Learning Journal

Over the past two weeks we have gone over some pretty interesting stuff with

Continue reading “Sass and Parallax”

Finals are almost here…..

As finals season approaches its important to remember a few things.

1. Be kind to yourself. This is a stressful time for most students and we need to make sure were kind to ourselves and remember how capable we are.
2. Give yourself a break. It is important when it becomes grind time and we are all inevitably drowning in schoolwork, to give ourselves time. Burnout is real and not giving yourself the space to decompress can be detrimental to your workflow and retention!
3. Drink water. Because hydrate or diedrate.
4. Dont be afraid to ask for help. At Sierra College we have many supportive professors and tutors that are only an email away! If you feel lost or stuck, please reach out and get some help!
5. Do your best! I know you will!

Good luck friends on the last few weeks of school and I wish y’all good times and good grades this semester.

Using parallax well

In week 12 of this course, we were introduced to techniques to introduce movement into our websites. The use of parallax techniques to provide a sense of depth and dynamic motion to entice the user to interact with the material of the site is exciting to learn. What I found interesting is that as with all components of design, these techniques need to be used thoughtfully with the intent to enhance your user’s experience and not to distract from it. One resource website suggests that these techniques are best used for product or portfolio websites verses informational websites. As we mature as designers, need to consider how people interact with the material we are presenting and how people learn verses just using all the cool techniques we know on one site.

As we round the far turn into the home stretch our final project is foremost on our minds, the finish line, and all the preparations and learning we have put into this second course in web development.

Continue reading “Developing the Final Project”

These past few weeks, I completed my Midterm design. It took me a long time but I’m really proud of how it turned out. After that, I learned that writing CSS from scratch to copy a design is really hard. In comparison, responsive design isn’t that bad.

Boooo

Mobile First is our mantra. How we arrive at the goal of adaptation to the many viewports in the firmament is our struggle as we enter the home stretch.

Read more: Responsive Design

Over the last two weeks we studied the building blocks of responsive design, which is intimately tied to positioning. The three main tools for positioning are grid, flexbox and the relationship of relative and absolute positioning. We had many fine tutorials and practice sessions with a number of websites.

We also worked on or Portal Page and our mid-term design. The many movements of our sixteen week symphony will culminate in the crescendo of our final project where we will employ the many tools we have studied so far.

I find myself circling back often through the weeks to listen again to the tutorials to refresh the information in my mind and apply it to our work. Due to family circumstances another considerable challenge for me is budgeting time. I’m playing catchup, but I haven’t given up.

The last couple weeks we went over Responsive Design. We learned how to work with media queries and design for mobile up to desktop screen sizes.

Continue reading “Do you even media query?”

Designing from the ground up

When we began this adventure with Responsive Design, I had the misnomer that we would be creating the most intricate design and then pair down the design to the barebones version for the smaller screens. Once we started to code, I realized just how much it made sense to go the other way! It has been really helpful to challenge ourselves with the recent projects and then find the solution later. It allows me to be wrong, try and learn as long as I am trying. I am finding that walking through these solutions once I have researched and fought a little with the material, I then have a deeper understanding of the answer. Starting from the ground and working up is much more manageable and approachable overall.

Flexbox isn’t nearly as tricky as it appears to be!

With my design based brain, learning flexbox seemed so foreign and impossible. From the 85 class all the way to 86, every time there was a lecture or information on flexbox I shut down. Much of the steps you need to take to achieve flexbox seemed pointless which led me to accidentally skip many step and led to my flexbox never working the way I wanted it to. Previously, I always resorted to using the absolute and relative positioning to position my elements. This always caused problems when there were layout changes or browser size changes.

But after months and months of practice in flexbox, I feel like I finally understand it and realize how simple it truly is and that what I once thought was very difficult, is actually simpler than my own methods! So remember to stick with it! What you think may be ridiculous now, may be a really helpful tool later down the road regardless of the learning curves!

Over the course of two weeks, we had many projects with Responsive Design. The main emphasis was on building a website for a mobile device, since it is more effective to start the design with it, and then you can add the layers for a tablet and computer.

Continue reading “Weeks 9 & 10 AAD 86”

I finished my midterm design, and after three rounds of designing it, am I happy with it?

Continue reading “My final midterm design.”

I found it odd when Professor Bill told me he didn’t know what was going on with my 2nd draft.

Continue reading “I Almost Didn’t Figma it Out!”

WARNING: DO NOT WORK AND SLEEP

This week I learned the importance of rest in relation to quality of work. With a long work week, I noticed my quality of work I turned in was getting worse and worse. This was because I forced myself to get it all done beofre I allowed myself to rest as a “reward”. But when I finally let myself rest after a days work before diving into hours of homework or midterms, my brain was more awake and my quality of work increased! I really think this impacted the outcome of my midterm site design this week. My working draft I had wasn’t great and definitely not challenging my design skills. Not until later in the week when I was able to catch up on rest did fresh ideas and enthuseasum start to flow!

Be kind to yourself and relax! You will get it done in due time!