I’m not sure how many hours I would consider excessive, since I believe that putting as many hours in as possible is better than doing a set amount per week. I guess a good amount would probably be about 3-4 hours a day, which would give me personally a pretty good amount of time per day to play around with different ideas, and try to come up with the best solution for my project. That way I can also come back to the project every day and look at what I’ve done the previous day with fresh eyes. Anything less than that would probably result in much less sophisticated work. Two hours day definitely doesn’t cut it, because that’s not enough time spent playing around with ideas. Unfortunately, most of my outside hours were spent on the more complex of my maps, the flowchart, and so I didn’t give myself enough hours to really make the bar graphs and the personal geography map really interesting in terms of design. So for that last week I was spending at least 3-4 hours a day on my flowchart, but not enough on my other two maps.
In terms of sophisticated work, we talked about the simplicity of the information shown, how comprehensive it was in its visuals, meaning how quickly and efficiently could the data be displayed and understood by the viewer. We talked about color a lot, and how it helped the comprehensiveness of the overall map, and of the visuals. Of all of my maps, my flowchart was the most successful, since it had the most comprehensive visuals, didn’t rely too heavily on words, and when printed out I thought the colors were really successful together and fit with the theme of seafood. My personal geography map was successful I think, in conveying its message, and all of the lines and visuals were pretty clear since I used one of the symbols for walking that everyone already knows, the footprints. I struggled a bit with the colors here and I definitely could have spent more time on that, and it wasn’t very rich in terms of information, so I think I also could have added a couple of interesting parts. My graphs were the least sophisticated in my opinion; the colors turned out alright, and the graphics were sufficient, but I wasn’t able to spend enough time on them to really get them above basic default design.
I got the most feedback on my flowchart map, and so that’s probably one of the reasons why it turned out to be the most successful map. I mostly got a lot of feedback on the complexity of my choices, and whether or not I was making them into more than just yes or no decisions. That ended up with me using a rubric within my flowchart which definitely wasn’t something that I thought I was going to use in the beginning. I also got a couple of cautionary comments on the heaviness of the background color, which led to me adding a couple of color accents at the top to take away some of the weight and add a little more movement to the overall map. I also had some comments on my original graphs, since the way I had presented the bar graph was confusing, so I ended up getting rid of it in favor of a different bar graph.
I found the most challenge in the flowchart graph, and it was the one I cared about the most, so I spent the most time there really trying to work out plausible solutions. When I was able to find the most effective ones (in my opinion), that’s when I was enjoying myself the most. A close second as far as challenge goes would have to be analyzing all of the information from Tony Pierce’s excel sheets; there was just so much information that it was hard to sort out what I wanted to do and what I didn’t, and once I had that information it was hard to visualize it in an interesting way.
I did end up going to the East Austin studio tours and seeing Hollis and Alex’s work on display, but as far as workshops go, I wasn’t really able to attend, either because I’ve been busy working on stuff for other classes, or because the workshops are usually Saturday mornings, when I’m working. I will be submitting some of my copper plate engravings that I’ve been working on for printmaking to the student juried exhibition, since I spent so darn long on those.
My life outside of school has definitely negatively impacted my schoolwork; because I have to work every weekend at home, and because it’s so hard to get days off from my manager, I have a really limited amount of time during the week where I can go into the labs that have Adobe on the server and really work on my design files, and that time became even more limited because I also had to work on my printmaking editions, which I also can only do on campus, and that takes much more time to do. And because I work at Starbucks, and because I have to get up early every weekend after weekdays with little sleep, I have even less time on weekends because I can’t function without napping at least an hour. So overall, just a lot more stress. (I should probably quit.)
When I think of my ideal classroom environment, I think a lot of the environment that I had in printmaking this semester, where all of the work that everyone was doing was hands on, and so everyone would look in on each other’s work just because it was easy to see what other people were working on, and commentary felt really open. Everyone was learning from one another, which I feel represents the ideal class the most. When everyone’s working separately on computers though, it feels very isolated, and unless one person is actively asking others for their contributions, a lot of the students just stay behind the screen, and there’s not a lot of collaboration. I will include myself as one of the hiders, but I did collaborate a bit with other people outside of class time.