Emily Scherer

1. This project made me learn a lot about photoshop. I was a beginner before this project and had no clue how to use any of the tools. I struggled at the beginning but I learned so much and am able to say that I am comfortable with photoshop because I used to be scared of it. I learned how to get people and glares from windows out of my photos and make them look a lot sharper. This was so satisfying though because they are pictures that I genuinely enjoy and were ruined by people and stuff like that so I love that I am able to crop all that out and have better photos than before. 

2. What was easy was creating the lighting adjustment curves because you just had to play around with it and would always make your photos so much nicer and would give it a darker/sharp kind of lighting. All you had to do for the curve adjustment was make a slight S on the line and it would work well with every photo. 

3. What was challenging about the project was trying to get people and other things out of my photo by using the stamp tool and other tools while also trying to blend it in and make it seem natural and not out of place or where you could tell that it was photoshopped. And also the my portfolio with all the pictures and creating thumb drives for it was very confusing and didn’t know what I was doing until I was shown and then got the hang of it pretty well. 

4. How my submission could be improved is making sure the photo looks neat in some places because there were some spots where I used the stamp and lasso tool to cut people out and looks a little blurry and was a little noticeable. I tried my best to make it blend in and I feel like it worked pretty well, but could also be neater. 

5. How you could improve it for the future class could be to simplify it or find an easier way to replace your photos with our photos and to maybe have a little less photos because it can be a little overwhelming and confusing with all the files. 

6. I will apply what I learned from this project in future assignments because it has helped me with improving my skills with photoshop and will be comfortable using it for future projects. 

7. The videos in the project 1 slideshow helped me a lot to learn what I had to do in photoshop and how to make my picture look better. Without those I would have been really lost. 

Emily Scherer

https://www.figma.com/proto/MhQbAts9GuVn8HVm753Ota/ToDo-app-project?node-id=48%3A31&scaling=min-zoom&page-id=48%3A30&starting-point-node-id=48%3A31

1. I learned a lot about the prototype button and how that works to bring you to different pages of your app. I also learned how to be super organized with naming my frames and it made it a lot easier to know which frame I was working on. 
2. The easy thing was making the actual frames and creating the theme of the app where every frame has the same background and layout. 
3. What was challenging was keeping track of all the prototype lines and where they all go because it got really confusing looking at it. 
4. My submission could be improved by creating more tests on different parts of my app to make sure it works properly. 
5. You could improve the project for the next class by spending more time on maze in class and going over how it is supposed to be done. 
6. I will apply this to my future because this project really helped me learn a lot about Figma and about design and will help me when I have to design an advertisement or a website for my job. 
7. A reading that inspired me was danpetty.com because it showed the logos for companies and apps and shows how the logos don’t need to be so complex and that is what inspired me to make my logo and theme for the app pretty basic and simple. 

What I learned was the use of different shapes and how a simple shape like a circle could represent a spider. I realized that you don’t have to make a descriptive photo to show what you are talking about and can use some basic shapes and people still can understand what it represents. It also made me understand the gestalt layouts because I was able to make my own examples. 

What was easy for me was creating the shapes to match the rhymes because it wasn’t very hard to come up with a pattern and a gestalt layout to match the rhyme with just using basic shapes. Which was interesting because I thought that would be the hard part because of how we couldn’t make the pictures descriptive. 

What was challenging for me was making sure I wasn’t breaking any rules like the margins inconsistencies and what was called being a wimp and the rule of thirds. Also not always having things symmetrical but to make things off-center. I struggled with this and found that I did these things a lot and then had to go in and change it to make sure things aren’t breaking these rules. 

My submission could have been improved by making things bigger and taking up more space instead of having a lot of white space between things. 

You could improve this assignment for next class by saying that each box needed at least 2 gestalt layouts and the student would have to figure out which ones would work together to make a pattern that would represent their nursery rhyme. 

I will use my knowledge from this project to help me in future scenarios and jobs by being more prepared for the projects to come because I know a lot more now than I did at the start of this project. It will help me in future jobs because I will know how to make basic designs and have it represent a story or a song without having to give it too much detail, which is what I would do if I didn’t learn what I did while doing this project. 

I used the student examples and the readings to help me create my project and help me know what it is supposed to look like and see if I was on the right track. The website thoughtbot had a reading called “Using Gestalt Principles for Natural Interactions” by Carolann Bonner and it helped a lot because it gave me simple definitions of what the gestalt principles meant and how the shapes correlated with each other.