Presentation Skills

     These couple of past days in e9, our class learned about presentation skills. We learned about what makes a good presentation and how we could achieve that. Each of us got handed a packet that had the different characteristics of what can help us do well during a presentation. Some of the main things were posture, eye contact, voice, facial expressions and professional appearance. For posture, it's best to not be pacing back and forth during your presentation or have your leg bouncing and such. It distracts the audience. With eye contact, if you're looking at your audience while talking, they'll know that you're trying to really get your point across. Your voice during your presentation is a big thing. Having a loud, lively voice makes your audience more interested in what you're talking about. Those characteristics and many others can make a great presentation.
     After learning about presentation skills, we watched three Ted presentations of Bill Gates, Bjorn Lomberg, and Jamie Oliver. We rated their performance based on their professional appearance, facial expression, eye-contact, and posture. With these three men, they all showed different characteristics as they presented and got their points across. After rating each person, our class would discuss why we rated them a specific number; one to five where one is the worst and five is the best. This discussion certainly helped each of us really understand how to present properly.
     Finally, the whole class each presented their sketchbook blog. We all first showed the class our design and then read our blog. For my presentation, I was really nervous. Though I practiced reading my blog many times, when I went up there, my voice was shaky and I kept repeating "um" and other nonsense. I wished I could have done better, of course. I really liked the sketchbook project and presenting my design confidently would have changed the whole experience for me.

The Sketchbook

     For this week's assignment in e9, we had to create a design in our sketchbook that explained "What is graphic design?" With mine, I added a couple designs from albums, logos, and other things that I liked. When I first started this assignment, I started out with typography. I did two fun fonts with the words "graphic design." I started to gather and look up other designs, even one on the cover of a book I'm reading. As I chose to do some typography, I thought that it looked pretty neat when I was done sketching it out. I wrote some other words like my "ICE COLD" sketch and my "LOVE CRIME" one, too, and I think that they look really cool. I used a few logos, like the Twitter logo with the white bird in it. Some of the designs in my sketchbook were a bit random but I think they turned out nice and completed the look of it all.

     At first, I wasn't going to color or outline anything on my sketchbook. Then, I thought that it would look even better with some color. So, I used some markers and pens to give the designs some color. Adding color to them definitely brought out the liveliness of all of them, so I'm glad I decided to do that.

     Overall, I think that I really enjoyed this project. It helped that I used to always try typography when I would draw a lot and that drew me into the project even more. Also, getting to maybe even design them on Illustrator sounds interesting. The whole page of the project looks really cool to me and I'm excited to do even more projects like this in the future.

Thinking About Color

    

     
     My favorite color is red. Red has a sense of fiery characteristics and it can be passionate as well. It also can be extremely bold and I like that about it. Memories I associate with this color are usually ones that make me feel truly confident. Red is a color I've always admired considering it also can represent danger and blood. But I see it the opposite. I think it's more of an outgoing kind of color. It's a bright and warm color. In its color scheme, there's red-violet, red, and red-orange. I've seen this color many, many times on products and buildings and it really catches the eye.

        I think my least favorite color is navy. It's a cool toned, dark blue. It's a bit more specific but it's just not my favorite. I don't necessarily have any bad memories with this particular color, but I just don't have any good feelings towards it. But with this color, it gives me a sad, depressing vibe and I think I like more colors that seem to give me confidence and happiness. It is a pretty dark, glum color, really. I think it's a bit less bold than red and it doesn't stand out too much. So with that, the color navy just isn't my favorite color. 

Illustrator Experience

     In my E-Communications class this week, we began to learn how to use the program Adobe Illustrator. We started with making different shapes with different colors just to introduce ourselves to the basic aspects of the program. Later this week, we learned more about Illustrator and even got to make our own graphic of anything we liked. We also learned about color theory and the different factors to it.

     

     Our first tool that we used was the shape tool. We each made a couple shapes like a rectangle, star, and circle. The shaper tool contained the basic shapes. Then, we made our own graphic design with another tool that let us draw out a shape, and it automatically picking up what we've drawn and making it. We made a Pac Man sort of shape. Then, we made our own graphic design with everything we've learned throughout the week. With also learning about color theory, it helps when making a graphic. We learned about things like the groups of specific colors and factors like tint and shade (and more). Overall, I think using this program will be educational and fun to use.