So far this week has been a much needed review for me. I have a little bit of prior experience in html and css from a previous class. The shortcuts that were mentioned during class were very helpful and will hopefully make my life easier when coding! To recap this week, some big things we learned were how to:
This week we learned about how to link several HTML pages together using the a tag like this This can be useful for when I am making a website and want it to have interactive buttons with several pages. I am excited about the Hypertext exercise and am still thinking about how i want to stucture it. Right now I'm making it an "About Me" page that will go into two of my hobbies and my major. I'm still thinking about how I can make the pages seem more fun to go through. The examples shown for this exercise really helped me start to figure out how I want to structure this assignment. Although it say no CSS right now, I'm thinking I might add CSS later so for my portfolio. I'm excited to be learning more about HTML and CSS since many of the internships I'm looking into right now prefer candiates with some HTML and CSS knowledge. The Five Variations exercise also looks intersting. I especially enjoyed Theresa Castellucci's site that showcased this exercise. I'm excited to start using more CSS for ths exercise. Something that I was struggling with last week was being able to change the font to the ones I picked out. I originally had two specific font picked out and then had the backup as sans serif. However, when I opened it in the live server it automattically defaulted to the sans serif typface. Im wondering what I can do to make the brower show my picked out fonts, or if the live server is just unable to show speacial fonts. Overall, this week was a mix of refresher and learning something new! I am very excited to see where the next week leads me.
This week we went over excecise 1 & 2 in class. After going over the excersies I am inspired to explore more things i can do with CSS. I also think I would like to go back and add CSS to my excerise 1. The other thing I wanted to do was create was a story that used a tags. I saw a couple people did click and point stories which inspired me. Im taking a game design class right now too and think that I could combine the conent im learning in my game design class with the exercise 1. Another class that I'm yaking right now is a Collab deisng class with all three deisng majors (Visual Communication, Interior, Industrial). This class is exploring the future of technology, how to try to predict what technology will succeed, and exploring how to use new technology. I'm hopeing that I can use the skills that I learn in this class to my collab class. The professor mentioned at the beggining of the clss that we couold have the opporitunity to explore areas on the internet/ new tech so I'm hoping that I will have the chance to use some HTML/CSS for one of the future projects. Some random things that are happening in my life is I'm starting to play Minecraft again. I got inspired by some cool builds that have popped up on my tiktok and whated to try playing again with the intent being to build a cool house or town. Lastly, I'm really excited about building a portfolio page. TYhis is somthing I have been wanting to do for awhile and I found many sites that I am inspired by. I hope to be able to build a site that is shows my aestheic and my html/css skills for my portfolio.
This week we presented our website designs and had studio time to get started on Project 1. I felt super inspired by everyone else's inspiration websites and their plans! I planned for mine to be more of a standard portfolio that I can show future employers. After seeing everyone else's ideas I'm thinking about keeping my original design and then having separate pages that the user could click on to try out different experiences. I want to create something that is interactive and makes the user want to click around. Here are some changes I'm thinking about:
This week we went over our websites and started learning p5.js. After looking at everyone's website I felt very inspired to create another website that is more expressive/ fun to interact with. I started mapping out an idea that is based on my bedroom wall decoration and Rusty Lake's Cube Escape games. My bedroom wall is decorated with an assortment of knick-knacks that I collected from events, travels, art, and anything else I've found interesting. I want my website to have a similar wall as its homepage, with some of the different objects leading to my weekly post or exercises.
The website would start with a blank home screen with an old brick house. The visitor would then click on the door and enter the living room, seeing the wall full of knick-knacks. The user could then explore the house, leading to the kitchen, a gallery wall, and the front where the visitor could exit. I want the website to incorporate interesting ways to navigate through scrolling, and incorporate some easter eggs that don't seem clickable until hovering over it. Overall, I want my new website to be much more fun to interact with and much less formal. My goal is to get it done before the end of the semester. I may start it and just incorperate the basic ideas so that I can use it for my class portfolio.
This week we learned about P5 JavaScript! This was super fun to experiment with. While working on exercise 4, I started playing around with loops and if: else statements. Currently, I have a lot of circles that grow inside one another, almost like an optical illusion which I thought was cool. For my math problem, I added circles that grow exponentially. I'm still playing around with this function and how I want it to work in my project. Right now it starts at the top left, and I'm trying to figure out how to make it start from the other corners too.
Another thing I'm still working on is getting my website to work on Git. I'm still unsure what's causing the problem. I might download the repository from Git and then try updating that file instead. I have not started my new fun website because I want to try to get my original website to work first.
Spring break is next week! I'm excited to have a break. I'm also going on a hiking trip to Colorado over break that I'm excited about. Right now I'm trying to get all my work done for the week and the Monday after break so that I can sleep when I get back lol.
