The information we have been provided with is regarding the 39th Annual Fullbright Conference, which will be hosted at George Washington University in DC from Thursday November 10th to Sunday November 13th 2016.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences and so I’m familiar with what works and what doesn’t about materials provided by the conference. In a addition to a commemorative program, because everyone wants one of those to take home for afterwards, I want to mockup a more functional app that allows schedule viewing. I also want to create name badges with personalized QR codes that can be scanned to create an in app networking system.

also I found you (ಠ_ಠ;)

2016 Conference

Where are you in your hours that you declared earlier in the semester? Looking at your work now, are your current accumulated hours enough?

I committed to working about two and a half hours a day on course work for this class, accumulating 112 hours by midterms. I’m not sure if I have consistently worked two and a half hours every day, but I probably have averaged about as much, considering some days I went far more than 2 and a half hours and some days I was busy working on other things and didn’t have as much time to commit to this class. However, if I am looking at my overall time spent on furthering my design education, also known as expert hours, I feel like I have definitely been successful in this regard. Between actual assigned coursework, all of the information I’ve absorbed sitting in the lab during other classes as a lab assistant, and plenty of time spent reading and watching professional designers talk about their work, I’ve been racking up the expert hours. I think this time commitment shows in my work and that if anything, I have learned the lesson of spreading my hours of work out over more days, especially concerning animation. I hope I never again put myself in the situation where I have to spend six hours straight working in After Effects.

Has your definition of “sophisticated” work changed from last semester? If so, how so? What is sophisticated in your weather report?

A conversation that I had with Jimmy has strongly influenced my understanding of sophisticated work. We were talking about my grasp on “style,” which is a bit lacking. He asked about my habits of looking at other successful work and told me to pay close attention to how they create within the constraints they are given, in order to reach the goals of the project. I think that as I absorb content, I want to be more intentional about picking up what works and then rather then just copying, analyzing why it works and trying to follow a similar process to get there. I think my weather report is sophisticated in the sense that I really stepped into the shoes of the viewer and made choices based on how I as a viewer would like to see the information. I tried to apply a logic of progression that begins to elevate this project to the realm of sophistication.

Describe how the new things you’ve learned so far connect to what you already had coming into the semester.

I was a little worried coming into this semester that my experience in typography was lacking. I was in, what I perceived to be, a less vigorous section of Typography I and I was worried this meant I wasn’t prepared. I think I was right in the sense that most of my technical knowledge of type had to come from supplemental sources (I read a lot), but I had picked up on the overarching concept of hierarchy. I think that I have been able to draw from all of my foundational classes, even ones not classified as GDES, in order to put together successful compositions that draw the viewer to what I want them to, or at least I know the questions to ask to start me on my way there.

What are somethings you are still unsure about in this project that you would like to know more about?

I think the aspect of this project that I would like to explore further is the idea of transitioning between two configurations of information without reintroducing the information entirely. In technical respects, I had a lot of trouble with this in animating without clutter. I think I want to spend some time thinking and reading about different methods of emphasizing information and transitioning that emphasis more naturally. I’d like to expand beyond the more conventional ways of drawing attention to type (color, size, etc.) and think more critically about the ways that people see and then process information. I want to look into the psychology of reading and see how we as people are trained to perceive different choices that designers make.

Assign a level of value to this project. Identify two other projects in your creative life and place this weather report relative to them. How close or far are they from one another? What qualities did each project have that the other’s didn’t that would rate them higher/lower?

I am going to look at this project in comparison to the interaction lesson at the end of Image Methodology  (where I used After Effects for the first time) and the final project in Typography I (where I was given an unformatted journal article and asked to format it). I think that these two projects serve as a good reference for my progress because they showcase my precious experience with the technical aspect of animation in After Effects, as well as the conceptual idea of taking pure unformatted information and applying design to it to change or enhance the meaning. I certainly have come a long way in respects to animation since the app mockup project at the end of last semester. I am not nearly as comfortable in After Effects as I am in Illustrator or Photoshop, but practice makes perfect. I think that if I were to go on and make more work in After Effects, it would be well informed by the process of creating this weather report. It’s true, the final outcome of the video is not as clean as I would like. However, I can pick out specific points and know how to fix them if time allowed that and I think that shows success in as far as the application of animation on this project. With respects to making design choices that give information more meaning, I don’t know if I have necessarily progressed. I think I had a pretty strong understanding of conventional ways to do that even a year ago, back in Typography I. The fact that I have not progressed beyond those conventional methods is what is pushing me to try different ways.

Break down the percentages of what entities are responsible for creating growth within the creative you. Am I part of it? Part of it is on you, right? Do you consider your classmates/friends as influencers on the course of your trajectory for success? At the end of the semester you will be evaluating me, but right now within your own pie piece, how much have you brought to the game? How did it end up that you brought that much?

I work my ass off. I put in hours of work on assignments and continue to make myself do design outside of assignments too. I give informed and constructive critique to my classmates. I absorb and apply outside influence to my work constantly. I put in the work. I think it’s starting to pay off. I think my weather report shows that.

The only useful advice I ever received from a substitute teacher in high school was this: “treat college like a 9 to 5 job, doesn’t matter if you don’t have classes that whole time, you’re working, whether that be working on assignments or studying or reading, you are on the clock  eight hours a day.”

I also once heard that for every hour in class you should spend three hours working outside of class.

16+(16×3)=64

However, in order to get 64 hours in every week, working 8 hours a day, I’d need 8 days. Rather than bend the space time continuum, I think I’ll just exceed that substitute’s advice by one hour and make it a goal to work nine hours every day.

If I apply the math to this course…

4+(4×3)=16

…sixteen hours a week spent on work for this course seems doable. Broken down, this means about two and a half hours a day, which I feel like I can commit to.

If I stick to this, I will have completed 112 hours by midterms and 224 hours by finals.

Better get working!