I decided that I wanted to do a map of the big island of Hawai’i with suggestions on activities to do throughout the island. Below, you can see what the island looks like

And here is the final product:

What did you learn?

I learned a lot about typography, how to import fonts into Figma, and how to implement color schemes to fit into a specific style.

What was easy?

I found that color schemes were not too hard to come up with, because the style that I was attempting to replicate had a fairly strict color palette.

What was challenging?

Finding a theme for the project took me a long time. I spent multiple hours trying to figure out a theme that I wanted to do, and that I thought would be a unique challenge. After a long time, I came to the conclusion that I liked both old style Japanese stamp designs, and that I wanted to make something for the Pokemon regions. Conveniently, there are four Pokemon regions based on Japanese prefectures, so I designed them based on prefecture stamps.

How could your submission be improved?

Some of the lines and colors in the drawings are fairly rigid. With more time, I may have been able to make it a bit smoother and closer to the style I was intending to replicate.

How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?

I have no complaints with this assignment.

How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

All of the concepts used in this project will be helpful in future scenarios. With the typography, I learned a lot more about what fonts to use for what situations, and how to fill spaces well and color schemes are always useful for any project, because they change the entire mood of the piece.

How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

I found the adobe tutorial for how to use image trace in adobe illustrator to be useful in my project – https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/image-trace.html

The metaphor that I chose to use was “Books are windows to the soul.” This can be seen in the final product, shown below:

What did you learn?

I learned how to integrate multiple photos together in photoshop, and make it so that they look like they belong together through adjusting saturation, brightness, hue, and contrast. Additionally, I learned how to warp and skew images to make images which are differently aligned fit together along the same axis

What was easy?

I found navigating photoshop to be easy due to previous classes having used it.

What was challenging?

The hardest part was to create a set of multiple images that coexisted together without anything sticking out too much. This was accomplished by fine tuning visuals such as hue, or contrast, but required precise changes. Additionally, since images were on strange axis shapes, they were hard to align.

How could your submission be improved?

My submission could’ve been improved by using better source images, as they would’ve helped to have a better continuity in the scene.

How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?

I have few criticisms for this project, I was happy with the requirements and process.

How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

I can use the new skills that I have learned in future projects by now knowing how to adjust multiple images to match together in a scene.

How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

I used this video to learn a lot about the skew tool.

I wanted to create spot illustrations where the theme was video game entities. Furthermore, I wanted to keep a stylistic, squished, cartoonish, and cute look to the illustrations. The styles that I hoped to be able to replicate can be seen on this mood board, the outer images were broader styles that I had hoped to accomplish, and the inner images were closer to what would be possible to use for a video game. I aimed to combine the two:

The sketches for the illustrations looked like this:

And here are the final results:

What did you learn?

I learned a lot about color schemes and how to make seemingly small color palettes show large ranges of color.

What was easy?

I did not have many issues with choosing color palettes to use. I decided on one before starting, and did not change any of them after.

What was challenging?

I had used the pen tool for nearly everything besides the urban landscape. The pen tool is very tedious and time consuming, but rewarding for the result.

How could your submission be improved?

I was not overly excited about my urban landscape, I could have done more with shapes and shading, and an overall more interesting composition.

How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?

I have no issues with this assignment, I thought it was a good project, and did not run into any major problems when working on it.

How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

Color palette knowledge can transfer to almost anything based on design. Furthermore, I feel as if my skills with the pen tool have greatly improved, which will also be used in many future projects.

How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

I used this video https://youtu.be/wUXa6ZPG6Lw?si=6tBTXxZZlgIf1z9B to learn more about using the pen tool in Figma, which helped to start the project

Part 1: Photoshop Portrait

Part 2: Illustrator Portrait

Other Projects Related:

What did you learn?

I had learned more about Figma, especially in pen tool adjustments and the new updated layout. Furthermore, I had learned about how to use multi-select logic.

What was easy?

I went into this project having a large knowledge of Figma from previous classes, so the basics and navigating were no trouble.

What was challenging?

It was difficult to decide which Gestalt principles to use and how to implement them into the story. Furthermore, the primitive shapes and lack of color palette made it very hard to get the point across concisely without using very abstract ideas to tell the story.

How could your submission be improved?