This week I explored p5.js more. We learned about functions, parameters, and for/while loops. This was a bit harder for me to learn and I am still taking time to look at tutorials and other examples outside of class. The examples from the class were really helpful and I took a lot of time to go through the code a fully understand how ts working. On Monday we went through everyone's exercise 4. It was really fun to see what everyone else had created and gave me a better idea of what p5.js was capable of with limited knowledge. For the next exercise, I would like to expand upon exercise 4 and do repeating planets or stars.
I'm looking forward to updating my website. I hope to be able to add some cool javascript functions to it!
Some other thing happening right now is that I accepted a job at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory! I'm pretty excited about this opportunity and will get to travel to Maryland! This will be my first internship outside of OSU and will also be the first internship that will allow me to work with other graphic designers. In my past intern jobs, I've been the only graphic designer on a communications team. Im sure ill be able to learn a lot from the other graphic designers on APL's team. Lastly, I'm also working on my senior thesis ideas. I want to do something along the lines of safety and sustainability in the outdoors.
This week I tried working through more of Exercise 4. I needed to go back and refresh myself on what functions. parameters, and for/while loops I wanted to use. I knew I wanted the planets to be a function so that I could control their position and size. I also wanted to create small moons around the planets that changed in size according to their planet's size. After figuring out how to do this I started changing the planet's colors according to a color palette I picked out. I also made the moons change colors based on size.
After doing that I needed to spend time looking up for/while loops and tried to figure out what I could use one for and how to incorporate one into my project. I decided I wanted to add flashing stars ontop on my planets. I also wanted the stars to be random sizes when they were generated. When I first tried this the stars would randomly generate continuously on top of each other so that they would eventually fill the entire page. I fixed this problem by adding a black rectangle that would redraw every time the page reloaded. After this, I changed the opacity to leave traces of the moving stars.
Overall I'm pretty happy with how this project turned out and am excited to see how I can apply it to my website.
Some other thing that happened this week was I tried bouldering for the first time. This was a super fun experience that I hope I can continue during the summer!
This week we presented Exercise 5 to the class. Overall I was pretty happy with my outcome. I enjoyed how I explored the exercise goals and know that I could come back and easily reference and understand what I did. I got to see more possibilities through other people's work which was super exciting!
Right now I'm thinking about what exercise I want to come back to for the final project. I liked 5 and know that I could spend more time practicing it too, so I might go with that. I also really liked exercise 4 and know of some ways that I could implement that into my website. I think 4 and 5 go hand in hand so I could implement both into my final somehow.
Other things happening right now include the start of other final projects and getting ready for my internship in the summer. Everything seems to be moving much faster now that all my classes are starting to wrap up. The weather is also getting much nicer out so I'm trying to spend more time outside! I've recently set a goal to try new things before the year ends. I've tried climbing, specifically bouldering, which was super fun, and would love to go again. I've also tried rugby, which seems fun but I will probably not get super into it until next year since they are at the end of their season. Lastly, I've tried a cycling class, which was also super fun and a great alternative to running for me.
This week we continued to work on our final projects. I am struggling a lot with figuring out what I want to do and am now thinking I might start over on a new page. What I was trying to do was make a page that had 3D planets that were generated in random places, with random sizes, and a range of colors. I also wanted those planets to have their own randomly generated moons. In the background I wanted stars. I thought I was getting close to what I wanted, however, I realized I only wanted the planets to load once, therefore I put it in the setup function. However, after I put the planets in the setup function everything broke and the screen went white. Now I'm not sure what to do and am wanting to start over. The project is due in a week so I might have to scale down my original plans since I've been struggling for a while. I thought the things I was struggling with would be easy fixes however after I solve one problem another thing breaks and it's taken me too long at this point. I'm a little disappointed that my final is not going the way I planned, but I know that I'm still learning new things through my struggles. My next step right now is to start over and find a cool new thing to create. I've looked t some more examples on the p5.js site and am feeling inspired again. Maybe after I create my final I will go back and try to create my original idea.
This is the final week of class! This last project has been really hard for me and I think I just needed to focus more on experimenting and less on creating a perfect outcome. I was getting really frustrated but I decided to step back and look for other fun things I could do in javascript. I think instead of creating a perfect project, I'm going to use this last project to just experiment and have fun. I'll still try to design it to some point, but I think I'm gonna try to focus more on learning some new tools rather than trying to recreate past projects. I feel like I just needed to remind myself why I took this class, which was to learn something very new to me and have fun!
Right now finals are happening and it's going well right now. I have two classes done and three more to go. I'm also trying to figure out all the little details for my summer internship! Lots of things have been happening this past month so I'm trying to focus on the summer and having fun in Maryland!
For a past project in another class, I learned Blender and went through the Donut tutorial. I'm getting into the 3D realm which is super fun. I think it's interesting to see how 3D objects can be created in a browser using javascript.
Overall I think I've learned a lot from this class that I could use in the future! I previously took a class that used HTML/CSS, however, this class helped me really learn how to use HTML/CSS and Javascript. Getting some experience using Github was really great too!