing our ideas. 

  

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed working with Illustrator. I’ve tried to work with vectors before, and I really struggled with them. Illustrator makes them much easier to work with, and it’s surprisingly user-friendly once you get used to the UI. Overall, I was surprised at how easy it is to create logos/vectors. 

I’m excited to learn about 3D modelling/working in a 3D space next week. I’ve always wanted to learn digital 3D design, but I never had the time, equipment, or hardware to really invest in learning. It seems like an invaluable skill that will give me access to a whole new process of creation. I also have an ulterior motive of eventually learning to model in blender, since I’ve always wanted to try making 3D characters. I’m hoping that this will be a good first introduction. 

We learned to use the line tool in Illustrator, and then how to create logos with it. Generally speaking the way I’ve learned to use the line tool most effectively is by tracing/drawing the initial rough shape with a straight-line tool, leaving plenty of in between space and only blocking out harsh shapes. Then, I go in with the curved line tool and create new anchor points, defining any curves I need. From there I adjust and refine it further with the direct selection and curved line tools.  

  

As I mentioned last week, I’m really happy to finally be doing 3D modeling. It’s a big load on my computer so it’s very slow, but just learning the basics made me feel like I was making progress with my goals. Seeing how easy it is (at least the basics) made me feel more hopeful about someday mastering it. 

I’d give myself a 10, since I put a lot of time and effort into figuring out how Adobe InDesign works. Going into this class, learning 3D design has been a major goal. InDesign felt like a good first step, so I put a lot of effort into understanding it. Even outside of the project, I experimented a lot with lighting, different objects, different textures, etc. .  

I actually enjoyed working from a pre-recorded lecture in class using headphones, I found it super helpful to be able to pause the video to catch up, as well as having the ability to rewind parts I found confusing. Simultaneously, the fact that I could still ask the teacher in class if I had a question really made that arrangement the best of both worlds. 

  

My classmates definitely impacted my learning this week regarding typography. I’ve never worked in typography before, and I wasn’t sure how to make my hierarchy quote look good. I was very cautious with the size differences, colors, etc. until I saw how far my classmates were pushing it. After seeing how beautiful and unique they looked, I started to explore more adventurous type facing, which ultimately looked much better.  

I would definitely tell them to download fonts in advance. I found a lot of the Adobe default fonts to be kind of boring, ugly, and unprofessional looking. I kind of struggled with font choice throughout these projects, and in hindsight I would have saved a lot of time just downloading a font package. 

I’ve learned about the font families/font styles, which I didn’t really know about before. I know now that the five major font families are serif, sans serif, cursive, fantasy, and monospace. I really like serifs and monospace fonts the most, and I plan to use those for the majority of my design work. 

  

I’m really struggling with InDesign; I find it to be extremely unintuitive and hard to use. The problem is that every other adobe program works in relatively similar ways, the layers, resizing/cropping tools, and text tools generally have the same functions and commands. However, InDesign is completely different for seemingly no reason. Doing simple tasks is hard because I’m so used to other programs; I keep forgetting and struggling to adapt to InDesign’s keyboard commands. I’ve mainly been countering this by watching adobe tutorials and googling commands. 

Bleed and slug are new to me, I know a little bit about bleed in design but I’d never heard of slug before. I now know that the slug is the out-of-bounds area of the document page that is often used when printing, and bleed is any graphic, image, shape, or color that extends over the edge of the finished piece/artboard. 

I find that customizing my workspace while using adobe products really helps with productivity, since by editing the layout via the window menu I can bring out everything I need to be at the forefront. I find that this really helps when using new programs that I’m not as familiar with, that way I can find what I need quickly.  

  

This week we watched the Adobe Max tutorials, which are Adobe sponsored tutorials for Adobe products. Then, we summarized what we learned on Miro. I watched “Photoshop Tips & Tricks: Elevate Your Graphic Design Style“, and “Attention-Grabbing Graphics: Social Media Animation”. The photoshop tutorial covered selection tools, blending modes, and screen/toolbar layouts. It ended covering smart objects and the share for review tool. Overall I found this lecture to be very helpful, and essential watching for any designer working with photoshop. The second lecture was about animating in Photoshop and designing smart object characters in Illustrator, which is essential for using the auto animation that photoshop provides. This lecture taught me about the importance of Adobe libraries, and the basics of photoshop animation. 

I plan on using Photoshop animation for personal projects, as well as animated graphic design work. I feel like this is an incredibly useful tool, and deep diving into it might give me a bit of an edge in the graphic design department. I want to continue honing this skill whenever I find the time. 

Realizing that adobe libraries transfer across programs made me realize how using adobe gives an advantage. Watching the second lecture especially made me realize why adobe is so standardized; because everything transfers when used properly. Being able to easily export a project/ resources across programs is extremely useful. 

