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An excessive number of practice hours would be around 10 hours. Considering the nature of our assignments however, it isn’t surprising to clock in anywhere from 4 to 8 hours a week working on an assignment. I know that for my second map I spent many many hours sorting the information before spending a considerable number of hours putting everything together. Unfortunately all of that was lost aside from the one time we had a mini-critique over the infographic maps. As finals week approached I found myself having less and less time to work on graphic design, so I can’t show that graph now. Less than 4 hours working on a project wouldn’t create sophisticated work.

I would consider “sophisticated” work something that was well thought out. Each part comes together in a cohesive way. The typographic choices aid the images and the color choices would emphasize the overall flow of the work. I tried to take into consideration the color choices of my maps first, and then figure out what font I wanted to use. Although my images aren’t very good because of the whole loss of my thumbdrive and my old laptop, I tried what I could.

I received feedback about my usage of stroke on titles, and that caused me to consider the style choices I make for my designs. A thing I find extremely important in design is accessibility, so I try to find fonts that aren’t hard to read, and color combinations that aren’t hard on the eyes (for example, red text on a blue background is awful). I wanted to put a stroke on a title so it would be slightly easier to see on the background, but at the same time it didn’t add much to the overall aesthetic of the poster. As a result I learned that I have to pay attention to not just what is easier to understand but also what looks nice.

My maps were difficult to come up with, because I had to pick a topic and also format it in such a way that it could be easily understood. The easiest part was coming up with a color scheme. Generally I just started with a color that I liked, and then paired it with a few colors that were analogous to it. The thing I enjoyed most about making the maps was that once I got into a certain headspace, it was almost like clockwork putting the maps together. In addition, the most time-consuming thing I did with the maps was going through the bills spreadsheet, that one wasn’t very fun to go through and I’ve been dreading recreating my work on that map as a result.

I’ve only been able to manage some light sketching this semester for outside-school drawing. Other than that I’ve gotten into Dungeons and Dragons and have been thinking creatively ever since. However these are the only two things I could do outside of school, since I haven’t had much time to do anything else.

Life outside of school took my work from a reasonable pace to a complete halt. I lost access to my last computer two days before I could go home to do anything about it. I had a backup for my files: my thumb drive. I’ve had that thumb drive since sophomore year of high school, so I didn’t think I’d lose it any time soon. And then I did. I didn’t have a second backup after that, so I lost the entire second map and all of my progress on that excel file, so I wouldn’t be able to sort through the information again and finish the map and do well in my other classes. This was the major stressor I’ve had this year, and I’ve learned that I need to keep multiple backup files. So because of my not-school-work, I haven’t been able to put the necessary time into my assignments.

The ideal classroom experience would consist of people that can aid one another and enhance each other’s learning. Each student has something to contribute to the discussion, and we’re able to learn more as a group. In the previous year I’ve had a hard time talking to my fellow classmates and didn’t contribute much to the classroom environment. Now I feel slightly more confident about speaking to my classmates. There was even a point where I was so afraid of failure and making mistakes where it’d push me into being totally silent and anything bad that happened was immediately my fault. I’ve grown more accepting of myself, and as a direct effect I’m more comfortable speaking up in class. It’s only slightly better, but it’s better than what it used to be.

I think I used my practice time consistently. I made sure that I spent time in class to learn how Illustrator worked, and get a better understanding of the different tools before I went home and applied what I learned in class.

The sophistication of my work is medium, I followed the instructions as closely as possible, but I didn’t try to push beyond that. I feel like one of my symbols really went beyond what I was thinking, but the other two didn’t quite reach that point.

Whenever I got feedback I made sure I incorporated it in some way. It meant quite a bit to me that I still had areas to improve so I would just use each bit of feedback to try and make each of my symbols stronger and stronger, and also make it so that they could be understood at various sizes. Of course, there were also times where I’d receive feedback that I didn’t find so helpful to my project. For example, feedback on things I already knew I wanted to change.

Learning how to properly use Illustrator was an ordeal to me. There were many times where it wanted to do its own thing and I had to fight with my program to make sure the lines I wanted were smooth. Sometimes the machine wanted to add a lot of unnecessary anchor points and segments when in the end we didn’t need this many points. As I began to learn Illustrator, however, things got much easier for me.

I did a little extra compared to the class assignments. In many cases I would make multiple iterations of one symbol, or I would come up with two different designs and then make multiple forms of those too. I made smaller, scaled versions to make sure the form could still be seen at a small size. I would invert the colors to see if I liked that better.

My social emotional development was mature and that I was in control of my feelings for this project. I think I was also aware of other peoples’ emotions and I think I grew a little bit more through this process.

My contribution to the class climate was probably room temp. I have some problems with communicating with other people, but I think I offered some helpful words every here and there. I could have done more, definitely, but I think my contributions were helpful and aided the class environment.