Final portfolios

[benmiller314]

By the end of our final exam slot, please reply to this thread with a single post containing the following:

1. a prose reflection of at least 800-1200 words (1200-1800 recommended), reflecting on the course and framing the portfolio’s contents in terms of your learning and goals;
   • NB: please refer to lesson 25 and/or the handout for guidelines and prompts
2. representative thumbnail images, hyperlinked to final rendered versions of your four unit projects, i.e. Audio Narrative (.mp3), Visual Argument (.png or .jpg), Website Portfolio (live url or index.html), and Consolidation/Integration (ymmv);
3. links to your repositories for each of those pieces; and
4. a thumbnail of at least one specific prior draft, allowing you to talk about your revision skills. I feel like it might help to link this thumbnail to a specific commit in the revision history, but it's probably not essential.

PS: In addition to the portfolio, or as preparation for it, please do take the end-of-term version of the Tech Comfort Survey – among other things, it will give you a space to officially let me know whether and how I can use your work as an example for students in future semesters.

[arianakeith]

The biggest thing I learned in this class throughout the semester was to not get frustrated when dealing with a platform that is new to me and to be okay with adaptation as the tools permit. What I mean by this is, sometimes I would get extremely frustrated when working with a platform to try to create the project I had envisioned at the start of the unit. I quickly learned that when starting on a project I needed to be open for change and adaptation as that is how some of the best things are created.This is what I most want to remember for future digital composition. This was very prevalent for me in the visual argument unit. I had some experience working with image editing softwares, but GIMP was completely new to me. That being said, the idea I had imagined at the very start of the unit changed tremendously as I started playing around with different tools GIMP had to offer. I learned that this process is what creates some of the best work. You should be flexible, patient and experimental for success in digital composition.

When I look back at the unit goals and overall course outcomes, I feel I have been most successful and the most challenged in the website unit. The reason for this is that going into this unit I had absolutely no background with HTML, CSS or VS Code. However, I did not let this overwhelm me. I did the work at the start, taking the tutorial chapters very seriously. When it came to writing the code for our own websites ourselves, I did not hold back. I used what I learned from the tutorials to adapt them in a way that fit my vision, but I also experimented with aspirational aspects as well. When I needed help, or felt my skills were lacking, I sought guidance in office hours. The barrier of inexperience did not stop me or put me off from completing my vision. By the end of the unit after countless hours changing and trying out new structures, fonts, colors, aspirational additions, I came out with a product I was and am proud of. What I learned most in this unit was trial and error is important. There are infinite things you can do with HTML and CSS, however the only way to explore these options, and see what works for your vision is to try different things. I have had my fair share of trial and error through this process, especially when working with layout of my pages for my projects, experience and contact page. I ultimately ended up using display grids and display flex to truly capture how I envisioned the layout however when we started the unit drawing our pages on paper I had no idea the steps it would've taken to translate that pen and paper image to my computer. But, I did not give up, I did not let the barrier of inexperience hinder my outcome, and I successfully reached my goal of a finished product I am extremely proud of, though this unit was the most challenging due to lack of previous knowledge.

One aspect that surprised me during this course is how valuable peer feedback was for me. I learned very early on that the skill levels of students in this class had a very large range for all units. This was very helpful for me, as students who had either more experience, or learned different skills or tools for the specific platform in the unit were able to offer advice and feedback to enrich my personal project. This was extremely helpful for my visual argument project. The QR code included into my visual argument was implemented from a peer review suggestion. I would have never thought to add this final touch, and after I did it added immensely to the call-to-action I was trying to achieve. If I were to make a suggestion for the course structure, it would be to do two peer review workshops throughout a unit instead of just one, because of how helpful they were for me.

Moving forward, I have a few plans for continuing to develop my digital media skills. First, I want to continue working on my website either in future classes or outside. When going into the website portfolio unit, I knew I wanted to create something meaningful for my career. I wanted a site to represent me, my projects, and career experience. As I move forward with my career goals, I want to update this website and share it with potential employers. Aside from this specific project, in general this course has made me excited to learn various digital affordances of different software platforms. I would like to continue to expand my knowledge and skills of more great software platforms out there. The beauty of digital media is it is ever evolving and taking over the world. I want to continue learning, and adding more skills to my toolbox to bring with me into future career positions. Overall, I think I have learned that the possibilities are endless in creation using digital softwares. We only had the chance to touch on a few great ones this semester. This class could not have taught every skill needed for every software, but it taught me how to navigate the spaces of new digital softwares. I have gained skills in problem solving, and ultimately this class helped me gain confidence in navigating new spaces making me eager to continue my journey in this space throughout my senior year of college and after graduation.

Lastly, to touch on the consolidation project, I wanted to create something that practiced the visual argument unit’s skills, but on a platform other than GIMP to practice transferable skills. I have been wanting practice in Adobe Photoshop, as coming into this class I was comfortable only doing basics in this space. However, I wanted my project to be meaningful. I decided to edit the headshot images I had on my website. When looking at examples at the start in the website portfolio unit, I noticed the professional look that websites represented with high quality images. Since the website unit focused on structure and code, I did not have time to dedicate to working with the images that I wanted to display. So, I took this unit as time to not only learn more sophisticated editing techniques in Adobe Photoshop, but to apply those to my headshot image to display on my website. I paid close attention to lighting and color features to add depth to the overall visual element of my image. Some of the tools I implemented were gradient tool, vibrance, layer masks and more. Through creating this project, and researching different tutorials to gain more skills in this space, I started to understand all the ways that simple tools can create high level editing effects, once you learn how to utilize them properly. I think this is what composition in digital media is all about. Learning the basics, and continuously trying new things with the already learned skills to take projects to the next level. It's all about building on top of skills.

Soundscape

Visual Argument

Website

Consolidation

Repository links: Soundscape: https://github.com/arianakeith/audio-narrative-2023spring Visual Rhetoric: https://github.com/arianakeith/visual-argument-2023spring Website: https://github.com/arianakeith/webs2023spring Consolidation Project: https://github.com/arianakeith/consolidation2023spring

[lks50]

Composing Digital Media has challenged me, but it has also inspired me to reimage the digital space. One of the very first things we did in this course was to make a GitHub account, and I must admit I had never even heard of the platform before. After messing around on the site, and doing some research, I quickly learned that it is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. Having access to not only my classmates' work, but anyone that has posted anything publicly on Github gave me a lot of guidance and inspiration. While committing changes to my projects as I was creating them was tedious, I really enjoyed looking back on them once the projects were complete.

As I continue composing digital media, I want to give myself ample time and be patient with the process. I have a very type A personality. I like to plan out my days very meticulously with a schedule and a to do list. While this is motivational, I struggled at times in this course because I did not expect certain components of my assignments to take as long as they did. Additionally, some things in my original vision did not actually fit in well with the rest of my work; therefore, I took more time editing and reworking a lot of my original ideas than I had planned. Going forward, I want to give myself more time for experimenting, creating, and editing. In turn, this will give me more time to utilize the advice and suggestions from others. The advice I received from my peers during the website unit was extremely helpful. I had no previous experience with vs code, so it was really inspiring to see some of the work of my experienced classmates. I always dread peer reviews, but this course has shown me how helpful collaboration can be. The work I pushed for peer review had a decently structured html, but as Asher put it, “the css formatting was a little bare bone.” I had not quite worked out all the navigation details, but Ben gave me a lot of helpful feedback and tips. He pointed out that the @href attribute in my was an absolute path instead of a relative one, therefore inaccessible on other devices. With his feedback I was able to create a functioning navigation bar that aligned with my vision for the website.

I think I have successfully brought my genuine passions and interests into each of the projects. In my visual argument, I brought attention to the world’s rising temperatures. I have always been conscious of environmental changes, and more recently I have tried to make a conscious effort to adopt sustainable practices in my daily life. In my website, I put the University of Pittsburgh’s resources in one convenient location for students to find outlets to support their emotional, physical, social, and occupational health. I am really passionate about health and wellness, and I want everyone to know of some of the amazing resources we have at our disposal at the University. By no means do these resources give students everything they need, but I think it is a great starting point to feel supported.

I have faced some challenges with bringing my vision to life. As I mentioned, I had a difficult time creating a way to navigate between the pages of my website. I looked to advice from my peers and went to the website Ben suggested. It proved to be extremely helpful, and it helped me see the bigger picture of how to structure html and css files. This page also showed me how to use div id=”nav” to make my website more accessible for screen readers and mobile devices. In today’s digital world there are so many online resources available. Whenever I felt stuck, I would spend time online looking for inspiration, guidance, and instructions. Especially with the last unit, I learned the importance of seeking help, whether online, through peers, or attending office hours.

I was surprised by the variety in experience of people in this course. It seemed to me like a decent amount of people came in familiar with the software we used, and some had never heard of them. I would suggest spending a bit more time teaching the students how to use each software. I really enjoyed the creativity this course made space for, but I felt a bit handicapped by my lack of experience. I think I would have benefitting from a few less individual workshop days, and one or two days of instruction for how to use each software’s general tools. However, I do understand that this is a bit tricky to do as everyone in the class came in with a very different level of expertise.

As an avid podcast listener, I was really excited about the audio unit. I really appreciate listening to well produced audio, but I had never produced anything myself. It was really eye opening to see how many small details go into audio production. For example, I did not know that it is good practice to record for much longer than needed for editing purposes or that it’s better to have your recording levels set slightly too low than too high. I always think better out loud, so it has always been in the back of my mind to record my own podcast. Unfortunately, my schedule during the school year has never had much room for passion projects, but now that I feel comfortable working with Audacity, I may try recording this summer.

For my consolidation project, I was again inspired by my interest and passion outside of the classroom. I have always been obsessed with the fashion industry. As a kid, I wore a uniform to school, so when I flipped through my mom’s magazines and saw women wearing pieces far more interesting than a plaid skirt and sweater I was hooked. By the time I entered high school, I had my own Vogue subscription. Finally able to wear my own clothes to school, I loved looking through each month's issue to find outfit inspiration. I chose to use InDesign and Photoshop, instead of Gimp, for this assignment to challenge myself. I combined my interest in podcasts and fashion, and put Emma Chamberlain, fashion icon and podcast producer, on the cover of a Vogue magazine. I chose to use an image of her making a pose that I could use to resemble the iconic layers Vogue incorporates in their covers. I have always loved how Vogue does this. It shows that they are so confident in their brand that it doesn't matter if someone is blocking a letter, the people know the magazine is Vogue’s.

I started by uploading the photo of Emma to InDesign and added a transparent PNG of the vogue logo on top. Then, I opened the image of Emma in Photoshop and used the object selection tool to isolate her silhouette. I saved the new image of Emma, without any background to my desktop and added it to the work I had in InDesign. I used the new image and aligned the lines of her silhouette to the old one. This gave the design dimension and made her body look like it was overlapping the Vogue title. Then, I used the Adobe Fonts feature to find a font similar to the one they use for text on the cover. I found Avenir and used a variety of sizes to resemble the interesting combination of text sizes Vogue covers use. This project is definitely something that I think I will continue playing around with, and I may even make some more using other celebrities.

Audio Narrative Visual Argument Website Consolidation

Repository Links Audio Narrative: https://github.com/lks50/audio-narrative-2023spring Visual Argument: https://github.com/lks50/visual-argument-2023spring Website: https://github.com/lks50/webs2023spring Consolidation: https://github.com/lks50/Final-Project/tree/main

[eliotann99]

One of the key takeaways from this class is that creating digital media is not merely a matter of mastering a particular tool or software. Instead, it involves a lot of research and learning the different approaches, strategies, and techniques. By applying all of them together, I was able to create more compelling and effective digital products. For instance, when working on the audio project, I had to consider a range of factors, including recording quality, sound clarity, narrative structure, and story elements. Similarly, when working on the visual argument, I had to take into consideration lighting, colors, appealing visuals, image quality, and so on. Lastly, when working on my website, I had to learn about accessibility, fonts, vector animations, responsive design, best coding practices...etc. At times, all this information was overwhelming. However, consistency, curiosity, and the willingness to learn pushed me to take in all these different strategies and apply them together. Simply put, next time I'm working on a digital product, I would like to remember the importance of taking the time to do the research and trusting the process as it results in better products.

Looking back at the unit goals and overall outcomes, I believe I had the most success with the website. It was challenging getting started at first as I didn't have much experience with web development. However, the more I worked on it, the more I developed an understanding of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and became more efficient at making changes and adding features. Challenges started arising, but giving up on my goal was not an option. So, overcoming the challenges on the web project involved a lot of asking questions in class, Google searches, StackOverflow, viewing other pages, using the browser inspect tools, and trial and error. Nonetheless, I'm very pleased with the result as it turned out better than I envisioned. My vision started off very simple with me wanting to build three pages, a home page, a projects page, and a contact page. I didn't have any features in mind Nonetheless, I quickly got hooked on making it responsive, adding images, changing colors and fonts, making it accessible, making it interactive, and even posting it on Github servers. What started off as a portfolio to house my projects for potential employers became a project in itself that I can share with them proudly.