  

When making business cards, it’s important to zoom out while designing to make sure that your font is readable at such a small scale. While I was working on the card, I forgot to do this, and the final printed result was extremely hard to read. However, if I’d just designed it while scaled out I could have accounted for the small size without having to redesign it again later. 

I feel like my business card design had successful minimalistic graphics, but it was lacking on the typography layout. This was mainly due to me sticking with the logo font, which didn’t have a boldened or unitalicized font option. I had trouble finding another font that matched well with it, so I decided to play with size and layout to make it more palatable. Overall I feel like I was successful with my goal of minimalistic design, but less so with my progress in typographic design. 

Before class, some other classmates helped me to print out my cards since I didn’t have any experience printing with bleeds or slugs. They showed me how to properly print the cards on multiple pages at the right size,  which is incredibly useful knowledge moving forward with graphic design. 

  

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed working in UX. Website design was always an interesting idea to me, but I never expected to actually like the process of it so much. I was also shocked by how easy website design applications make it; my experience with website design (more specifically, app design) was always through a lens of coding, so being able to change the color of an image without writing 30 lines of code was very freeing for me. 

Why are you interested in what we are exploring in this class? 

I spend far too much time on the internet, and I’ve come to love it. I would love to contribute to the vast and beautiful collective project that I was raised on. I feel like being able to make my mark on it, however small, would be really fulfilling.  

How are you progressing with your goals? What would you like to accomplish next? 

Honestly, my goals didn’t include website design, but looking back they really should have. I didn’t know we were going to be exploring it in this class however, so I didn’t think to write it. I have always had a mild interest in it because of my experience coding; I somewhat resented the bland, numbers-based activity, and always wished there was more of a design element to it. Website design combines these two ideas, and it’s an incredibly useful skill to have a graphic designer. Going forward, I’d be really interested in coding website designs. I think a good place to start would be creating blog themes; these are simple, usually open-source HTML scripts that people can use to customize the look of their blogs. I want to try making one so that I can experiment with the basics of code and design. 

  

I really overestimated myself regarding the animation project. Since I majored in animation at my last college, I was sure I could create a high-quality animation in a short time frame. However, I didn’t realize how different auto animation is from the more traditional animation I’m used to. I kept trying to exaggerate things, add keyframes, use squash and stretch, etc., without realizing that it wasn’t going to work in UX’s bare-bones animation software. I ended up wasting a ton of time trying to do these things, so if I could’ve done it over, I’d have just made something simple and low effort and saved the wasted time. 

I’m a little disappointed with myself. I think my animation was lackluster considering what I’ve made before; but that was partially because of a short timeframe and a limiting program. I thought we would be doing more animations in this class, so the fact that this one was so ‘meh’ made me feel like I hadn’t progressed much with my goals. I’d still give myself a 6 or a 7 for figuring out the new program and handing in something decent, but it just wasn’t up to my own standards. 

When trying out a new program, sometimes it’s best to go in without implementing prior knowledge. The Micro animation project was the most recent example, but this problem came up before with InDesign. I was experienced with applications like Photoshop and CSP prior to using it, so InDesign’s UI and commands were incredibly frustrating for me to use. I wasted a lot of time trying to do things how I would in those other apps, whereas if I had just gone in expecting something completely different and starting from scratch, I would’ve had an easier time. 

  

Learning Goal One 

I want to become more proficient in Adobe tools, since I only have experience in photoshop. 

Learning Goal Two 

Strengthen my graphic design skills; specifically in regard to color usage and composition. 

Learning Goal Three 

Become more comfortable making minimalistic work (I’m crazy for detail/maximalism) 

Learning Goal Four 

Pursuing/growing animation skills; I’ve always been really interested in animating but rarely had the time/opportunity.  

Learning Goal Five 

Similar to animation, I’ve always wanted to learn more about working with 3D designs in a digital space. 

I think I achieved most of my learning goals, and I grew a lot as a designer over the course of this semester. I became far more efficient in Adobe programs, and even learned how to use some new ones. I had some precursory knowledge of Illustrator, but getting to deep dive into the program and spend a lot of time with it made me feel solid with my understanding of the program. I now feel like I could confidently produce high quality content from it, similar to Photoshop. I do think my colors improved a bit too; I've recently begun to realize that like illustration, people have different personal styles of coloring as well. I always kind of gotten down on myself for not using beautiful painterly pastel-esq color schemes, but frankly, I’ve realized they just don’t work for me and the kind of art I like to make. Bold designs with pops of color tend to work the best for me, and I think this is reflected in my work. Minimalistic influences also started to make an appearance in my designs; the classical music album art, the app design, and the logo were successful in their minimalist approaches. Overall, the only goal I don’t feel terribly progressed in was animation. However, understanding how to create auto animations using Adobe products will probably be helpful someday, so I’d still consider it a mild improvement. I really enjoyed this class, and I feel more cemented in my desire to become a graphic designer. I think my confidence as a designer has been boosted, and I feel like I’m on the right path.