For this project, I primarily chose locations that I knew would set an idea for places I would want to go to in the future and establish a baseline for the hidden history of my own hometown. For what it’s worth, I already had aspirations to at least vacation in Ireland and Japan, but my target cities had much more to offer than the aesthetic I held them in my mind for. As for Philadelphia, if I want to design a fictional cityscape that makes sense, architecture is something I can set my sights on.

During this assignment, I learned that there are more nuances in everyday designs that serve as aesthetically pleasing examples. As it stands, designers prepare their subjects to match or complement the established environment or canvas for a more appropriate look.

It was easy to choose the locations I prepared for each stamp. It turns out that if you favor the subject you’re designing for, you’ll enjoy the process much more.

The notion that there is plenty of work to consider for each location and there is a degree of bending reality to fit a complementary or triadic color design really toyed with my brain – I’m not used to breaking the rules though I feel I’m getting much better at it.

I imagine that if I learned to push out of my comfort zone with the subjects I chose, I could choose more relevant, yet challenging locations to research and design.

There was a slight confusion that gave me the impression there was supposed to be four topics of interest for each location. A slight panic set in when I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was supposed to have 16 designs or four.

When I’m designing video games, there will be times where scenery or character position will matter when their designs need to complement each other and set each other apart. If I want to go for designing tile screenshots where there is limited space for design and contrast, I need to factor in my skills here.

Other students’ examples put my goal into perspective. It was difficult to imagine the process was simple and that the designs could be minimal yet effective, but seeing other students factor their imaginations in so simply let me know that it was fair for me.

With this project, I learned how to control the opacity of a layer and its various elements and position it so that it can be layered on top of the layer that I’m working on if the image turns out to be as simplistic as this. Most of the time, I work by positioning the original image under the layer I’m working on, but that honestly seems more problematic in this case.

I found it easy to use the stroke thicknesses to create different roads using different thicknesses of strokes, and different line styles.

The most difficult part of this project was designing the icons for the legend and the map itself since clicking on multiple objects and buttons was the only way I could remember how to operate the Live Paint tool.

I’m actually not certain of how my assignment could be improved. Perhaps if I chose a smaller or larger target image from Google Maps, I could’ve had a more accurate map or a more detailed one, respectively.

I think the assignment could be improved by adding a suggestion to use specific color palettes for the map. I want to stress the difficulty of creating adequate maps with color palettes that consist of colorblind-friendly triads since many colorblind people have difficulty differentiating colors.

I may apply the knowledge that I’ve gained here to create more intricate and/or fanciful maps. I’m a big fan of world-building and that’s especially the case when I’m writing stories or designing roleplaying game campaigns.

In creating this project, I was able to pick Premiere Pro up again and learn about the various animation effects that come with it. One such effect was the translation feature, which moved the video layers across the screen.

The easiest part about the project was creating markings that would help me to shorten video clips to accompany the music with perfect timing. There was only some lag after I created a mark, but the precision in placement was dead-on.

The most challenging part about the project was properly navigating Premiere Pro as I tried using the keys to type on a Text layer. It turns out that I had unintentionally made Mark In and Mark Out points on the same frame, giving me only one frame of material upon export. It’s not only that they were there in the first place, but that I didn’t know that until I looked up a video explaining the mistake.

I feel as if I could improve my submission by exploring a little bit further from my neighborhood and my house to find locations or sights that would make me feel content. Not everybody finds everything as becalming and spiritually-lifting, but not everybody is the same; I felt as if I needed to emphasize that more.

The assignment could be improved in the future through a more detailed explanation of Premiere Pro and its features. I was lucky because I’ve already used the software, and others like it, but I can imagine that nobody could come off without some difficulty.

Given my fascination with tracking video effects and properly-synthesized musical fades, I can use software – either Premiere Pro or something else – with this knowledge to have some semblance of what my limitations are, trim them out, and see the possibilities. I’m very happy when making films and I feel pretty encouraged to see what I can do.