There were two big surprises for me in this class. The first one is that almost every composed image could have a story/argument in it. In today's age, everyone has access to millions of images at their fingertips. Therefore, it's easy to start mindlessly scrolling through images without paying attention to the details. However, after learning about the potential storytelling or argumentation that goes into composed images, I started paying closer attention to the pictures I see. I started focusing on the font, spacing, layout, colors, contrast, and so on. The second surprise was that Interneting is hard, but it doesn't have to be! I have had a brief encounter with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before. Nonetheless, the way they were taught to me made them seem complicated and hard to deal with. Therefore, I was wondering how we were gonna learn and build websites in a short amount of time. Turns out, they're much simpler than I thought when they are taught correctly. For example, I learned how to apply flex boxes around images and grids to organize things Furthermore, spending time building a website of my choosing as opposed to an assigned one allowed me to engrave those teaching into my brain and experiment with features that interest me.

For my consolidation project, I wanted to explore the realm of video editing and apply some of what we learned to it. I believed that this project would be a good chance to combine audio and photo editing skills. For instance, I have a better understanding of what visuals would work better in the video and how to pair audio with them for a better product. Furthermore, I can add it to my website as part of my portfolio and projects that I've worked on. Unfortunately, given the time constraints and busy schedule. I had to delay the project until further notice as it was very tough picking up a new skill in such a short time and gathering all the materials I need for a video. Instead, I decided to shift my focus and put my energy into revising my website. With all the knowledge that I had picked up from working on the website, I was able to add many more features. For starters, I added more responsive features to the website. Additionally, I added more images and made them responsive to the screen size as well. Then, I added a JavaScript file and moved the code to it as it's a better practice. After that, I changed the font from 'Pacifico' to 'Oleo Script' to make it more accessible and changed the text alignment to "left". I added a hover feature to all the links that I have. I added a scale-up feature to the SVG symbols on the contact page. I animated an interactive fixed link on the project page that takes the user to the top of the page. I added padding to some elements and fixed some code for improved results.

Audio Project

Visual Argument

Website

Consolidation

It's impossible to demonstrate all the website changes in one image. However, this photo shows the different font and text alignment.

Repos Audio Narrative Visual Argument Website Consolidation

[kellenapp]

My time in this class has helped my knowledge of digital media grow exponentially. There have been so many skills I’ve learned throughout the course that will directly transfer to my professional career aspirations. Our in-class process of articulating thoughts and ideas into concrete designs is the first of these skills, I have never gone about creating something in this manner before so it was a new thing for me. Previously, I would mostly just bleh ideas onto whatever software I was using and fix it up after doing so. With our class exercises of writing out what we were thinking, it was much more organized and easier to start creating whatever design I wanted. Our group review sessions also were entirely new to me, I have never worked with others on a design, so it was very eye opening and useful to get opinions from other people. I will ask my peers their unbiased opinions on my creations from now on as it gets a new perspective and can help you pinpoint a mistake you wouldn’t have caught otherwise.

My 3 projects all ended up very decent (to me at least). The first, soundscape project is exactly how I envisioned it; a simple grocery trip between two friends. I’m not a writer, so the script is simple, but it felt realistic and included dialogue that my friends and I would say. If I could go back and change something about this project I would take Prof. Miller’s advice and make the script a little more narrative-based, but at the time I wanted to focus more on the audio itself and creating a space through sound rather than the story. The second, visual rhetoric project was the one which I revised. Originally, it did have a very decent outcome but I thought it could be better and am very happy with how I revised it. Technically, the original design was exactly how I had envisioned it, but it needed cleaning up and new elements added. I added some white shapes in the background, changed the text and font, implemented some text effects I hadn’t used previously, redid the camera distortion on the background to fit the piece better, and changed the background color a tad. The third and final web-design project was by far the hardest. I went into it thinking having a background in Java code would make it very easy to learn HTML and CSS but was quickly proven wrong. After realizing how difficult it could prove to be, I made a U-turn and completely redid my design. It still was extremely difficult and most of that can be attributed to the fact that I have never touched this sort of code before, while with the two earlier projects I had experience using audio editing software and photoshop which helped me to make them easier and faster. That said, this project had the biggest reward, as I am proud of my final website. I missed out in some points for being repetitive but regardless, the website is reasonably responsive and visually appealing. It feels organized and does a good job at what it’s meant to do.

Looking back at specific positives and negatives in my projects during the course, it is quite clear that my strongest asset was that when I thought of a design, I made it. The sound project came out exactly how I envisioned and mapped out prior to starting it, the same happened for the visual rhetoric project. Once I realized my original aspirations for the web project were a little too difficult to implement as a beginner HTML/CSS coder, I remapped a new design and stuck directly to it. I would say a big part of this can be contributed to our in class exercises that I wrote about above, they were the building blocks for me to create and gave me a clear list of things to implement in each project. I really enjoyed my color schemes I used for the visual rhetoric and web-design projects, I think they were visually pleasing and complimented the points I was trying to achieve. Some of the areas I struggled with were citing and Github organization. My first project I lost points for missing a citation in the audio, but I believe after that mishap I worked hard to do better with my later projects in this aspect. Granted, it is helpful I only needed to cite one thing between the visual rhetoric and web design projects. I also was not the best at Git updating, I feel like this is not the worst thing ever as my folders and files are very organized and Github itself does not transfer directly into the professional realm (unless a future boss decides to use it). I tried my best, but I just did not have it in my to update my repo’s every time I changed a color or moved an image in my projects, so the updates ended up being broader like “Final Draft” or “Preview.” I also struggled selecting text for my projects. When I make video edits I honestly just select any random simple font, so having to search through fonts to find one that is aesthetically pleasing and matches the energy of whatever I am trying to convey was new and difficult. This is largely my final revision, fixing up the font I used for my visual rhetoric project and making another graphic with interesting fonts.

Moving on from this class, I will use visual rhetoric and web-design projects the most. I honestly already have a decently strong understanding of audio editing and have better projects from my own personal archive that will do better in my portfolio than the sound scape we created so that will not be making an appearance anywhere unfortunately, but it was still fun to make. I am very happy with how the class went and honestly would not change much about it. The readings were extremely helpful in furthering my understanding of not only the different types of media we were creating but also design as a whole. The in-class exercises (like said about) allowed me to develop new skills and go about thinking of the design process in a different way. Thank you for a great semester!

Sound scape:

Visual Rhetoric (prior to revision)

Web Design

Final Revision

Repos https://github.com/kellenapp/audio-narrative-2023spring https://github.com/kellenapp/visual-argument-2023spring https://github.com/kellenapp/webs2023spring https://github.com/kellenapp/finalRevision

[josieharris1]

Reflection One of the biggest things I have learned from this course is that taking time to learn and understand the tools of the software we use is the most essential component of composing projects in digital composition. Looking back on all three digital projects from this semester, the improvements made in my drafts weren’t necessarily driven by creative inspiration. Rather, a wave of creative inspiration was brought about from a deeper comprehension of each software, which I gained from taking time to experiment with their tools. This learning experience began before we even started our first digital project when I set up my GitHub account. I have never used any sort of code hosting platform before, so understanding its purpose in general, and understanding its purpose in contributing to our projects was something else that I learned during this course. In addition to serving as an organizational system, the consistency of using Github as a hosting program for all of our projects allowed me to gain transferable skills like I did from the software we used to compose the actual digital projects.

Furthermore, the organizational and creative system that we followed during the progression of all three of the projects we completed this semester contributed greatly to the transferable skills I adapted in each aspect of digital media, more than the actual assignment itself. These steps included reading a system of baseline criteria and aspirational goals, to beginning each project with a reflective writing prompt, to creating an initial draft, to a peer review process, to revising and creating a final draft, to writing a finalized reflection that considers the goals, challenges, and accomplishments of each project. All of these components maximized my ability to work creatively with inspiration. Creating a system of baseline criteria and aspirational goals has been most impactful in elevating my works of digital composition during this course. It’s cool how we can have a unanimous system of guidelines for our projects, yet everyone utilizes them in a different way to create such different pieces of digital composition for the same project. These guidelines were super helpful in adding depth to my projects. For my final consolidation project, I was excited to create my own baseline criteria and aspirational goals, which took inspiration from the guidelines of previous projects in this course. A peer review system was also extremely helpful in viewing my projects in a different light. Reading my peer’s comments on my projects also allowed me to notice things I didn’t notice from staring at my own project for so long. And by reviewing my peer’s projects, I was able to learn about tools that I may have not used in my projects. If I were to make a revision in the course assignments, I would suggest adding another round of peer review within each project. I think it was one of the most beneficial aspects of each of my project revisions.

I felt challenged by all three projects we completed this semester. My website portfolio project felt the most challenging and the most successful because of the duration of the project; the extended time span allowed me to really dive deep into the project and commit to it more than I was able to with the other two projects. Starting with essentially zero coding experience, my website portfolio project felt the most improved. I’m proud of the revisions I made and how much more fond I am of the final draft than the initial draft. I’m still extremely proud of my visual argument project, but the changes didn’t feel as meaningful, as the changes I made in Photoshop felt more experimental and lacked as much purpose. I was also more attached to my website portfolio project because of how rewarding each revision felt. It was an extensive learning process. I was surprised by how dedicated I became to each of my projects. At the beginning of each unit, I was a little overwhelmed by the change in direction. But, as time went on and I became more familiar with each project, I thoroughly enjoyed each one. I was also surprised by how much the system of creating baseline criteria and aspirational goals contributed to the organizational factor of my projects. When first reviewing the lists at the beginning of each project, it seemed like a lot of tasks to keep up with. However, I found that being goal-oriented and breaking up each project into smaller components made it much simpler. As a Media and Professional Communications major focusing on Digital Media, I will definitely take these skills with me into future courses and jobs. In my previous job roles, I have worked on audio, visual, and web design projects, and expect to be tasked with these types of projects in the future.

For my consolidation project, I was confident in the fact that I wanted to work with Photoshop again. I felt that my visual argument project was unfinished because I struggled with time management as I spent most of my time during the unit attempting to learn about the software and tools: leaving me minimal time to actually compose a thorough project. During the second time around, I was excited to use skills that I had used in my first visual argument project in addition to experimenting with more tools. My consolidation project represents a reflection of my visual argument project process in which I created a visual landscape composed of three different stages of the project. In order to establish a visual focal point, I utilized the frame tool on the part of the background image that resembled a mirror in the sky. I replaced the reflection of the clouds with a reflection of the three screenshots of my project on the background image. I also created a strong contrast in this area of the piece by adding a transparent black layer over the whole piece and erasing the layer from the reflection section. I called this piece “reflections” as a play on words for the final project reflection and the mirror aspect of this piece.

Audio Narrative

Visual Argument

Web Design

Consolidation

Repositories Audio Narrative: https://github.com/josieharris1/audio-narrative-2023spring Visual Argument: https://github.com/josieharris1/visual-argument-2023spring Web Design: https://github.com/josieharris1/webs2023spring Consolidation: https://github.com/josieharris1/finalproject

[anayoungblut]

I took a course last semester called ‘Tutoring Peer Writers.’ My professor had a strong belief that writing is never done and more revision is always possible. I believe the same is true in digital media and taking Composing Digital Media proved that lesson to me. This course taught me a lot about digital media, but most specifically revision. A large portion of this course has been grounded in editing, revising, and collaborating. At the end of each project, we produced reflections where we could state any revisions we wished to make if we had more time. We were encouraged to look at the work of our peers, offering suggestions in the ‘describe, evaluate, suggest’ format. This format translated into my own work as I used the skills I learned to determine areas of improvement for final revisions prior to submitting a final draft. It also encouraged a healthier approach to revising my own work; I am a perfectionist and often my harshest critic of my own work, nit-picking every minute detail until it is ‘perfect.’ By first describing what I am seeing then evaluating it based on the criteria, I can see the more specific areas of improvement rather than growing frustrated with something small that is not working exactly how I hope it would.

An additional way I improved my revision skills in the context of digital media is through learning new platforms. At the beginning of each unit, I had a big idea that I hoped to achieve. This is especially true in the website design unit. I quickly realized that learning a new platform would alter what I could achieve, especially because we were learning a new medium while learning what makes a good argument across platforms. The first preview of my website was not received well: most of the comments suggested improving my navigation system, bettering the organization of content on my pages, and changing my color scheme. I was also extremely unhappy with my first draft and knew that there was a wide margin for improvement, so my peers’ comments were entirely warranted. I had tried many different codes to fix my layout issues to no prevail and was in totally unfamiliar territory. Typically, my pride would not allow me to reach out for help and I would try everything to fix the issue independently. This was not the case during the web unit. In response, I admitted I needed help and went to office hours. In the end, I am far happier with my project when I sought help and collaboration than I would have ever been figuring my way through HTML and CSS independently. As such, collaboration is one of the most helpful aspects of composing digital media because it produces better quality of work.

