Day 12 – Adobe XD Editing
I had done the homework but not to the best of my ability. The homework was making a Home page for a picture that Dimitri had selected for the Hero. Had to choose colours / fonts/ sizes etc. The reason my homework wasn’t the best was due to the fact that my XD didn’t work as well as I had hoped it would and there are issues with the version that the guy installed in to my computer. But the best thing is that I have Windows 10 now and I am able to do 90% in XD and finish it off in the school when I come in early
Came in early as normal and got set up I am loving the fact that I can get to the school by MRT as it is so much easier than the way I had to do it before.
So, today we were going to make a start on our own portfolio page we had to go to a website called Behance.
From here we could down load free web pages (templates) and change them to be our own as practice on what we had learnt. Tool me ages to come up with one that I liked. And once I downloaded it, I started working on it. It started off easy and then got harder. It was here that actually thinking of your own content rather than copying someone else’s is much harder.
What do I want to put on it? How many pages? Where do I put this? What size should this be? What font looks best? What size should it be? And many more questions buzzing through my head. So, I just decided to keep it simple and look for inspiration from some other web designer’s pages this lead up to lunch.
So, as normal we went to the food court, but my goodness it was so busy on Monday everyone had the same Idea had a delicious Stewed pork and noodle soup and some fruit.
Back to the class we had to work on our profile page we did this till the end of the lesson. This was actually very difficult as we have to either copy someone’s web page profile or use it for inspiration and come up with our own content. Which seems easy and to some people I am sure they are great doing this.
But, as a novice to all of this this it’s hard to know what I will have done in the future and what to put in and what to leave out. I did my best and by the end of the lesson it looked quite good even though there wasn’t much on it. We were to do more to this for our homework but I wasn’t able to open it up on my notebook when at home so I couldn’t do anything. So, what I did I looked for a new one and found some great inspiration fonts and colours which I saved and will use when I get back in to the classroom.
Day 13 – Happy Cafe Part I
As per usual I got in nice and early and continued to work on my profile page until everyone came in. I got some help from one of the other students on parts that I couldn’t figure out myself then we all were ready to start again.
Todays lesson was all about Happy Café, we are going to reproduce the home page of Happy café by making everything the same including: Colours, Fonts, Pictures, Heroes, Navigation bar Contact details and all the information on the footer. This was going to be a big job. The most important thing that I forgot to mention is that everything and I mean EVERYTHING has to be correctly spaced to everything else on the page pixel by pixel.
So, we all got started on this and had to download the pictures from one of the sources on the Trello page. But this didn’t have all of them and we had to use some pictures of our own or try to find the picture on Unsplash.
This is an amazing resource for un registered pictures you can use without requiring permission.
We continued to do this up to lunch. Went to the usual and had one of my favourite Thai foods It is called Khao Sai. It come from Chaing Mai and is a noodle dish with chicken and some vegetables in a spicy soup it’ similar to Indian food.
After lunch we got back in to the classroom and Dimitri said: ” You know what to do!” and we did. So, for the rest of the afternoon we all worked on our individual Happy Café home pages. This was Amazing practice made so many mistakes and lots of Command Z but towards the end of the lesson I had about 40% done it was so complicated having to check the sizes of everything.
The text fonts, font sizes with everything we did. Also, if you are a novice like me when you change one thing it changes the sizes of everything. It is so frustrating! But it makes you remember to move everything the right way to make sure that you don’t create more work for yourself. At the end of this lesson I felt very proud of myself as what I had done looked the same as the real Happy Café web site.
Ok I understand that coping someone else’s web page is nowhere near the same as creating your own I am so impressed about my progress.
So far, I have gone so from knowing nothing to being able to reproduce half a page that not only looks like the original it has all the same fonts colours and sizing.
Day 14 – Happy Cafe Part II/Exporting Assets
Came in very early so I could get back on with the homework bit too early as WCB opens at 9am so I walked down to 7/11 for some breakfast. When I got back, they were open so I set up got some water and my cup of tea and ready to start the day. I worked on the parts of Happy Café’s web page that I could not do at home due to not having the right pictures. We reviewed the NOSCRAPS which is: Negative space, Overlap, Size, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity.
Then we went through some other things that were important to remember then Dimitri said “You know what you have to do”. Which we did that was to continue with the Happy café web page. So, I finished the Home page and started on the About page, this was a lot of fun and very useful because every time you make a mistake you try to not make the same mistake again in the future.
It never happens but you try. I have found that I am now doing things without having to think about how to do them, still making mistakes but know (most of the time) how to fix them. We did this up to lunch and we went to the food court It was much better on Tuesday and Wednesday not so many people. I decided to have Phad Thai which was amazing and only 50 Baht cooked fresh but had to wait about 10 mins which didn’t matter.
After lunch we continued with the Happy Café web page after a while Dimitri said he wanted to teach us about exporting things to the developer. He showed us how and what important things needed to be exported. So, we went through the pages we had done and set up the things to be exported and set them to Dimitri so he could check if we had done it right.
Also, Dimitri used what we had sent him and he found mistakes that needed changing. This looks so petty but is so important to make you do it right. Dimitri also brought his camera and took some amazing profile pictures that we can use on our portfolio page which I thought was very kind of him and he will send them to us later.
Then till the end of class we continued with the Happy Café web page. I Said good bye to Dimitri and looking forward to learning with him next month then I had to get home quickly as I had a something important to do and had to be home before 4pm. I just made it with 10 mins to spare. Phew!!
Day 15 – Introduction to Coding
Today was the first day with our new teacher his name is Cylis I had met him two times before and he was always very happy and bubbly and easy to talk to so that makes it easy to learn with him. We started off with a brain storm on the board and writing all of the different process that you have to do to make a web site such as: Persona, Wireframes, site map. The he kept asking what else? With some help we got the rest. Cylis then talked about what we would be learning with him and it sounded so complicated and stressful!
Then we played a game where we had 12 cards that had all the process from start to finish when making a web page and we had to put them in order. It was made easier with them being colour coded we were able to get them in the right order maybe 95%.
We discussed about which password saver was the best and safest. Here is where we start the WordPress. We opened a program called: Sublime.
Then we were shown some simple WordPress using these symbols <>< /> of first sight these were so confusing!!! However, Cylis has a great way of teaching. He gets you to see him do something then makes you do it in very simple steps and makes sure everyone has done it correctly before moving on to the next part.
This is going to be very important with WordPress as it is something completely new. At this point it was lunch time. And yes, I did have the same sandwich again It is called the Philly Steak Sandwich from Le Lapin.
It was as good as ever. Once we had finished, we went back to the classroom and started back on the WordPress.
We continued learning and watching a PowerPoint about what we had just learnt and it made a lot of sense. However, had we seen it before trying it ourselves I would have been completely lost but understood 99%. We learned all about how to make fonts show bold and about gaining Sematic Value so it is more successful when loading up to Google. We also learned about how to make bullet points and numbered sentences.
Next, we learned how to insert a picture and how not to do it. Finally, we learned how to add an anchor which means that you can move from one place to another by adding a hyperlink. If you add an internal one it will go to other pages on the web site if it is external it can go to another website. We learned how to make it open in the same tab or to open in a new tab. It was a very useful lesson and I hope that we will refresh what we did on Monday as I am sure I will have forgotten most after 3 days away from WCB.
[text-blocks id=”59324″]
