wavesoflife

I’ve been working on my non-fiction children’s book most of today and yesterday. So far, I have all of the text written and three illustrations done. There’s 12 illustrations total. I have to have this finished by 1 am Saturday (Sunday).

I’d appreciate it if anyone could take a look at it and let me know if there’s any typos or misspellings in the text.

I’ve been using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop for the illustrations and putting the book together in InDesign. I do the lines and the color in Illustrator and do some blurring, blending modes, and filters in Photoshop.

I’m finally finished with my final multimedia project. You can click on that if you want to see it. It’s the previous movies in an interface, with some changes. I spent from about 2 pm today working on it. It was really enjoyable though. I took my time and wasn’t stressed out like I usually am when it’s Saturday and I haven’t finished my homework.

I can finally say I know Flash now.

I don’t like grades, I’ve decided. I think all classes should be on a pass/fail basis.

I went from a 100% in Multimedia to a 92% after the second week’s assignment. My second week’s project was more complex than the first week’s, as it should have been, but apparently not complex enough. We were supposed to use masks, motion guides, and motion tweens. I did. He wants “more animation”. That’s fine, but I only have two “scenes” and one scene I can’t add animation to because it uses a mask. The mask only masks out what’s on the layer under it, so basically one scene has to be flat and you can’t animate a layer with more than one group of objects or symbols on it. Or so Flash told me when I tried even though I only had one symbol. *shrug*. As it was our first week learning animation, I don’t see why he expects us to use a ton. I had two. Plus he said my discussion board wasn’t “in detail” enough when it was about the same length and same amount of detail as my first week’s one, in which I got full points.

Which brings me to my point. I obviously completed both assignments to specifications. I don’t think it’s necessary to have to grade things more than that. Give comments and critiques on, yes. Sure, getting high grades is great and an ego boast. But when you get bad grades? I don’t know about you, but it usually doesn’t inspire me to work harder. It makes me feel like giving up or not care about the assignments. Which is kind of what is happening to me this week. I don’t have much enthusiasm for working on this week’s assignment. I put the same amount of work into the first and second week’s assignment and I got a worse grade on the second week’s. I probably worked more on the second week’s. At least the project was still above the class average…my discussion board grade was about 10 points below the class average. While I agree that it wasn’t as good as some of them, it was better or as good as most of the other ones. He mentioned going more in depth and including examples, but only one other person wrote a post like that. So I don’t understand why mine wasn’t closer to the class average. I don’t feel like asking why either. It just bothers me because getting a not-so-good grade can really mess with your self-confidence. And sometimes the instructor’s grading makes no sense…it’s like it was just that one week they were in a good mood and gave everyone good grades…and the next week they were in a bad mood. It does seem that when my grades are lower, everyone else’s is lower too (class average-wise).

All right. I had posted an entry here before about how I couldn’t get into the class today or how I hadn’t received the books for that class (class starts Sunday but we could access it today). Well, the reason I didn’t get any books? It’s the same book we used for Web Design. This is Advanced Web Design. The book we used before was a Dreamweaver MX book that taught you horrible web design practices. I’m really dissapointed. I wanted a book on actual designing for the web.

I’m dissapointed with the assignments as well. We’re supposed to use a table for the page layout (which we created in Photoshop and sliced up). Then later we create a layer-based version of that in Dreamweaver. Then we get to create roll-over navigation and a form. Next we insert Flash objects or multimedia into the page. Finally, we critique each others for the group project. One week, the discussion board topic is to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of frames and to find examples of both. Really, it’s not the ’90s anymore. No good site uses frames. At least they’re not making us use them (although I did love frames back in their day).

The website we have to design is for a ficticious earth-friendly gardening company called The Green Garden, based in Portland, Oregon. Much better than the travel agency site we had to design last time. I’ll just have to do the best job I can that fits with what the assignment says. Hearing Krissy’s experience with a technology-challenged client has made me realize that if I do get into web design, I may have to deal with people who wants things done in an “old-fashioned” (or even wrong) way.

My other complaint from the now-deleted entry was that my senior project class is now missing from my upcoming classes and is now listed in the completed classes, with no grade (I don’t take this class till March). My advisor is on vacation till the 2nd…if it’s not fixed on its own by then, I’ll have to email him about it. Not a big deal, but still an annoyance.