Looking back at unit outcomes and goals, I feel that I have been most successful in cohesion. My audio narrative had seamless transitions between clips. I had a few friends outside of class listen to it and some asked if the spoken clips were one recorded conversation. Each spoken line was a different clip, so the timing and volume had to be exact between each to replicate a realistic conversation. Additionally, my visual narrative flowed nicely and fit my vision for the hierarchy of elements perfectly. It makes sense both as a whole and as individual elements. Something I’d like to point out, however, is that my audio project was not always perfectly cohesive. The cigarette had a higher level of saturation in the initial preview and one of my peers mentioned that it did not fit in seamlessly with the rest of the image, suggesting that lowering the saturation would allow it to fit in better with the coloring of the overall argument. This was great advice and fixing the coloring allowed my project to have the level of cohesion I hoped it would. In the web design unit, I had the same layout on each interface with text and visual alternating left/right. I also had the same color scheme and heading/navigation layout on each page. These elements gave it a streamlined appearance that appeals to users.

The area I improved most in is revision (giving and receiving). As I mentioned in the beginning of this reflection, revision is a crucial element of digital media composure, so learning how to appropriately give and take it is imperative to being successful in this medium. The amount of change from my initial previews to final drafts grew as the semester went on. For instance, the only impactful revision I made for my visual argument was fixing the coloring on the cigarette. In contrast, the initial preview version and my final version are completely different projects. These fixes were in response to the suggestions made by my peers in the workshop and included color scheme, layout, and navigation. All three of these design elements were changed from initial to final draft.

I am happy with the outcome of each project, though all three underwent some revision for this final portfolio. First is my audio narrative: the only change it needed is proper attribution to sources. My project was recreating the sounds of a person filling their water bottle, having a brief interaction with a check-in person, taking off their bag/tying shoes, beginning a workout then being interrupted by someone familiar and having a short conversation. Dr. Miller commented on this in my grade sheet, noting that the specific sources I used require verbal citation. In response, I added a brief statement of thanks and reference to my repository to the end of my narrative. I was unaware of the different types of citation that audio sources require and was surprised that an alphabetic citation was insufficient. That said, I’m happy that Dr. Miller pointed it out to me so I could fix the issue and give proper credit where it is due. I gave more organization to my GitHub repository, so files are easier to find as well.

Repository: Audio Narrative Repo

Revision to include proper attribution:

Second is my visual argument: the biggest change this piece underwent from initial final submission to portfolio submission was in the additional information at the end. My goal for this project was to create a simple, seamless design arguing against cigarette use. Again, Dr. Miller posed a good suggestion that the additional information section at the foot was a bit muddled and difficult to read. I was weary to include it in the first place out of fear that it would detract from the simplicity of the overall argument and made the executive decision to remove it entirely. My goal for this project was to have a simple design so the message stands the loudest; I often find that overcomplicated designs detract from the message and wanted to avoid this. Removing the banner for additional information allows a better fulfillment of my initial goal and vision. Like my audio project, I gave more organization to my repository files with new folders.

Repository: Visual Argument

Pre-Revision:

Final, revised version:

Lastly is my website. My only suggestion for course content is allowing more class time to learn how to use HTML and CSS. The “Interneting is Hard” tutorial was helpful, but more live tutorials could be beneficial to visual learners. My website unit project was meant to be a virtual gallery of images of photos I have taken in some of my favorite places with a brief description next to each. That said, I consider my final web submission to consolidation project to be a representation of the revisions I made during this unit. For starters, I fixed the issue with my index page image so that it properly showed on the landing interface. I realized I forgot alt text on the index image, so I added that as well. My captions saw an upgrade to be more interesting to users and be more personal to me. I ventured into using more advanced code by incorporating a carousel for images on the ‘Art’ interface. This inclusion also made my webpage more engaging as users can interact with the content in a more hands-on way. My final portfolio also has options to download images with embedded links. Again, this makes my content more interactive for users.

Repository: Website

Draft (obviously this is a very rudimentary version, but notice how muddy the coloring is):

Final:

Finally, a word on my consolidation project. I chose to create a new website based on the code from my old one with some alterations and new, more advanced coding. The web unit was by far the most challenging for me, so facing it again and showing how I have improved seemed like a good way to cap off the semester. My idea was to revamp my website (fix issues, make it more interactive, update the color scheme to be more appealing) and change the content to include the audio and visual projects from earlier in this semester. In essence, my consolidation project is a revision of my website. The coloring of my final website unit submission is a draft of this final project. I included the revised versions of my audio and visual projects (stated above), so the final consolidation project has revisions to all three units.

Repository: Consolidation Project

Carousel image:

Final:

Link (security measure, though the thumbnail link does work): Consolidation Website

Moving forward, I can see myself using GitHub and version control in projects. I am always paranoid about saving my work; version control software like GitHub provides more cushion to saving my work. Additionally, I will continue learning more about HTML and CSS; I have already used it in another class! The final project for my Professional Uses of Social Media class was to create a public-facing persona on a personal website. We were intended to use WordPress, though had the option to use other platforms if desired. I figured this was the perfect opportunity to use my recently developed skills in web creation and decided to use HTML to build a site from scratch. My professor loved the idea, and I am very happy with how that project turned out. I plan on making more websites in the future.

Here's the project for my Social Media class if you are interested: Social Media Final Website

[suchiattota]

Composing Digital Media is one of the most exciting courses I have taken. It gave me the opportunity to get hands on experience in using different software programs that I never thought I’d get a chance to use and/or learn. Although it is possible for one to learn a software program in their free time, it is different from a classroom atmosphere where you are required to put in timely effort to learn the material and make timely submissions. I never thought I’d work with audacity or GIMP and knowing myself, I wouldn’t have learned to use them unless they are required for a class, so I am really glad to have taken this class. As my time in this class ends, I am proud to add working with audacity, GIMP, HTML, and CSS to my skills.

One of the biggest concerns I had coming into this class was that I didn’t believe I am much of a creative person. Knowing we would be required to compose media by ourselves in the class, I didn’t think I was capable of doing so. But surprisingly all my three projects, the audio narrative, visual argument, and my website, are one of my proudest projects that I have done, and I have been so excited to talk about and share them with my friends and family. Looking back at these projects, the most exciting part about them has been the consistent theme I selected. It started with the audio project when I decided to do a small murder story. The more I think about it, I realize my true inspiration for the plot might have come from a show I was watching at that point in time. As for the visual argument, it took me a while to decide what I wanted to do. Having the freedom to work on any topic made me want to work on a topic that was exciting and not simply work on a project for the sake of getting points in the class. For my website, since I had to learn HTML and CSS and the submissions were closer to the end of the semester and I felt like I didn’t have much time, so I thought I wanted to keep my first website simple, use it as a place to display projects from the class. But the guided writing during class time, that allowed me to think about my project and write down my ideas and sketch a mobile version of how my website might look like allowed me to think of a creative way to displaying my projects, making it consistent with the theme that I picked during the start of the class.

The flow and timeline of project submissions helped me learn a lot and build upon my previous knowledge. Firstly, the audio narrative followed by the visual argument and finally the website in a sense built open each other. The audio narrative allowed me to learn, mostly new things, about composing digital media. The visual argument allowed me to expand on previous the learning. And the website allowed me use what I have learned in the previous two projects. The new things I learned could be as simple as selecting a font for my website or visual argument. I cannot believe how much thought I put into selecting fonts and the amount of time because seeing a font used in your project is different from browsing them online, often times a font I liked while browsing didn’t look good once inserted into my project. Also, the timeline of individual projects itself allowed for a lot of learning and gave me the time to make constant revisions to my projects. The time to come with ideas in class with the help of guided writing, the first draft, studio time to work on the project in class and ask for help, final draft, peer review, and final revisions flowed in a manner that gave enough time to learn and create projects that I am proud of. What surprised me the most has been how important and valuable peer review workshops have been. When I come up with an idea, I know it makes sense in my head, but having the opportunity to have someone else take a look at the project before the deadline and see what they notice about my project and check if it matches with the idea in my head was incredibly important to me. It allowed me to think upon and make changes to make my ideas come across better. The feedbacks have also been so valuable to me as often times I got recommendations for changes to make or new things to include in my project that I haven’t thought about myself and that helped me elevate my project.

I felt the most challenged while working on my website. It was my first time working with HTML and CSS and I was slightly overwhelmed with the amount of new things I had to learn. Added to this was that I had more time constraints than before because it was towards the end of the semester and my other classes were touching upon harder topics and assignments. Initially I was slightly confident of being able to learn these new topics faster because of my prior programming language background as a Computer Science student. But later I realized that the front-end development is quite different from what I have learned before. CSS has been the most frustrating thing. Often times I have complained about my code doing the exact opposite of how I wanted it to be displayed. As an example of my frustration, this is a text I sent my friend while working on my website.

As mentioned, since the website had been the most challenging project and I didn’t feel like I had the time to do some things, I decided to continue working on it for my final consolidation project. The biggest thing I wanted to work on was making my website responsive. I had hard coded the dimensions of images and font sizes, making my website look the way I wanted only when opened as a full screen on my laptop. Making my website responsive was once again quite challenging. Different code segments behaved differently when resizing the screen size. But I got around to fixing most of the code segments to behave as desired when the website is displayed on a smaller screen. Only issue I have is my read page displaying differently from the other pages even though all share the same style sheet, hopefully one day I will get around to finding and fixing the problem. One of the goals I set for myself but haven’t been able to achieve because of the time constraint was creating a drop-down menu for my menu objects when displayed on a mobile phone. But overall, I’m quite happy with how my website turned out even though I couldn’t reach all the aspirational goals I set for myself.

As I leave this class, I have gained some valuable skills apart from the ability to work with and use the above specified software programs that I will continue to use in my future projects. Few of the things I have learned and will use in the future include that I am very good with creating a schedule to work on projects to make them look the way I want and still complete them on time. Timely completion of projects that are more than the bare minimum is very important. Along with the fact that I am a very organized person, I am now well versed in designing and planning layouts, particularly for websites. And as I worked with finding resources to include in my project, I now understand copy write concerns and know where I can source resources for my future projects. I am taking CS1520 PROGRAMMING LANUAGE FOR WEB APPLICATIONS next semester, and the experience I’ve acquired from this class in working with HTML and CSS will be extremely beneficial to me and I can continue to build upon this knowledge.

Audio narrative

Visual argument

Website

Consolidation Since I revised my website for the final consolidation and since I only worked on making my website responsive, there are no changes made that altered how my website looks like on a web browser. So, instead of inserting a thumbnail to my website again, I have decided to include this short clip showing a screen recording of my website being displayed on a mobile phone.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/79329912/234099359-8a38a0ae-df0b-4a38-a597-2b8ad6e732ea.mp4

Repositories Audio narrative: https://github.com/suchiattota/audio-narrative-2023spring Visual argument: https://github.com/suchiattota/visual-argument-2023spring Website(Before revisions for consolidation): https://github.com/suchiattota/webs2023spring/tree/bca2fabf4484072b779395e7d5b15ba154f54170 Consolidation: https://github.com/suchiattota/webs2023spring

[jannawohl]

Throughout this class, I have learned many different strategies about digital media that will be very useful for my future. One of the most important things I've learned/realized is how every element of media plays a role in a project, and what the absence or inclusion of a specific element does to the overall meaning. Specifically, with the audio narrative project, sound was the main aspect of this project. When listening to my project as well as my peers', I closed my eyes while listening to the sounds to try to paint a picture in my head and see if I could visualize what was occurring. For some projects, I immediately could identify the sounds I was listening to and what scene was being described, so that is how I knew the audio project was successful. However, for others, I'll be honest, it was a little hard to identify some of them, and part of this might be on my end, but it showed what difficulties and inconveniences arise due to the lack of a visual element. On the other hand, with the visual argument project, this contained only visual elements, including images and text. It was definitely easier to be able to detect the meaning of these projects, however, some of them were a little difficult because it was all visual elements and up to us to analyze it ourselves. So again, this shows that the lack of some elements within digital media can make it very difficult for the original meaning to be intended, and although it can be very difficult to fulfill this every time, it is important to try to make everything as specific and concise as possible.

