e9 Quarter 2 Reflection

My Strengths

    With this semester, I think that most of my strengths were in the graphic design area. For me, I felt like it was something that I've always wanted to try and when I had the opportunity to, I think I caught on pretty well. Over all, though, I think that I managed my time well with all of my projects and did an alright job with most of them. For the SketchUp project in animation, though, I think this seemed to be my favorite one and I think that I was successful in creating my house in the end.

Improvement

    I honestly think that with improvement, I could try to do a lot better and learn more with animation. For this quarter, we had to do a bit of it, and I think I struggled in that area the most. I had a many difficulties, but I had help so it turned out alright in the end anyway.

What I Loved Most

    I think that this semester was alright and I learned a lot from this class. What I loved the most about this semester, though, was the SketchUp house that we had to create for a project in animation/web design. I had used SketchUp before in middle school and it seemed to be a fun project to create. The outcome of the house was really cool and I think that's what I liked most about it.

What I Would Change

    From all of my projects, I think that there's a lot I would change with each of them. I would try to take my time and ask more questions whenever I need help.

Overall Take-Away

    I learned a lot this semester in e9. I think that the most important thing that I learned about this program is that it takes a lot of effort and time to be successful in what you're aiming for, and that it's not easy at first, but learning along the way can extremely help. I also learned that I'm probably not the best person with animation, but it was still cool to create those projects.

Final Thoughts/Goal

    With all that I've gotten to do and learn in e9, I think that my overall goal is to better myself in the areas that I'm struggling in. Even though I won't be in e9 next semester, I think that with whatever time I can take, I'd like to try to improve myself with those specific struggles, just so I can learn more about it all. My final thought about e9 is that it's a great 21st Century program and it has a lot of areas for a variety of people that can enjoy it.

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.

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.