Criticism = Better Projects

When you think of critique or criticism you might squint your eyes, wrinkle your nose, and stick your nose in the air. These two words often come with a lot of negative feelings attached to them and people usually try to stay as far away from them as possible. Others feelings get hurt if they take a comment too personally or literally. If you're the one giving the criticism, they might think that you're just trying to show you know more than they do.  But I have found that criticism is one of the most important elements to designing.

Without criticism, how would you know if you were doing something wrong? Or if you accidentally misspelled a word or something was out of alignment? Some people might ask how they give and take criticism without taking it personally. I have a solution for this common problem.

When giving criticism, make sure you are critiquing the work and not the person. Give them helpful tips of what they can improve on, but also point out what did work. When receiving criticism, make sure you know that people are criticizing your work to help you improve. They're not trying to be rude and inconsiderate. I have found through my own experience that if you follow these guidelines, you'll be able to improve your projects and learn how to help other do the same in a tactful, non-harmful way.

A felony for using a free WiFi Connection

In my media law class, we discussed the rights of intrustion and appropriation. It's was pretty boring until my professor brought up this article about a man who was almost convicted of a felony for using a free WiFi signal at a local coffee shop in Michigan. He used the WiFi signal from his car on his lunch break and a cop came to ask him what he was doing and the man in the car freely admitted that he was using the WiFi to surf the internet and check his email.

It's intimidating to think that for using a WiFi connection you could be convicted of a felony. The sad part about this is that I use a free WiFi to connect to the internet. This just goes to show that with all the new technology coming out much of it is free, but we should all be careful as to if what we use that is "free" is really so. There are laws that come with all of these new technologies and just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's free.

advertising group projects

I have worked in group projects many times before and most of the time I have been pretty fortunate to be have people in my group who were all willing to pitch in. This last week, however, was a bit of a shock for me. In my advertising class we were divided into groups of two to create a billboard ad. One person who wanted to do the design portion of the ad and one person who wanted to do the marketing portion and write the ad plan for the billboard ad. I chose to do the design portion because that's what I really prefer to do. I was paired up with a girl who ended up being very difficult to work with.

After our groups were decided she told me she didn't know how to write an advertising plan and that she wanted to do the design. We debated about this for a while, but I finally decided we weren't going to be able to proceed with the ad unless one of us gave in. I said I would do the ad plan and she could do the design. Sadly, the day before the ad was due, she informed me that she didn't know how to use any design programs to create the design of the ad; therefore, I ended up pulling an all-nighter to complete the ad design and ad plan.

I was extremely frustrated at first, but I realized that I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this experience. This is how it will be in the real world. People's personalities don't change from being unreliable to reliable once they step out into the real world. I know I'll probably have to deal with unreliable people in the workplace, no matter where I find a position. People will always be people and I'll just have to learn how to get along with them.

designing: not as easy as it looks

Over the past week I have had a pleathora of comments about how I have the easiest major. People seem to be under the impression that when you design something it just comes to you in a wave of creativity, you quickly put some text and a photo on a poster, and boom it's created and finished. Anyone out there who think's that designing is just where you create a bunch of fun stuff and there's no stress is very much mistaken. I have more homework that most of my senior friends. Designing and being creative in your design has to be thought out.

Tonight, my friend asked me to help her out creating a poster for the Talent Board. She is in charge of coordinating the marketing aspect for each individual Talent Association here at BYU - Idaho. She told me to just come and she already had the text and images ready and that it would take tops of a half hour. I knew better than that. I planned my schedule for an hour and a half to create this poster. I had three people telling me what to manipulate for a good hour and a half. I didn't mind it at all, but my friend was frustrated that I wasn't faster and creating the poster.

 I think that people have to understand that when you have the text and images, sometimes the images don't work as well as you thought they would. Sometimes the fonts don't quite match or don't accentuate the poster in the best way possible. Designing takes skill, practice, and I think most importantly patience. By manipulating and taking the time to test out new and different ideas, you will be able to be creative, professional, and learn a whole lot more from failure than success.

freelance designing

I have realized in the past few months that my major could potentially be very helpful if I would like to be a stay at home mom. There are so many opportunities to do freelance design work it's amazing. I have done some myself while going to school and holding a part time job. One thing that I have learned is that if you don't have time to do the freelance work on the side, don't. It's always difficult to say no becaue it's a great opportunity, but as I have demonstrated in the past three days of my life, staying up until 4:30 in the morning is just not the smartest idea.

One other important aspect of contracting freelance design work is that you should always have a contract. Either create your own or start with a template and tweak it to fit your circumstances. Always agree upon how much you will be paid whether it's per hour or a lump sum for the entire job. Also, estimate how long the job will take you and make sure you let the customer know. By doing this, the customer and you will know exactly what you agreed upon and terms will not change later after a job is completed.

There are obviously a lot of other items that could be placed into a freelance designing contract, but I believe that most of those are very circumstantial. I would suggest going to David Airey's webpage to see the contract that he has created for himself. He gives some great tips on contract work as well.

I have placed below my most recent freelance project.

the joys of printing projects

You have been working hard on a project and you think you have all the tweaks figured out. You have had numerous critiques, revisions, and your project seems to look perfect, on the screen. Then you press print on your computer mere hours before you are to present. You pick up the finished page and it doesn't look anything like the screen version. You then spend the next few hours trying to figure out how in the world to fix your printing error.

For some reason, there always seems to be printing problems, no matter how much you prepare for them. I have done many print media projects that didn't turn out to look anything like I pictured on a computer screen. This happened to me only last week. I had an advertising portfolio due on Wednesday. I had all the pages created saved in the correct format, etc. on Tuesday night. I thought all I had to do was to print. Unfortunately, my first print attempt turned disasterous and I ended up spending six hours of time fixing it. Six hours, of which, I was supposed to be working. Oops. I will never print the same day a project is due again and I would suggest to print the day before to anyone else. It just makes life so much easier.

HTML, XHTML, and CSS

I have recently realized that I have been using the wrong tutorials to create my website. I was under the impression, having never done very much with HTML coding, that I was to be using HTML coding and tutorials. Much to my dismay I have just discovered that HTML 4 switched to XHTML in the year 1998. I was in 5th grade then. Oops. This has solved many problems in validating my code. I thought it was me that was messing things up, but it was really because I was working with the wrong coding.

This is a valuable lesson. If you are just beginning building a website and learning about this world of coding, I would highly recommend searching for the newest, most widely accepted form of coding. I have been told from various professors that XHTML will soon be a thing of the past to be replaced with HTML 5 instead. It's just so interesting to me how fast this world is changing. Technology moves so quickly and if you better keep up with it, if you want to survive in this fast paced world.