When looking back at the unit goals, I feel I have been the most successful with Photoshop and the visual argument project, simply because I have previous experience with this application and feel pretty confident in my abilities. Although I had to refresh my memory with how to use Photoshop a little bit, I remembered how to use it for the most part and did not need much help. I also enjoyed this project the most out of all the units partially because I knew how to use the application already, but also because I am very passionate about graphic design. Due to my strength in Photoshop, I chose to use this platform again for the final project. I feel the most challenged with the audio project because I struggled with figuring out how to use Audacity. If I'm being completely honest, I also think that my project idea was good in theory but it was a little too complex for a first-time user of Audacity. There were many strengths of the project, but also many weaknesses, so if I tried to recreate this project idea of a baseball game setting after practicing in Audacity, I would be able to improve on some of my initial flaws. I am also proud of my improvement with the website project, as coding is something I find extremely difficult. Although the tutorials we completed were very helpful, I still felt absolutely lost when first starting my website, and when looking at my first draft of the website to the final project, there is an extreme amount of progress seen. From the font and color change to the image arrangement as well as the use of hyperlinks and many more features, I am extremely proud of myself for the way this project turned out, as well as the ways in which I pushed myself to work hard despite the difficulties.

Something that surprised me/was a moment of realization for me is how deep the digital media field is and how the possibilities are truly endless. Just by looking at the different people in our class, some people are Media and Professional Communications majors like me, some are Digital Narrative and Interactive Design, some are more focused in writing, coding, broadcasting, and many more options. Some of the software used in this class I had never heard of before, so it just shows that there is so much in the media world that can be taken advantage of. I loved doing the peer review after submitting drafts of our projects because I was able to get feedback from classmates, and everyone had different ideas because everyone has a different focus in this field, so it was nice to get a wide variety of opinions and would highly suggest continuing this for future years of this class.

After this class, I plan to continue my passion in both the design and writing fields. Firstly, I am going to update my personal portfolio with the projects from this class, specifically the visual argument and website projects. Whenever applying for internships and soon enough real jobs, I am usually asked to provide a portfolio with previous projects, so these will make great additions to this, I use a lot of projects from my Integrating Writing and Design class, but I feel I have improved on my skills since taking that class, so my work from this class will be great to add. Secondly, next school year, I have a remote internship as a Digital Ambassador where I will explore the fields of creative writing, social media, design, and more, so I look forward to applying the skills learned in this class and other previous classes to this internship. I have taken most of the design related elective classes for my major, but I am taking more media/communication related classes that will still play a major role in this field. Additionally, I could see myself working in the social media field in my future, as well as the graphic design field as an invitation designed, so I will definitely be showcasing my digital media skills in many ways in the future.

For my consolidation unit, I chose to use Photoshop, because as I mentioned earlier, I am the most comfortable and familiar with that. I really was not sure what to do for this project, so I decided to make a Converse shoe collection that is inspired by famous works of art. It is a bit of a random/interesting idea, but I feel like it was unique and it ended up looking pretty cool. I used the later mask feature in Photoshop to fill in the Converse show with a different famous painting, and then I provided information about the work of art underneath. I put the name of the painting, the year it was created, the artist's name, and then a short description of the artist, so if this were to be a real shoe collection, people know the inspiration behind their shoe. Although this is a very simple design, using the layer mask feature definitely showed off my digital media skills.

Audio Narrative: [] (https://github.com/jannawohl/audio-narrative-2023spring/blob/main/Baseball%20audio%20project.mp3)

Visual Argument:

Website: []

Consolidation Unit: [] (https://github.com/jannawohl/finalproject/blob/main/Final%20Project%20copy.psd)

Repositories: Audio Narrative: https://github.com/jannawohl/audio-narrative-2023spring Visual Argument: https://github.com/jannawohl/visual-argument-2023spring Website: https://github.com/jannawohl/webs2023spring Consolidation: https://github.com/jannawohl/finalproject

[taylorjenkins]

Coming into this class, I was unsure of what to expect. Before now, I had very limited or no exposure to the softwares and tools we would be using to create our projects so I was a little worried. I knew that I would learn valuable information for my career after college because I planned to go into the creative design side of marketing. I had taught myself little bits and pieces of softwares and editing tools before this class, but was grateful to have the opportunity to expand and grow my knowledge while having fun with it as well.

I looked at the projects in this class as areas to grow and let myself explore my interests and creative abilities rather than looking at it as one more thing to check off my to-do before graduation list. I think this mindset in general is a valuable takeaway from this class because I ended up learning more than I normally do in my classes that I just looked at as work for a grade. If you allow yourself to have fun you not only learn things that you actually want to use and see as practical in your life, but you’re more likely to remember what you learned as well.

This may be a weird observation that I left this class with, but one of the ways that I feel as though I improved from this course was in my mindset. I had always wanted to create a blog and I knew that I wanted to go into the digital side of marketing, but never fully challenged myself to gain the technical editing or coding skills because I always felt it was outside of my toolbox. The ideas in my head that I had for my project definitely involved skills that I did not fully possess and normally I would shy away from such projects, but I was inspired to push myself. I read and watched a lot of tutorials for this class, which I normally wouldn’t do on my own but needed to in order to create what I had envisioned and set as goals for myself. So, I think that I improved my mindset and motivation in letting myself try new things and not getting discouraged if it didn’t come out exactly the way I envisioned; this is the beauty of design.

I have always wanted to get into photoshop; I love taking pictures and editing videos, so I saw this as a tool that would be helpful for my future. I had used it before casually, but never really got into the nitty gritty and honestly never understood half the tools I was using. During the visual argument project, I learned the different ways to cut out an image or layer on different backgrounds in an image (which is a lot harder than I thought it would be). Also learning how to change the photo or just certain layers with contrast, saturation, etc. is very helpful for me going into brand marketing because their images need to fit a certain aesthetic or theme before they can be published.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the website project the most. I had absolutely no background or experience in coding and never thought I would ever be able to get as far as I did with it. From a learning standpoint, this is definitely the most I’ve ever actually learned and retained in such a short amount of time and even though my project isn’t perfect, it’s definitely the work I am most proud of, maybe ever. I love to write and have wanted to start a blog for as long as I can remember, but didn’t love using squarespace or similar platforms when I tried them. I know that I will take this knowledge and work on expanding it to create a website where I can showcase all of my writing. I think that the tutorials assigned, as well as going over specific aspects (I think layouts are definitely something I would like to/need to spend more time on) was very beneficial.

I would say that before this class, I was mostly a passive viewer of digital media, including poster/print design. I never put much thought into how or why something was created - don’t get me wrong, I appreciate art and podcasts tremendously, but for some reason, I never questioned the process, only the end result. Now, I analyze everything a bit more and am excited when I see a photo that I know how to replicate (even if not remotely as well) or listen to a piece of audio like music or podcasts and understand how it was created and edited.

This class has given me a deep appreciation for digital media and a new motivation to expand my current creative horizons into new categories that I didn’t think I would ever be in. I also was much more willing to challenge myself and look for solutions to my problems, whereas in other classes that I didn’t find particularly interesting, I would not give so much focus or effort to. I realized that I definitely need to brush up on my technical skills because I can easily create the vision in my head of what I want my end product to look like, but didn’t always have the knowledge or skills to execute it. I honestly surprised myself with what I was able to create in this class given my previous skills (which basically did not exist before). I am excited to move forward and see what else I will create in my future.

Sound Scape Repository

Final Website Repository

Visual Argument Repository

Before revising my visual argument

[juradodiego]

As a computer science and digital narrative and interactive design double major, I had initially enrolled in the course to fulfill a requirement. I had heard positive experiences coming out of the course, so I thought I’d take it. Luckily for me the course was a delight. I learned plenty and built on my previous exposure to digital media. In the past I had experience working with audio editing, video editing, and website design, however, I never had any experience with composing visual arguments.

I accomplished my goal of conveying the sensation of waking up from a nightmare in my sound project, "Digital Nightmare." To achieve this, I developed the concept of a student returning home late after studying and turning on their computer to continue working. When lightning strikes, the student is drawn into the computer and transported to a void with a large glass window. The protagonist is trapped inside, pounding on the glass and screaming for help, but no one can hear them. Suddenly, a spirit of pure electricity appears, confusing the protagonist, who begins to flee. The floor is metallic, and the protagonist runs until they are breathless. The monster catches up, and as it is about to consume the protagonist, they scream "No!" and awaken from the nightmare, gasping and thrashing under the covers. The sounds of birds chirping signal that the nightmare is over.

Initially, I thought it would be easy to create this narrative with sound, but I soon realized that finding the right sounds was challenging. I had two options: record my own sounds or remix sourced sounds. Ultimately, I used both approaches, starting with the sourced sounds to establish the environment before adding more unique elements. I layered several sounds to replicate the original idea in my head, with a consistent rainstorm audio playing until the "event" occurs.

While the project does not perfectly capture my initial vision, I was able to meet the baseline requirements with the resources and time available. If I had more time, I would work on improving my mixing skills and making the clips flow together seamlessly. I believe that incorporating more sounds into the chase and adding music would elevate the tension. I would also expand on the "nightmare" segment of the narrative to make it more intense. Overall, I enjoyed playing with the pan dials to create the environment and adjusting the gain of the audios to establish the relative positions of different sounds.

For my visual argument project, "We're Toast," I aimed to create a poster that echoed the style of World War 2 propaganda. However, I found inspiration in George Orwell's "1984" and the poster "Big Brother is Watching." With this tone in mind, I began considering color palettes and fonts. Knowing that fonts have historical and cultural associations, I chose a clean sans serif font to capture the militaristic feeling I wanted to convey. Although I received feedback to consider other font options, I stuck with my original choice and ultimately felt that the message was effectively communicated. However, I took the feedback to heart and made improvements to the project. I made the coloring uniform and refined the edges of the toaster, outlet, and plug. I also replaced the original "mean businessman" face with a more ominous one, using only the eyes to enhance the effect. The final product is one that I'm proud of. If I were to revisit the project, I might create additional posters with different taglines but conveying the same message. Initially, I considered using an Amazon Alexa as the symbol for "always listening," but licensing issues prevented me from doing so. Instead, I realized that any IoT technology could serve as the subject of the poster since so many data is being collected from people without their knowledge.

When I began my website project, my knowledge of HTML and CSS was limited, though I did have some prior experience from a previous course. However, the techniques I had learned were outdated and I needed to refresh my skills, particularly with regards to using flex boxes and media queries. My goal was to create a portfolio site that would showcase both my programming and game design projects, reflecting my dual majors in computer science and digital narrative and interactive design.

Originally, I had planned to include several additional pages, such as an About page with a photo of myself and information about my career, interests, and education, a Projects page with links to all of my GitHub projects and descriptions of the skills used, as well as a page for showcasing my work experience as a software engineer and game designer, a Resume page, and a Reading Blog page. However, I realized that my initial plan was too ambitious and decided to focus on the parts that were most important to me, namely the About, Projects, and Reading Blog pages. I began by implementing the navbar, using elements from Prof. Miller's example as a foundation. Next, I created a basic version of the Reading Blog page, which I needed to finalize before creating multiple pages. Once I had the Reading Blog page working properly, I moved on to the Projects page, which proved to be much easier to create. I used two similar structures to display my programming and game design projects respectively.

Lastly, I tackled the About page, which turned out to be the most challenging. My idea was to have the photo of myself on top of the logo link bar on the left and the About Me excerpt on the right on desktop, and on mobile or smaller screens, to have a smaller version of the photo on top of the logo bar, which would then be on top of the excerpt. However, I was unable to achieve the desired effect and there is some blank space that shouldn't be there. Overall, I enjoyed working on this project and would like to make it into a web application in the future. I plan to use Flask, a Python Framework, and some JavaScript to automate the addition of new posts and projects and to store the information in a database, as writing out the full HTML is not efficient in 2023.

In one of my courses this semester I was tasked to write a book to summarize the ideas we have discussed throughout the semester. I chose to write a book named “Panopti Co” with central themes revolving around the Panopticon first theorized by Jeremy Bentham. The plot of the stories can be best summarized as an evil corporation out to exploit the world in a Sisyphean struggle. So, when it came to my final project for this course, I had a few options. In the visual argument unit, I came up with several ideas, and several preliminary drafts – I would be able to produce another piece of propaganda. I also never fully finished my idea for my website. Finally, the option to compose a cover for my very own book. While continuing my pre-existing projects may have proved fruitful, I decided to apply the skills I learned in the visual argument unit to compose a cover for my book.

While designing the cover of my book there were certain elements I wanted to focus on, namely: colors, fonts, and graphic design. Some works that I was inspired by are the recent release of Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai published by New Horizons. Being inspired by this cover I knew I wanted to incorporate yellow in the design of the cover. Yellow is used throughout the stories in the book. It is used to call attention to people, especially those in positions of power. Throughout the stories there is mention of people in yellow suits. Personally, I like books with yellow covers. Furthermore, I wanted to incorporate the color black into the cover, as it is the color of the factory workers. So, it resembles equality. Also, black looks good with most other colors, especially bright colors.

