Final Reflection
One of the things I noticed as this semester progressed is that as we completed more projects, I was more easily able to unify the theoretical concepts we discussed with the practical media assignments. As I went back to revisit my older work, then, it was no surprise that I was able to more clearly and consciously focus on what I wanted to do with each project and why I wanted to do it.
Even viewing later work like the Logo Design alongside earlier work such as the Photoshop movie poster demonstrates how much clearer I feel I've been with my designs. With the Photoshop poster in particular, I thought that while my (and my team's) first attempt was funny, it was a little aimless in terms of what we actually wanted to accomplish, which was a genre change. Instead of that genre change, however, we the poster turned into a comedy, which while valid was more to cover up our attempts at poor Photoshopping.
My revised attempt, the Drive poster, ended up being much more effective while also being a much subtler change. It ended up being one of my favorite revisions, as I felt good about being able to think of a concept and make minor changes that completely change the work. I think this is one of the main benefits of revision like this, is that making these small edits with new information or even just a new perspective can elevate a work more than it might seem.
I think this was definitely the case with my logo design. While my revision focused on making an entirely new icon, taking a second look at the original logo led me to adopt another small change, the stripes on the outside. When I actually thought of how I might use symbolism to communicate that each block was a "ticket," the idea of the stripes came naturally. It's these seemingly intuitive moments that I think make the revision process work so well.
It was also nice to work and revise with different technologies, including the sound design work we did earlier in the semester. For me, an important part of the sound revision process is simply having access to different tools than we do in class. Using my preferred tools such as Ableton over Audacity gives me better control of the sound, allowing me in this class to create the soundscape that I wasn't able to with the short time in class.
The soundscape in particular, I think, was a great example of having to consider modal limitations. I think one of the problems with my first soundscape is that although I imagined in my head what the sounds represented, I do not think I gave enough consideration to how they sounded in isolation. In the expanded soundscape, I tried to make the action more clear, sometimes at the expense of the ambiance I wanted. This approach worked better, I felt, because it kept the listener interested even if it wasn't as atmospheric.
Although the revision process was similar for my media projects, my web design revision process was much different from any of those. Specifically, the changes in my website came a step at a time when I needed to do so, rather than the holistic approach I took with the media revisions. For example, the colors that I used throughout were all meticulously chosen after about twenty different tries. From my very first writing I wanted yellow to be a focus, but I realized that I needed a second color for secondary page elements. When I found that most of my web pages were vertical and dense, the green color made sense. I first wanted to try to change the size of other headers, but with a vertical page sometimes the size difference isn't apparent enough to tell the difference between sections.
One of the more difficult aspects to unify across my different projects was consideration for an audience. I suppose the easy answer to who is my audience is "people like myself," but beyond that I often had trouble speculating who my projects would be for. I think the biggest success in this regard is my website, for which I had a very specific vision. I wanted it to be professional-looking to reflect my computer science background, as opposed to something overly artsy, but I also wanted to add some color and flair. In my opinion, the green, yellow, and muted gray/purple serve this purpose well enough.
Sometimes, though, I found that traditional revision strategies didn't work so well for me. This was apparent the most with my independent skills assignment. As I learned new and different things with the synthesizer, I found that trying to improve a beat that I had already made was a fool's errand, as I had already created the beat with the synthesizer I used in mind and changing it wouldn't necessarily improve the song for the better.
The strategy I took for revision in my synthesizer studies, then, was to create new beats that showcased what I learned. In this most recent third beat I made, for example, I wanted to demonstrate modulation techniques and really stretch synth notes out. I never gave myself the opportunity to do that in other songs, so instead of trying to shoehorn in a new melody, I created another beat to work on. This is much more work, obviously, but I felt it was the better approach. Had I been studying songwriting instead of synthesizers specifically, I may have felt better about modifying my existing songs, but as it was I didn't think it was my best strategy.
Looking over the course as a whole, I have definitely noticed growth in my design patterns. Although I knew much of the technology coming into the class, I had never thought as consciously about the different choices I made when I worked with them. This revision process has been so successful in my mind, not only because of my actual work (which I am proud of), but also because I felt I was able to really connect with the ideas and concepts we learned about. All in all, I had a ton of fun working on these projects, and I am super proud of the result. Thank you for viewing!