DECO1800: Design Computing Studio 1

This week marks the start of SWOTVAC and a busy time in my university life, with many exams and deadlines rapidly approaching. Keeping this in mind I have tried my best to stay on top of the portfolio assessment and keep to the deadlines I laid out for myself in my  portfolio design process  blog post from week 11. Content wise I have achieved what I set out to do - I have written or compiled the necessary texts for each section of the site from my blog entries over the semester and have a folder with relevant images and screenshots to support this. I also decided to limit my personal section of the site to reflect just one hobby that displays some of my creativity and skills in the form of my video editing. I took the time to compile the videos on YouTube and investigated some CSS design layouts to display an array of media. Included below is a graphic prototype of a makeshift logo I plan on using to add more style to the website: Overall, I think that I am making s...

With the semester drawing to a close, and the only piece of assessment left for DECO1800 being the personal portfolio, I thought it would be useful to take a look back on the semester and reflect on the assessment items and classes to see what I have learned and what skills I improved. By looking back to my  first blog entry  for the semester, regarding my course aims and expectations I can see that I was able to fulfil many of the tasks I had initially laid out for myself.  At the start of the course I believed I would be able to improve my web design skills by learning new things and I definitely think I achieved this. The workshops proved instrumental to this - working through examples to learn about AJAX calls and PHP global elements were just two examples that I specifically remember. Not only the workshops, the lectures helped me better myself in this area - Matt shared a great deal of knowledge on topics like decomposition and modularity. Whilst I may have not go...

Yesterday, the team and I engaged in our last piece of assessment together: the presentation of our web application 'On this day' in the form of a trade-show. Reflecting on the pitch I think the team did a really good job of mentioning all the key points of the web application that are specifically relevant to a trade show audience; we tried to keep away from the technical side and focused on the actual 'selling' of our site. We distributed brochures that summarised what we were talking about which were a huge help as the audience could follow along or read at their own pace throughout the presentation. I think as a team we could have improved upon the uniformity of our separate presentations. We didn't have a chance to go over the specifics of what we would discuss hence when we split up and talked to individual audience members separately I think each of us emphasised different points. This isn't necessarily something we did wrong as a group, however in a comp...

This week the team used our time to complete all the remaining components of Project Part C. Considering all the major functionalities of our website are up and running, I spent the majority of my time this week working on the report and the trade-show components of the assessment. As the semester progressed and our web application continued through its development phase, I felt as if I was not able to contribute to the site as much as I should have been, so I decided to step up and take leadership in completing the report section of Part C. Considering this, I allocated my time this week as follows: Sunday-Thursday: finishing my report sections Friday-Saturday: compiling and formatting the report Sunday-Monday: editing the report and running it by the group My report sections were focused on the first criteria point regarding the final product. I tried to keep the general scope and functionality sections as visual as I could by using dot points and various media (images, gr...

Due to the technical limitations of the Twitter API not allowing us to get tweets from every users from a single day, it was decided to use the alternative method of getting the tweets of a single user, sorting these by date, and repeating this process for several other users (specifically users tweeting about things that happened on a specific date) to compile a set of tweets that still relate to our web application's purpose. The single-user tweets method relies on the utilisation of a TwitterOAuth library and the example I followed along used a user named a library by user 'Abraham' (accessed and downloaded from GitHub ). I first retrieved my Twitter API key and secret from the developers page which were used to identify the specific application. These were defined as variables in index.php: Next, connection was established using these newly created variables using the Abraham Twitter library. Following this a call is made to get the tweets from a specified user a...

This week's workshop session was all about planning and preparing to develop our portfolio. A summary of the process I completed and notes I took during the session can be seen below: PHASE 1: Browsing portfolio's for inspiration Below I have included a list of design elements that I liked and could potentially use in my portfolio: Image navigation links: on hover the name of the link shows up and the image darkens -  Sagmeister & Walsh 's portfolio Single page scroll portfolio with links to jump down -  Melanie Daveid 's portfolio Header only shows up once scrolling down the page begins -  Studio Schurk 's site Simple animations on hover -  Mark Thomas 's portfolio Header that automatically changes as the page scrolls -  Jesse Willmon 's portfolio PHASE 2: Initial brainstorming The following have been constructed with a single page scroll type portfolio in mind. Site map Potential design layout Colour scheme I really like how b...