The graphic I designed is fairly simple, but this allows for two key focuses of mine. As a book cover, a simple image means easier print. If this were to be produced en masse it would severely reduce the overall cost (A good thing). Second, it allows for more reader interpretation. As of writing this, I have shown the cover to several people, and they have all mentioned varying objects that carry a similar theme. My intention was to include an aerial view of the Panopticon in the form of a mobile phone app icon. However, several friends have stated it looks like a keyhole, a person, a chess pawn piece, or the opening to a 007 movie. All these objects carry a common theme of oppression to some extent - keyhole: key and a lock; a person: oppressor and oppressed; a chess pawn: a pawn in a larger game; 007 opening: someone being hunted and killed; In summary, I designed a front cover and spine. I could not decide on how to design the back cover. Also, it did not seem to be exceedingly important.

Spine	Front

In short, I learned a lot this semester, and I had wonderful exposure to techniques in composing digital media, especially where to find resources to build my skills, and find applications that suit my needs. In fact, I found an open-source digital art platform – Krita – for use in my final project. My final project, while building on my skills gained in the visual argument unit, I was not editing photos, I was essentially drawing. I needed different software. In the future I hope to continue to write more stories, and books. These books will need covers, and hopefully audiobooks. Now I will be prepared to make them myself. Furthermore, as a software engineer it is important to understand front-end development in order to properly communicate with my coworkers. I gained plenty of skills and experience that I wil use throughout my career.

[michaelpacifico]

As a DNID student, digital media is essentially the lifeline that allows us to create the pieces of media that make. Last year, I actually took this class (2021 Fall), but I ended up failing because of attendance because I was working full-time as well as being a full-time student. Along with that I just didn't do too well in my assignment at least from my perspective, because I just didn't feel like I did a good job in most of my assignments. So when this semester started, I already had made the decision to solely focus on my studies and make sure that I give my classwork the utmost priority. Honestly, when starting the class, when we were going through the syllabus and what we'd be focusing on for this class, the most exciting for me was actually utilizing GitHub for the class, because I've actually never used GitHub and I was also taking a INFSCI Capstone class this semester and the work we were doing was solely located and tracked on GitHub so learning how to use GitHub was probably the most beneficial thing for me.

SOUNDSCAPE: https://github.com/michaelpacifico/audio-narrative-2023spring For the audio narrative piece, my initial thoughts were already set towards creating a narrative, similar to a barista experience that you'd get when getting a drink from a boba shop. This initial idea came from my personal experience with working as a barista at a boba shop for a little over a year prior to the start of the 2022 Fall Semester. Unfortunately, my lack of materials and creativity for replicating the sounds to compensate for the noises you would hear in a boba shop is what made me to pursue this idea for the audio narrative piece, after that I started thinking about replicating a dentist office setting because of the relatively easy access to sounds, like dentist tools, chairs, alarms, and what not. I also thought that I'd lend my voice for the narrative piece to better allow for a more cohesive and structured narrative while listening to the audio.

During the development process for this audio narrative, I had some difficulties, because I wanted to opt to use Adobe Audition, instead of Audacity, for the narrative arrangement, but never really used Audition or Audacity, so the learning curve would be evident in either program that I chose. From the work that we did during this unit, I can say that the most important thing that I learned was that when dealing with sounds, they can evoke different feelings and reception even if you have a guided description that tells you what the audio is about.

VISUAL ARGUMENT: https://github.com/michaelpacifico/visual-argument-2023spring For this section, I've got the most experience with Photoshop, so figuring out what I wanted for my visual argument was really the only obstacle that I had when trying to do this section. Although I didn't have much that I learned from this section and more so just another rep of practice when using Photoshop, I didn't mind it at all. Prior to this class in high-school I had a complete curriculum dedicated to the Adobe Suite, mostly comprising of Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Lightroom so those programs were things that I had a good understanding of prior to taking this class. After those classes, I would use those programs for thumbnails, video, and other random things that I'd create. During the middle of high-school I had dreams of being a gaming YouTuber so I got reps for using those apps from making media for my YouTube channel.

WEBSITE: https://github.com/michaelpacifico/webs2023spring This section for me was the most difficult for me because I really never had much experience when dealing with CSS, HTML, JavaScript in much capacity. During my first year of community college (2016), I had at basic web development class that I took, but I'm pretty sure the professor who was teaching that class, had no prior knowledge on CSS, HTML, JavaScript because we offered zero insight on the work that we did for the class so it really left a sour taste for web development until this class. I had an initial idea to work on a web e-commerce site as my theme for this section, but without any experience and really not idea what I should be looking for in terms of tutorial help, I opted to just do a portfolio website because there's a lot of information on sites like them.

The lesson and work that we've done for this section was definitely a better stepping stone for getting into web development, than my first encounter with this topic. And for me, it's definitely something that I'd like to look into for work going down the line and hopefully finding some jobs.

CONSOLIDATION: https://github.com/michaelpacifico/foodvideo2023spring For this section, I definitely underestimated to amount of time and work that would be require for me to achieve the idea that I had for this section. The work that I wanted to do for this section was to create a intro video for a podcast that I help run with the Filipino Student Association here at PITT, and it would comprise of work done in both Premiere Pro and After Effects. As I've stated before I'm quite familiar with Premiere Pro, having done for with it since high-school, but After Effects I've never even touched. As I'm writing this reflection, it probably wasn't the best idea to try and learn something new, in a section that was really meant for revisions, as such I never do to finish the video that I had set my sights on creating for the podcast. I was able to make the foundation video with some edits on Premiere Pro, but with finals happening and us also filming our wrap-up video for the podcast last weekend, I just wasn't able to create the video I wanted with the time constraint that we had.

If I were to sum up what I have learn from this class it would probably be that there are certain aspects to a theme or idea that can be communicate best depending on what you're going for. For example, if the audio narrative section that we did first incorporate video as well as audio, I feel like you'd lose out on the audio changes that give us the unique narrative path that only audio can tell. So for me it think that and important lesson that I will carry on with when working with digital media and through my career outside of college as well.

[Asher-Goods]

Where do I even start?

This is a question that I ask myself now when I am writing my final reflection, but its also a question that I have asked myself each time I started a new project in this class and more generally, any project, anytime. Throughout the course of this class, each time we started a new project, I dreaded the idea of having to come up with some big idea and also found myself concerned with all of the small details. However, in this class, the method of approaching a new project was very particular and helpful. Having the ability to communicate with peers, compare ideas, and wrestle with a couple of different approaches, while still having enough time enabled me to think more deeply about what kind of product I wanted to create, which in turn led to the creation of a better product! If this class has taught me anything about the creative design process, its to slow down.

Open ended questions can sometimes be hard for me. I have a very chaotic ADHD brain, (you might have noticed,) but I also love order. I think the reason that I love engineering is that with most problems, there is a straight forward answer, or many different methods which lead to a similar result. I think that I find comfort in the formulaic manner of these things. This class however was the opposite of my comfort zone. Don't get me wrong. I'm a creative person, and I love creating art whether it be through piano, audio-mixing, painting etc. But, when these things are an assignment, everything generally goes out the window. For that reason, I think that this class has been an important and healthy challenge. I learned that when it comes to working in an open ended sense, it is extremely important to set goals and deadlines. For example, every class we had a workshop, we would write in the shared google doc our plans and then update it at the end of the session. I even found myself during after-class hours.

I was particularly surprised by the amount of time these projects took! When I enrolled in this course, I enrolled because it was a writing intensive course which would serve to fill my general education requirement. I didn't think that I would be looking at my computer screen at 11:30pm on a Monday night listening to the same audio clip over and over and over again trying to find the perfect time to mix in a cockatiel squawk so that I could perfectly match the ambiance of my apparent in a soundscape. But, here we are. There were many times that I felt frustrated when working on every project. For example, when I had sourced my images from the top search results of google images for pictures of Jews from all around the world, I only realized after I had included and edited these images in my project, that most of them were unusable due to licensing issues. So, I had to switch out numerous images that I used to represent the Jews from each location. You can see here this is what I originally had and compare it to my final result on the bottom of this reflection. I additionally changed around some of the text and added Yemani Jews. This is one of the many times that I had to delete a large chunk of my project and just start over again!

Although this class was more work than I had initially expected, this was most definitely the type of work that I felt pay off. I am legitimately proud of each and every project that I have completed during this semester. I enthusiastically have shown every project of mine to friends and family members. I didn't realize how lucky I was to have the opportunity to take this course. I didn't expect this course to give me the motivation and support in creating a website that I will use to show off my skills to future employers. If anything, this class has provided me with more skills and important concrete knowledge than most of the classes that I took last year! So, yes, you could say I am pleasantly surprised.

Speaking of the website, I will most definitely continue to develop it as I continue to do new projects and hone in my engineering skills. If I had more time this semester, I would definitely look to restructure the projects page (again) because of the limited amount of information that I am able to provide due to academic integrity policies. This summer, I intend to make my own home security system and fully document the process through my website. I hope that this page will be an eye catcher for employers, so I will try to the best of my ability to continue to make it look appealing!

Soundscape Narrative

For my narrative, I chose to recreate the soundscape of my apparent during a school night through a conversation between my roommate and I while cooking dinner.

Visual Argument

Website

My visual argument was to spread the message that Jews are still here (as it is blatantly written above), but more focusing on the idea of the "reverse diaspora." You can see more information about this project by visiting the portfolio.

This website will serve as my future engineering portfolio. It is fully navigable and contains important information surrounding my knowledge and skills in engineering.

Consolidation

For the consolidation project, I chose to continue working on my website. I focused on finishing each individual project page, filling the main project selection page with a total of 9 projects, reformatting certain pages for mobile viewing, and taking a professional headshot, photoshopping it, and including it in my about me page.

NOTE: I didn't realize that I needed to make a consolidation project repository before it was too late so both the website and consolidation repository links direct you to the same page. If you wish to see the website before the consolidation project, you can check the revision history.

[MikeBailey412]

In terms of composing digital environments there are many ideas or pieces of advice that come to mind that help me. First off, I think that knowing who exactly your target audience is, is a big part of how you will create the environment. Understanding who you are creating the content for in the first place is essential in composing an engaging yet effective message or idea. For example, say the target audience is children. I might lean towards using bright colors and soft shapes that can help draw the attention of a child. On the other hand, say the audience is a corporate business organization. I might want to use fonts that fit in to a professional environment. Or I could try and use muted colors to help tone down the background noise to emphasize focus on the content at hand. Knowing who your audience is basically determines how to get started, and also what the end result will look like.

For digital composition I think that it is very crucial to stay current with the most recent trends or technology. This allows the composer to take advantage of new techniques to help improve your message’s effectiveness. By staying up to date in this fast-paced world, your content can adapt to certain people’s preferences and the latest digital tools. For example, social media platforms are always updating their algorithms and layouts. This can impact the length of your reach and how engaging your content is. By staying up to date with these changes, you can adjust your media strategy and hopefully make content that is much more likely to be engaged with and seen by your target audience.

When I look back at the unit goals and overall course outcomes, I feel like I have definitely been able to reach a lot of them. I think I was most successful with being able to “develop proficiency with a number of digital tools for composing in aural, visual, and hypertext modes.” I feel very confident with my abilities in audacity, GIMP, and with my skills in HTML and CSS. Another outcome I have most certainly seen success in was “develop proficiency in one popular tool for version control and collaboration.” Being a computer engineer, I have had several software classes that utilized version control with GitHub. Although I have not had to use it for about a year, so my skills were a bit rusty when I jumped back into it with this class. In particular I really enjoyed the use of commenting on other classmates’ commits to give feedback and also receiving feedback. That is one feature that I never used before on GitHub, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Receiving feedback really helps me see where my content is lacking and also a great way to get new ideas to build off of. For example, below is a screenshot of feedback I received in my Visual Argument/Rhetorical Collage. Ariana suggested to try and make my message more clear because it was not all that obvious at first. I attempted to do this by adding the Spotify link in the bottom center of the canvas.

Below is a screenshot of how I attempted to make the message of my content clearer.

To be honest, something that really surprised me about this course was how much we used version control. I really only thought version control was useful in terms of software and writing code. I never really thought about using version control for any other forms of data besides code. So when I first learned that we would be using GitHub, I really thought it was kind of overkill. I now understand that it is a great way to keep track of progress, give feedback and keep your data safe. Seeing how useful it turned out to be, I really don’t see why people use it more often just for any data on their computer. I can definitely see myself using version control much more often in the future for stuff other than just software.