My submission could be improved by having a better flow between each frame. There was a large variety of value between multiple frames that could have had better consistency.

How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?

People that had not used Figma yet would likely have issues getting into the swing of Figma, it is quite confusing if you pick it up with no prior knowledge. More time to learn Figma could be quite helpful for newer students to the class.

How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

I have developed further skills in Auto-layout, pen tool, importing, exporting, and layout setup in Figma. These skills can all be useful, as they can apply to most projects that require clean formatting.

How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

The slide shows greatly helped to learn the basics, besides that, websites such as Lyssna were useful, and others which similarly showed how to use and notice many Gestalt principles.

What did you learn?

I had learned more about Figma, especially in importing and editing videos. Additionally, I had learned how to make the background of videos transparent in Adobe After Effects. Finally, I had further expanded my knowledge of component importing, using UI kits .

What was easy?

The basics, such as creating the general layout, choosing a color palette, and basic component prototyping.

What was challenging?

Throughout the project, I had changed my project idea multiple times, and when I had finally chosen an idea, it fell through do to being too difficult to implement into Figma. Due to that, I needed to restart my project multiple times, causing me to be set back by hours. Other things, such as the component used for pausing and playing videos was very difficult to implement due to the fact that prototypes often cannot have multiple outcomes for one action.

How could your submission be improved?

Some parts of the website could have been continued. For example, the social page could have been more expansive, with the comments sending to a page to view the comments. Additionally, in the demo that was premade for the camera discovery, there could have been other examples with other videos and demonstrations of usage.

How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?

I had no major issues about this assignment and how it was done. The only thing that I had issues with that may have been better was if the AR requirement for the project was better described.

How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

The usage of UI Kits in future projects could prove to be very useful. They helped greatly with the usage of components, and keeping the app professional looking.

How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

The Wikipedia pages for each of the planets proved very useful in writing my own definition and fun fact for each of the planets that I had included when interacting with the Cosmic Map page.

Webpage Link: https://www3.canisius.edu/~donner5/DMA217/PR2/

What did you learn?

I had learned more about web development, such as embedding videos into webpages and Figma, using containers and divs for alignment, how to implement transparent backgrounds using CSS, further creation of navbars in webpages and Figma, and auto-layout usage in Figma.

What was easy?

As I had gone into this project with previous knowledge in Web Development, the HTML and CSS coding was quite easy to do the basics for.

What was challenging?

I had made this much more difficult than it needed to be by attempting to add more complicated elements to the website such as videos, containers, div elements, dynamic and transparent backgrounds, and other complicated CSS.

How could your submission be improved?

I’m still not sure if the blog link was supposed to link to here or the website, if it were the case that I should have made a separate blog page in the website, I could have done that. Along with that, further implementation of CSS and general formatting and personalization could have gone a lot further and looked better.

How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?

Further time could have been given to do more of the website. The project was due before the professor went over the code for the website’s about page or blog page. Along with that, the actual instructions and guidelines for some of the webpages were quite vague and hard to understand what should be implemented.

How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

The auto layout tool in Figma will prove to be considerably useful in future projects. Along with this, I can now use this webpage’s elements such as the navbar and backgrounds as a reference for future webpages.

How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

I had used multiple sections of w3schools‘ HTML and CSS tutorials to develop the code for this project.

What did you learn?

I had not used Figma before this project, so I had not known anything about the software at the time. Due to this, I had to learn everything from scratch for this project

What was easy?

After learning the basics of Figma, I did not have many issues with using styles, placing components, and navigating the overall layout that Figma uses.

What was challenging?

Creating a logo, choosing a font, learning COMDMA, and initially learning prototyping was challenging for me.

How could your submission be improved?

The two things that I would have liked to do to improve the project would be to implement variants for my navigation bar, and to create a secondary set of frames for a different, “light mode” color palette.

How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?

The assignment seemed to be paced as if the student was expected to have a fair amount of preexisting Figma knowledge. Due to that, the start was quite bumpy for me. If there was one more day to go over navigating Figma’s layout, that would have been very helpful for me

How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?

At the start of this assignment, I had not used the assets menu. Due to that, almost everything I had done at the start needed to be redone with assets. In future assignments, I should not run into that issue again.

How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?

Looking through the form design ideas on medium.muz.li was helpful for gathering inspiration for my textboxes.