Reflections

Oooh, this is really late but I remembered the last not-serious suggestion I was going to make for the Unit 2 project: oil the hinges of that stupid white gate at the top of the stairs. It hurts to listen to it four times a week.

I've really enjoyed this class, and overall I'm definitely satisfied with the way my projects have turned out so far. I liked learning (and re-learning) how to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and even though they've given me some troubles before, it's been a pretty good experience. Of course, this class wasn't really about learning how to use those programs by themselves. Using them properly to create persuasive arguments wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. Take the layers aspect of multimedia values. Working with Photoshop forces you to consider layers. (Obviously, given the name of the textbook.) I've done some projects similar to the ones we did in class before, but I hadn't had to use Photoshop, and so layering was really more of an afterthought, if it even got a thought. Not so here. It's layers layers layers layers. Got a problem? Check the layer. Need to fix something? Make a new layer. Of course, this makes an image very tidy - just turn off any layers that are distracting and focus on, say, the image of a ring instead of an entire hand.

Dreamweaver defnitely helps with the try try and try again aka patience value. Maybe it was because I'm not familiar with the program, but I had a lot of what seemed like simple problems that ended up taking forever to solve - even if the solution was really simple. I'd try one solution and it would look okay, but still not right, so I'd try something else, which fixed that problem but caused a different problem, and so on. But that just made the final project even more satisfying. It's a really good feeling to pull up my own website and tell people, "Hey look what I made!"