I think the only thing I could really see myself doing to develop my digital media skills would be to make another website. I can see a time when I make a website about myself. It would include my resume, achievements, and other extracurriculars. I think if a prospective employer were to see a polished website like this it would only increase my chances of being hired. They would see that I am willing to put a lot of effort into displaying all of the things I have done this far in my life. Whether this would be a completely new website, or a continuation of my website I made for this class... that is still up in the air. I am super grateful to have taken this class and learned so much about web design and all of the cool features you can implement. The possibilities are basically limited by your imagination.

Soundscape Narrative

Rhetorical Collage

Website

Repos Soundscape Rhetorical Website Consolidation(same as web)

Prior Draft of Website prior draft This prior draft was before I updated the side nav bar to make it interactive. i.e. when you make the screen size small enough, the normal nav bar at the top disappears and a menu button appears at the top right. You should be able to click the button and the nav bar should appear from the right. This draft does not have that functionality yet. Also, this draft was not yet optimized for multiple screen sizes. The final draft encompasses all of these problems and makes them work as intended.

[jordanmarch]

Final Portfolio

This course has taught me so much about different digital mediums and the digital creation process as a whole. The most helpful thing for developing my thoughts on composing in a digital environment were the reflective brainstorming times we had in class before really diving into each project. Normally, when I work in a digital space, I bypass this step and jump over important considerations because, in my head, it’s digital, so it’s easier to go back and change as I go versus if I were, say, drawing something. Although it may be easier to go back and revise in a digital space than in a physical space, that does not mean it is ideal or simple.

The brainstorming time in class, specifically when we wrote on paper, forced me to be more introspective than normal in the digital creation process, which translated into my actual creations. The planning period was useful when creating my audio narrative. Originally, I wanted to just do a morning routine-type story, but the planning period required me to think further and deeper. This is when I formulated the idea of a futuristic dream routine story and planned out the plot. I had planned for the audio narrative to have a lot more parts of the story, but as I worked, I realized it could get boring and take too long, so I scaled my idea down to what I thought were the most interesting audio recordings. I think this process is evident in my visual argument project organization. When I went in with a clear plan, even though it did change along the way, it allowed me to be much more organized, which made the entire process smoother. I kept each element of the piece in a designated area based on what part of the design it played into. This was so beneficial when going back to revise, as I knew where everything was and I didn't have to click through a million disorganized layers to find what I was looking for.

PS Organization:

While this planning period can seem inconvenient and like an extra, unnecessary step, I recognize how helpful it can be and how it has a positive influence on the entire digital process. I am definitely going to continue this practice in the future.

Looking back on the semester, I think my visual argument piece was my "most successful". I have a lot of experience working with Photoshop outside of this class, which definitely helped me out for this assignment. However, the assignment I am most proud of is my website. HTML and CSS certainly challenged (and frustrated) me more than anything else in this course. It was a new way of thinking that was vastly different than anything I had done before. With my initial website, I was satisfied with its visual appearance on a large static screen, but I had to acknowledge that there were many places that needed improvement. This led to my choice to keep working on my website for my consolidation project. I am very happy with the changes from my initial website to my current website. While what I have now is not perfect, it certainly reflects how my understanding of HTML and CSS has grown.

I actually did not keep working on the same website but transferred the content to an entirely new website. My initial website’s code was a bit disorganized and all over the place because I was still learning while creating. When looking into my code, you can see this with headings from h1 to h7, text sizes, and lots of floating elements. With my consolidation project, my main goal was to make my website more accessible. I think there is still room for improvement here, but it is certainly better. Here is a link to my website files from my first submission.

In my new website, the biggest change I made was using a flex layout. This solved my issue with responsiveness, and now the window size can be adjusted and the content is still legible. This was a learning process, and I think more can still be done to make the layout better on mobile screens, but it is much better than before, as you can see in the screenshots below.

Original Website:

New Website:

Another change that helped with responsiveness was altering my font sizing units and font structure in general. In my initial website, I used a lot of different headings (out of hierarchical order and up to h7). This was absolutely not accessible. In my new website, I only use four headings, and they follow a size hierarchy properly. Additionally, I changed my units of measurement throughout the site to vw rather than px, which helps with responsiveness.

Original Website:

New Website:

Changing the colors and layout of the website also helped to improve its accessibility. In my initial website, I used white major title headings on top of a pretty light tan background. The low contrast here does not consider visually impaired audiences and absolutely needed to be changed. In my new website, I made sure the contrast was over a 4.5:1 ratio so that it was legible to all audiences.

New Website Contrast Ratio:

The final big adjustment I made to my website was the addition of alt text for all images. On my first website, there was only alt text for one image; this was mainly because of the due date and amount of content on the website. On my second website, I included alt text for all digital images. This was challenging when it came to my magazine and text-heavy examples; I was not sure what to put in the alt text and what not to. I provided a pdf link to most projects, however, which gives users the option to open as a pdf where the text in the image can be read in various ways. My intention was to just describe the images and overall idea of the page through the alt text. I would like to make these descriptions clearer and possibly longer, but for the sake of time, I had to limit myself. Ideally, the pdfs would be displayed on my site, and visitors would not need to rely on a link that takes them to an external page.

My website project is where I made the most major revisions. In my audio narrative project, I did not have time to make revisions because the aup3 file is corrupt, but if I were to make changes I would add audio credit and direction to my repository at the end, clean up background noises, and fix the corrupt aup3 file. I am very happy with my visual argument and chose not to make any revisions to it.

Coming into this course, I did not have a clear idea of what digital media we would be working with and expected it to be focused on projects similar to the visual argument. Audio editing and website construction were both pretty unfamiliar to me and not what I expected to work on. But after completing these projects and learning more, I see the value in these units and how they have helped my digital media skills become more well-rounded. I also enjoyed the consolidation project and the freedom we had there. It was nice to have the choice to continue working on something we were familiar with or to try something new.

Moving forward, I hope to keep developing my digital media skills. I am taking a digital composition course in the fall and am continuing to pursue a digital media certificate. Digital media is a major element of my professional life and aspirations, so I am eager to keep learning more as I move along there. I am also planning to continue practicing HTML and CSS in my personal time. I hope to make my website function even more smoothly and to make the layout more interesting as I learn more.

Audio Narrative: Audio Narrative File

Visual Argument: Visual Argument File

Website/Consolidation Project: New Website Link Website Repository (old and new)

[bst20]

Going into this course I was unsure what to expect besides that I would likely be making some type of digital media. While I initially was concerned when I saw that aside from audio and visual we’d also be making an html website, I found that the structure of the course was very effective in teaching me a variety of digital media forms. I previously had some experience in creating audio and visual projects but had no background in any type of coding or html. Having the class progression difficulty from audio to visuals to html was nice because I was able to gradually excel and improve upon skills I learned in previous sections of the course. Where the audio unit taught me to focus on telling a story with no visuals, the visual unit taught me to write an argument with little words. And while the web design unit wasn’t like the audio or visual unit it still involved thinking about fine details and making sure that what I intend to show is what is actually shown. Ultimately each unit taught me different things about composing digital media and helped me get a feel for both the possibilities and limits of creating media in a digital field. I found it especially helpful that we used github to track all of our changes. In previous classes I would simply work on a project and submit the final draft, and in the process of making edits I would go back and forth between changes but sometimes have to redo entire parts because I forgot what I originally did. With github I was able to visually see the progress of my project which helped me not only refer to any edits if I needed to redo them but also allowed me to think more consciously about the changes I was making. Unlike physical media, with digital media it seems like we can endlessly undo everything — which is mostly true— but thinking about digital media like this makes us overlook the process of creating it, so to say. With github however, one can view and track this process, seeing what worked or what didn’t. Its kind of like the digital version of when you can slightly see where you erased a pencil mark on paper even after hours of erasing. While on paper this isn’t always favorable, the perks outweigh the negatives in the digital realm.

Audio Narrative: Having reflected on the structure of the course overall, I will now reflect on each project. I really enjoyed starting off the semester with an audio project, especially because it was something I was already familiar with having just taken an audio storytelling class the previous semester. As I noted in my project reflection I was overall pleased with the end result of my project. I enjoyed testing out new audio editing techniques that I didn’t get to use in my previous class, as well as getting to learn how to use Audacity when I previously only knew Adobe Audition. While I didn’t revise my audio project for the consolidation, if I did have more time with this project I would work to expand the story as the ending felt a bit rushed. I would have gave more direction at the end of the piece so that rather than leave the ending up to the listener I would present a more clear narrative. Repository: https://github.com/bst20/audio-narrative-2023springbst

Visual Argument: The visual unit was especially fun because we not only learned to create visual media but focused on presenting a clear visual argument. I really enjoyed photo editing to present an argument about an issue that I care about. I was especially satisfied with the end result of this project which is why I didn’t choose to revisit it. I’m not sure if there’s anything I would change about this project aside from minor visual edits like filters and fonts. Repository: https://github.com/bst20/visual-argument-2023spring

Web Design: Although it was the hardest unit, I actually really enjoyed the web design unit because it pushed me to create a form of digital media which I was completely unfamiliar with. Through countless tutorials and trial and error I was ultimately able to make an html website I was proud of that presents educational content in a cohesive and visually appealing manner. While I am pleased with the end result there is still much more that I would do to further improve the overall layout and look of my website. But I chose not to do this for my consolidation project because there’s so much I want to add that even the few final weeks wouldn’t be enough to fully expand on every little detail I would like to incorporate. If I did have more time I would love to expand my new knowledge of html and css to add even more pages that link to each other, like having several pages under the history tab each of which would do a deep dive into different time periods. I would also want to incorporate more interactive elements that allow the viewer to feel engaged in the website, like some type of interactive timeline that might play a video at one point or play music at another point. Besides expansions to the html and css elements I would also love to add more of my own visuals to the website. This is what I partially did through the consolidation project, but if I were to specifically focus on the web design project I would create my own banners and mass head with photoshop as well. Despite wanting to add more to the website, I’m overall pleased with the somewhat final state of the site as I believe it displays growth in my understanding of html and css. Repository: https://github.com/bst20/webs2023spring

Consolidation: Lastly, for the final project I decided to expand on some of the techniques I learned in the visual unit by creating two images using GIMP. While I initially intended to use photoshop, I had to switch to GIMP because my laptop kept crashing while using photoshop. Though the sudden switch to GIMP was not ideal, I found that it pushed me to find different ways to edit. I ended up using many different online tutorials, to learn how to distort and adjust the photo, edit it to have a canvas painting texture and adjust the colors. Furthermore, while I initially was just going to make two images that were completely unrelated to my previous projects, I felt like I had the opportunity to somewhat expand on what I intended to achieve with the web design unit which is why I made two visuals that seek to unpack the harmful perspectives and rhetoric I presented through my website. Having made two visuals which combine famous orientalist paintings with images of ‘exotic’ animals I then decided to add these to my website under a new page which I called “Visual Project.” On this new page I also included a background image and a short description explaining the intention behind the images. Beyond explaining that I sought to question the orientalist narrative that likens eastern people to exotic animals, I chose not to explain too much so that the images can lead the viewer to draw their own conclusions based on everything else presented on the website. My intention is that after going through the information, resources and video presented on my website, by the time one gets to the new visual project page they can understand what I’m trying to argue without me having to elaborate too much. Overall, I believe this final project truly is a consolidation of all that I have learned throughout this course. The only thing I would expand on if I had the chance would be to make even more visuals that provoke the viewer to think about other elements and effects of orientalism.

Repository: https://github.com/bst20/final-portfolio-collages

My goal in the beginning of this course was to try as many new things as possible and gain a better understanding of the different types of digital media, which I definitely think I have achieved. I think this is especially true given that at the start of the course I didn’t even know what html or css was but now have my own personalized html website. This can be seen through my several commit messages on github that show the progression of my website which started as a very basic html doc made with the help of the course tutorials and ended as an educational resource that looks at the concept of orientalism. Here’s a screenshot of an early rendition of my html website. Now the site has much more edits and actually has a solid css stylesheet paired to it.

[alcalaaha]

When I enrolled in this class, I did not know what to expect, but I did know that I wanted to learn something new and take a break from the usual art and composition classes. It has been a while since I started something as a complete beginner, as I have never worked with any audio or html programs, but this class allowed me to take up these challenges without falling behind or feeling too inexperienced.

A skill I plan to take with me is writing with code. I first learned how to use RStudio last semester for a data analysis class, but I struggled a lot and felt that coding was too difficult to understand or read. Learning html and css has been much easier - possibly due to the amount of tutorials that were available - but I have started to feel a lot more comfortable in my abilities. Something that I need to improve on is being more accepting of feedback. I have always dreaded peer reviews in classes and opening myself up to critiques, even though I know how valuable it is to improving my work. The peer reviews we did in this class showed me that everyone only wants to help each other, and I ended up having fun looking at other people's work and seeing what they have to say about mine. I liked how before each project we started with writing down ideas/words/images that came to mind, as it was very similar to how I draft ideas for art projects. I never begin anything without drafting multiple thumbnails of possible designs, so this was right in my comfort zone and helped me connect with whatever I was making at the time. Something else that has stuck with me are the principles of Gestalt. They are something I have often included or thought about in my work, but I had never learned the names of them before this class. I will definitely keep this link handy so I can refer to it in the future.

I definitely intend to continue working with html and css outside of school. There is so much I can still improve with my website, and I will keep updating it as long as my friend continues to create art. Another friend who works in visual development is currently trying to convince me to design her portfolio, which I will hopefully begin over the summer once we can meet in person. Also this summer, my mom and I will be writing a book about past artists from our hometown for our local historical museum, and I am hoping to creating a website to accompany it to make it more accessible to non-locals who want to learn about my town's art history.

My first project is “A Day in my Life(guard)”, for the audio narrative unit. I wanted to create a narrative that captured me on a day of work as a lifeguard. A public pool is a very chaotic place, and I wanted to convey that through lots of background noises and rarely any silence. The audio follows a lifeguard starting their shift as they rotate the previous guard out of the station and take their place. The sounds communicate the actions and events happening around the pool that I need to be aware of and react to. The Audacity interface was very straightforward and easy to learn. The only difficulty I encountered with the program itself was the limited space - I had so many sounds that they ran off the screen and I ended up having to scroll back-and-forth to find what I was looking for. I combined what I could, but certain sounds were set to either the left or right side, and putting them together would override the directions I chose, so they had to stay separate. I’m normally a quiet person and don’t make a lot of noise (except at work), so I had to step out of my comfort zone to record the spoken portions of the audio. If I was to extend the duration of the audio, I would find other people to voice the other lifeguard and people the lifeguard interacts with, so it wouldn't sound like I am talking to myself.

“Welcome to Ankh-Morpork” is something I had a lot of fun with despite the troubles I encountered. I had experience with digital design/art programs such Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop, so I expected Gimp to be like those. Unfortunately, most of my time during this project was spent troubleshooting and getting used to the interface. I took some time learning how to use the selection tool to remove the backgrounds from the images, as I’ve never had to use it in my work before. The first layer of buildings had a blue outline around the edges from where the sky had been, which I did not think was too noticeable until someone pointed it out in their peer review. I had been manually removing the outlines with a small eraser, until I was taught how to color select and erase the blue, which was much easier (before and after showcased in screenshots). I also learned how to apply a layer mask to alter the colors and make them more cohesive instead of leaving them as I found them. This skill in particular has come in handy again in a later project, which I will mention then.

For the third project, I created a portfolio for my friend to showcase the art they created over the past year at school. The setup is very basic, following a simple path from the homepage to the art to introducing the artist. I included descriptive alt text, which is unfortunately about as accessible as it gets, as I did not attempt to make the website responsive. I am proud of it for being my very first attempt at creating a website, but I knew I could do better.

My final project is an extension of the last, where I tried to accomplish the vision I originally had for the website. I am excited that I finally figured out how to set up a custom cursor with an image (nothing ended up being wrong with my code, my image was just too big). Since the cursor is a circle rather than an arrow, it takes a couple tries to position it correctly over a link when clicking, which is something I will troubleshoot in the future. I wanted the homepage to have a specific look with the text overlapping that I do not think is possible with css, so I typed up the title in Gimp and inserted it as an image in html. I had to change the color around a few times, which is where I was able to utilize my knowledge of layer masks, so that I did not have to retype everything. I also tried out a background image, which took some research to figure out how to layer the text image over top of it. I also changed the background color for each page to make them more separate from each other as if you’re stepping into a new room in a gallery. Overall, I am much more happy with this portfolio design. It feels more cohesive and thought-out, and is a suitable place to showcase my friend's work.

[BenA03]

Final Portfolio

Reflection

When reflecting on this course, I feel my most significant takeaways fall into two main ideas: First, I have become a lot better at not sticking to the plan and being more flexible in my workflow. Second, I have a deeper appreciation and understanding for self-learning, and how the wild world of the internet can either be a fantastic or somewhat ineffective place to learn new skills.

To address the former takeaway first, many of the projects I've worked on throughout my academic career are projects that I would call "linear". They follow the typical algorithm of receiving a prompt, generating some kind of plan (which could be an outline for an essay, or some whiteboarding for a coding assignment, or a schedule for a project or presentation...), and then sticking with that plan until the assignment reaches completion. While I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this workflow (especially since it can be perfectly effective in the right context), this course was a great opportunity for me to practice assignments that I would consider more "circular". What I mean by this is, instead of having a fixed plan and executing it until I've reached my set goals, the state of my project as I create and revise my work leads me to constantly update and change my plan, which then informs my next set of tasks within my composition. While this workflow can be much more difficult than a more linear style, especially in earlier stages when the plan is constantly shifting, I think a significant upside is that you can model your next step around your current ambitions or spontaneous ideas, which can lead to stronger products than just plodding along a to-do list of things that seemed like they would work when you generated the initial plan but might or might not be the best approach in the present.

To illustrate, I'll reference my project for the Audio Narrative Unit. My creative process during this unit is what I would describe as somewhat turbulent. From my audio unit reflection:

I found the early stages of this project very difficult, especially in nailing down the plot of my narrative. Initially, I wanted the story to be about each member of a family returning to their home after each of them finish their long day at work/school. However, I realized that introducing so many characters might be too ambitious, since I’d have to precisely layer the sounds of their actions together in a way that it was still clear who was performing which activity. So, I jumped to the idea of just having one character, a student, which we’d follow as they unpacked from school, grabbed a snack from the fridge, and got started on their homework. I started assembling sounds for this story, but as I drafted this plot in Audacity, I realized that my sounds were really somber...From there, it came to me that perhaps our character wasn’t a student at all, but rather an adult who received unusually bad news. I noticed a few recent headlines about layoffs at Google, and so I ran with the concept of a post-layoff return back at home.

Despite this initial difficulty of finding strong footing within the project, I think that this unit was my strongest, even though I went into this course much more comfortable with a "linear" style. In fact, I believe it was a direct result of this friction that lead me to a successful end result. If I was not flexible in my process and tried to stick to the plan, I might have found myself continuing along a path that I was no longer interested in or would have struggled to execute properly, and I would not have had the opportunity to integrate a current event into my narrative that was still developing stages when my proposal was first created.

On the other hand, I think my project from the Visual Argument Unit was my weakest project. I went through somewhat of a similar revision process here as I had with my audio unit, and revamped my visual argument early into the project timeline:

Pre-revision:

Post-revision:

However, the primary difference here is that I did not allow myself the flexibility of deviating much from my original proposal at all as I developed the project. Throughout, my image formatting and general message stayed rigidly consistent. This made it easier to reach the baseline criteria by the project due date (which might have been necessary, as I lost a little time this unit getting familiar with GIMP), but consequently also meant I missed out on a lot of the aspirational criteria that might have been attainable or came more naturally if I had allowed myself to pivot to ambitious new ideas that I did not necessarily have the experience to conceptualize when I first created my project proposal.

Overall, the course criteria made it easier to branch out into this unfamiliar composition style, thanks to flexible baseline and aspirational guidelines that helped constrict project scope but not creativity, and Git version control was also very helpful here, as I always felt comfortable reaching for a new technology or task knowing I could always rewind to a stable version of my project if my efforts didn't pan out as I envisioned. To clarify, I don't think every assignment or project calls for a revision-heavy process, but in the future, I feel I would be more comfortable leaning into a more creative, iterative approach where it would lend itself better than my usual straightforward, more linear style of project development.

Another topic I'd like to touch on is the process of self-learning the course encourages, especially within the Web Technologies Unit. I really liked both the web technologies unit and the consolidation unit since they allowed me an opportunity to build on my fundamentals and teach myself more advanced tricks on my own. However, I found that self-learning wasn't always intuitive, and I needed to be careful of my approach to ensure I was actually absorbing and understanding the information and tutorials I came across.

There are a vast number of tutorials and forum pages that helped me solve some of the bugs and implementation issues I was facing, both across regular HTML/CSS and when writing in React. As a result, it was very easy to Google a problem, skim through StackOverflow for the most relevant answer, copy and paste in the code, and move on once it worked. This "works", but it doesn't really achieve the kind of learning that I was looking for when developing projects in the course. When I recognized instances of this during my own development process, I worked to alleviate it by intentionally seeking out resources that offered conflicting methods or viewpoints on how to accomplish a given task. I found that if I was presented just one way to do something, I might not understand fully why it might be considered best practice to do it that way, but if I was forced to consider between two ways to approach a task, I would have to consider the pros and cons of each method, and thus arrived at a better understanding of the code involved. As an example, in React, I found that there were many ways of updating a parent component from the child component. I carefully read through https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35537229/how-can-i-update-the-parents-state-in-react, which offered many solutions, none of which were necessarily worse than another. By reading through not only the solutions shared, but the replies and comments to those solutions, I felt I better understood the patterns and style of modern React and could integrate the same kind of design when I went to create my own implementations. After this course, I want to try to slow down during my self-guided learning more, as I did in these two units, which I think will make me a better and more conscientious programmer.

In the future, I can see myself creating many more projects in Audacity and GIMP, but especially in HTML/CSS/JS. My next goal is to try out Jekyll, and with the University Handbell Club site up and running (which I might try and rewrite in a framework, we'll see), I am sure I will be tweaking and futzing with my code for a considerable time to come!

Projects and Revisions

Audio Narrative

Repo

https://github.com/BenA03/audio-narrative-2023spring

Revisions

I didn't end up making any revisions to this project after the unit end-date, as I was pretty happy with the overall product and decided to leave it as-is.

Visual Argument

Repo

https://github.com/BenA03/visual-argument-2023spring

Revisions

After the unit ended, I added a reference at the bottom of my image to credit my sources, and I also changed the repo license to a CC BY-SA 4.0 to comply with a share alike image I used within the composition.

Web Technologies

Repo

https://github.com/BenA03/webs2023spring

Revisions

With approval from the rest of the club, I launched the site for the public at https://www.handbellsatpitt.club/! I made some small tweaks in another repo to link the GitHub pages site with my domain name and to drop the .html extension from each page's URL.

Consolidation

Repo

https://github.com/BenA03/portfolio-nextjs

Description

For my consolidation unit, I decided to try learning a technology I hadn't worked with before and created a site written in React. The site utilizes a Next.js framework and is deployed on Vercel. In the demo app, users can manage a list of "recipes", deleting existing entries, or adding their own. While there many features that would need to be implemented to make it a fully-functioning app (user logins, backend, etc), I feel this was a successful first attempt at trying out a new web technology within the last few weeks of class.

[ChrisTroina]

Final Portfolio

Reflection

Over the course of this class, my main takeaway is to always try to expand my horizons, and even if what I've created wasn't exactly what I'd envisioned in the beginning, it was still a worthwhile process. Of course because of the work I've done towards projects like this now, I'll be able to put them into works I plan on making in the future.

Before I took this course, I'd always wanted to work on creative projects such as this but for one reason or another I never actually put the time into anything beyond very small processes. Because of this, I'll admit, the process was very rough at points. My scheduling when it comes to long term projects was very loose, which often caused me to work on this more hurriedly than I would have wanted to. However, as the projects went on, I feel that my scheduling, while not perfect, got much better.

This course has also given me the skills in web design and audacity. I especially plan to take the html and css skills I've gained to use them further in my career, and I'd like to use the website I made in specific as a baseline for any further portfolio showcase. As for Audacity, I had very little experience in it beyond clipping audio files, however now I have a much better handle of how to use it, and in hindsight, there are a lot of things I could have done better. As for Gimp, I already had experience using it, however I never used the depth of options that it had to create something, but after this project the potential of Gimp is much more visible to me. I especially will take with me the principles of design when it comes to how the viewers see things in a design sense.

Audio Narrative

Repository:

https://github.com/ChrisTroina/audio-narrative-2023spring

My first project, as I stated earlier, was the one that I had the least experience with. As such my vision for the project differed a lot from what I had intended, for instance the omnipresent voice sounded much different in my head, and there are quite a few lines in the script that I had to cut out. When I first finished it I was disappointed in how it turned out, however in retrospect I feel that for a medium I had nearly no experience in, I did pretty decently.

One thing I'm still not that happy about is how I organized the audio files, with pretty much every file taking up its own line, which as you'd expect made it hard to navigate, and in general made me much more overwhelmed than I should have been. I did however decide to put all the dialogue on a single line, which at the very least helped me to manage that.

Visual Argument

Repository:

https://github.com/ChrisTroina/visual-argument-2023spring

The visual argument is probably the project that I liked the most. I think it's where I really hit my stride and was able to work in my sense of humor and such into my work. As I said earlier, Gimp was the program that I had the most experience in, as such I was able to stretch a bit more when it comes to my ideas. Overall the vibe I was trying to go for was over the top and jokey, however the ideas behind it are meant to get a point across.

This one the project where I was able to take the most feedback and incorporate it into my project. As can be seen in the screenshot, the original version was incredibly vague, with those who saw it either getting a different message from what I'd intended, or not even understanding what it was supposed to be. I thought that the obvious method to fix that was to add some sort of subtitle that gives an explanation of what I intended the image to be, however this isn't really what I wanted to do, as making it too verbose I feel would ruin the point. To fix this I added the simple alliterative subtitle of "suffering sells". When I replaced the image of the guy presenting the image, the best one that I could find was someone holding a billboard. The image that's being presented was initially on a screen, which is what was in the original office stock photo, however I was able to take that screen and turn it into a billboard, still with the original effects that were gotten from distorting the screen (the "smoke" around the fire).

Web Design

Site:

https://christroina.github.io/webs2023spring/

Repository:

https://github.com/ChrisTroina/webs2023spring

The website project was the one that had the slowest start for me, I had some experience in HTML, however I didn't do much of it outside of high school, and even then, barely. Even after the tutorials I had a lot of trouble getting anything done that didn't look really bad. By the time the deadline for the project came, the site was in an incredibly sorry state (seen below).

When I was making the initial site, I already knew that I was gonna use the final project to make the site look much better, so I was mostly focused on getting all the important things there so there was at least a very bare bones skeleton of the website. The time from the final project was definitely necessary, as that was when the vast majority of the work to make the site took place.

I wanted to make my website a kind of portfolio for my work, but I didn't want to make it just a dry presentation of the things I've made while at university, mostly because I didn't think that would be very interesting and also that it wouldn't really fit with the comical style of most of the projects. The majority of my work was focused on the aesthetics of the site, I spent a lot of time tweaking the font, background color, and the scaling of the images in terms of the size of the browser window.

The colors on the site were something I messed with a lot, it was initially a kind of green-ish off-white since I didn't want the background color to just be boring white. However, I decided to change it since "dark mode" sites just look better in my opinion. Changing it to black and the text to white messed with the background of the comic pages I had in the gallery, I briefly considered adding a blue background behind the images, but I couldn't get it to look good so I just took the easier (and in the end better) way and changed the color to a dark purple, mostly just because I like the color purple. Overall this site and the class a whole made me much more comfortable with making things and being able to be proud of them and display them.

[skygel]

Class Overview:

Going into this class I was excited to learn new things. So far throughout my major I have not taken many creative classes, so I was excited about the change. When we took the initial skill survey at the beginning of the class that asked which programs and software we had experience working with, I had virtually zero experience with any of them. I was slightly nervous about what I was getting myself into given all of the new programs we were going to learn throughout this course. I was pleasantly surprised after the fact, and I feel as though I learned a lot throughout the course. I had no prior experience using GitHub, Audacity, Gimp, or Photoshop, before this class. I found throughout this class for almost every unit I did a lot of research and trial and error to figure things out. Learning how to use GitHub was the first challenge of this class. I had no prior experience using the platform, so it was slightly difficult to figure out at the beginning. After figuring out how to use it, it became very useful for keeping track of work and viewing progress. When using applications such Audacity, Gimp, and Photoshop I relied heavily on the internet to guide me. I was almost always able to find answers and guidance on how to create what I wanted to achieve. I think one of the most useful things I learned from this class is that there are endless resources on the internet that can help you learn how to use all of these programs. One thing that I always wanted to learn how to use was Photoshop. I was always intimidated by it and felt like it would be impossible to jump into it. This class pushed me to try to begin to learn how to use the software along with making me feel less intimidated by it. Through trial and error and the internet I think I know have a basic understanding on how to use Photoshop. I now have the confidence to try and use the program again to create more digital media pieces in my own time. This class also allowed me to have time to be creative, something that I usually do not make time for in my everyday life. I found the class to be a great environment to be creative and try new things.  

Audio Narrative:

For our first assignment in this class, we created audio narratives. For this assignment we used Audacity to edit our audio, this was my first time both hearing of and using this program. I struggled in the beginning of the project to come up with an idea of what audio piece I wanted to make and what story I wanted to tell. I was still getting a feel for the class so I was unsure how large of a concept I was going to work on, I was worried about biting off more than I could chew. I was really indecisive, so I settled on one of the proposed topic ideas that were suggested for the assignment. I settled on creating an audio narrative that told the story on a morning in my life. I have to admit I had some trouble with Audacity in the beginning. I thought that the interface was slightly out of date and difficult to figure out how to do things. I was able to figure out some of the basics in order to create my assignment. One of the easier parts of the assignment was searching for what audio I wanted to use and recording my own audio. Initially I was not super happy with my audio narrative, but after getting some critiques from peer reviews and getting more time to mess with the program I was pretty happy with the end product. Having the input from my peers and some extra time to make some changes was very helpful. My audio narrative is the story behind my morning, starting with the birds chirping in the morning and my alarm going off and ending with me walking out my front door to go to class. In my audio narrative you can hear me doing various things in the morning to get ready such as brushing my teeth, making my bed, doing my hair, and going to the bathroom. With more time I would have added more steps of my morning routine and added more effects and filters to make the audio sound more realistic.

 

Visual Argument

For our second assignment in this class, we created visual arguments. When brainstorming what I wanted to do for this project I know I wanted to make something that had to do with the environment. I was also thinking about doing something about sustainability. I decided to combine the two and ended up with my visual. When creating this I knew I wanted to do a large pile of trash and focus mainly on the details of the pile, making that the main focus of the visual. That is what I spent the most time on and what I started working on first. The trash pile was very time consuming because almost all of the objects in the pile are individual images on their own layer. I spent a lot of time just fitting the objects together to make it look the way that I wanted. After the pile was complete, I worked on adding a background to the image, if there was one thing I would change I think it would be that. I had a lot of trouble figuring out what color background that I wanted. I was having a hard time deciding and choose to go with a gradient blue background. I then added a quote to the top of the image to emphasize the point of the visual and the argument that it was making. If I had more time to work on it I think I would add even more layers to the trash pile and make it look deeper. I would also go back and change the background to something else. The background became an afterthought in the initial project, and I think if I spent more time on it I could make it look better. I struggled a lot getting started on this project. I had never worked with Gimp or Photoshop, so I was slightly intimidated and had no idea where to start. I worked with Gimp for a day or two, after having some trouble with it I gave up and switched to Photoshop. I think they were both equally confusing in the beginning, but I slowly began to understand Photoshop as I spent more time working with it. Looking up questions online and doing research really helped me learn how to accomplish the look I was trying to achieve. I was ultimately happy that I switched to Photoshop and finally learned how to use it.

 

Website:

For our last assignment in this class, we created websites. I was excited for this assignment because I had taken a web design and development class in the past. Because of that I have some experience coding websites using Html and CSS. Once again for this project I had a hard time thinking about what type of website I wanted to make. I decided to use one of the suggested ideas and create a portfolio website. To do this I began to look at other portfolio websites that I liked along with planning out what was important to me to be featured on the site. I knew that I wanted a section to showcase different projects that I have worked on along with a section that talked more about who I am. It was important for me to have the main screen be my name in large letters. Similarly, to the other projects in this class this project took a lot of trial and error and research. I had the ideas in my head on what I wanted it to look like it was just a matter of figuring out how to create it. For the most part I feel as though I achieved most of what I wanted to. There is just some fine-tuning that needs done. For the last unit of this class, we got to decide if we wanted to revise our previous work or start a new project. I decided to spend more time working on my website. For this I wanted to really try and focus on making the website adaptable to any screen size. I was able to do this for the most part except for my “About me” section and my navigation bar. I was having a lot of difficulty getting both things to adjust to any screen size. Fortunately, I was able to fix all of the other sections. I also went back to the “Projects” section and changed the configuration of the images. I also went back and changed the outline width on the boxes in the “Skill” section along with the padding size in the skill section. I also went back and edited the font on the main page and added a shadow to the text that said my name. Overall, I was able to make some edits to my webpage, but I didn’t get to achieve everything that I wanted to. If I had more time I would work on finishing making the website adaptable along with making the project boxes expandable to show a description of each project.

Repository Links: Audio Narrative: https://github.com/skygel/audio-narrative-2023spring.git Visual Argument: https://github.com/skygel/visual-argument-2023spring.git Website: https://github.com/skygel/webs2023spring.git

[altrnate]

Final Portfolio

Audio Narrative Visual Argument Web Design

Composing Digital Media has been one of my most enjoyable, yet challenging class in terms of skills. While learning the content of Orgo or memorizing terms for Neuro have come with their difficulties, very few classes have actually tested my skill. Aside from some basic work with GIMP in high school, everything we did in this class was completely new to me. While at times this challenge was rather frustrating and I needed to walk away, I really do enjoy a challenge. Many classes "challenge" you based on how much you can memorize, but Composing Digital Media pressed my skills and required me to learn new ones. It has been one of the few classes in which I felt I had actually achieved something beyond just a grade, and while I may not use some of the skills ever again, others I may incorporate into my academic life.

When entering this course, I knew I wanted my portfolio to encompass one main idea, however, I wasn’t sure what it would be. While watching someone very close to me get hit with one bad thing after another and seeing them falling apart, I realized that the concerns that my life is too “boring” were trivial compared to the chaos of theirs. This is what inspired me to challenge our outlook on a “mundane” life and to appreciate those quiet moments. As I moved from one project to another, I needed to approach these themes in different manners, and I think having this central theme heightened my learning, as it provided constraint and required me to be creative to properly convey the idea.

In my opinion, the Audio Narrative assignment was the most enjoyable. While I am by no means a master of audio, I do enjoy learning about the work of sound designers and the ability of sound to inflict emotion. Being able to work with sound myself and tweak it how I wanted was rather enjoyable. For the Audio Narrative, I wanted to create a story that was left open for a bit of questioning/inference from the audience. Because of this, I wanted to use minimal words, as I also thought this would be too easy and really wanted to challenge myself. I was happy I gave myself this challenge, as it really pushed me to use other methods such as panning L/R or volume control to convey movement, rather than just have the movement stated.

The Visual Argument was probably my next favorite. As someone who just Photography as a side hobby, I have a lot of understanding of color, framing, contrast, etc. but have never really worked strictly with graphic design. I was surprised by how little I understood GIMP, as I expected my Lightroom experience would at least give me some aid. Either way, I enjoyed the challenge this presented (and might even use it in the future for my own photos). One of the biggest things this unit showed me was how tedious Digital media creation can be and how taxing that can be on your patience and attention. For instance, placing, resizing, and coloring the icons of my project required 4 different tools, so I quickly learned the Hotkeys for them. This is the project that I feel as if there were better ways that I could have conveyed my idea, however, given my skill at the time and the time allotted, I wasn’t to. Given the skills I have developed and enough time, I feel as if I would be able to try this project again and get a result that I could be much prouder of.

The Web Design unit was by far my least favorite. Languages, either foreign or coding, have never been my strong suit. Being thrown into a world of HTML and CSS was intimidating, to say the least. Nevertheless, I still wanted to take advantage of the opportunity and give myself a challenge. I think the hardest part was starting off. Figuring out the different syntaxes or elements took a lot of time to figure out and speed up my work. With that said, I quickly discovered JavaScript (and StackOverflow) was going to significantly increase my workflow and I was closer achieve my goal, even if that meant figuring out the basics of another language. Oh boy, am I glad I did that. Once I started working with JS, everything started falling into place and my website was quickly coming together. I was really surprised that there were so many different options to modify HTML and I honestly think that is what made this project so daunting.

For the consolidation unit, I decided to take your advice from the project responses and fix all of my citations. While I absolutely understand the purpose of citations, I hate them. I did not realize how many small details there are to so many different types of licenses and I honestly do not know how more companies do not get it wrong. Either way, with your help and advice, I was fairly easy to amend my projects so I was giving proper credit to those who made my assets. For my Audio Narrative project, I added a brief statement at the end giving audiences a link to view the full credits with the names of the authors and a link to their assets. For the Visual argument, I added a small link in the corner for viewers to follow and again see the creators and their assets. Original

Finally, for the Website Design, I included a link underneath all of the images used, as well as the name of the author (although in hindsight maybe I should have made that link clickable — oops).

Overall, the biggest thing this class taught me has nothing to do with Digital Media. I learned that if you challenge yourself, you are able to get significantly more out of something than just doing baseline. Much of college does not enable you to push yourself beyond the course, and having that option in this class was more than refreshing. Much of this class felt more like getting credit for doing a hobby rather than completing coursework, and I thank you for that. I really have enjoyed this class and cannot recommend it enough to others who may be interested.