ART 4110 Reflection.
Workshop One | Kristi-Lynn Jacovino
Favorite Features —
Some of my favorite features on the mobile app include alerts about classes, the notification feed, and the convenient network of classmates . Below is the link to my sell sheet.
Reflection —
I was part of the mobile app team and working in groups had its rewards and challenges. I have always liked working in a collaborative manner, and over the course of this workshop we learned to handle challenges we were faced with as a group. I know one of the hardest difficulties that the mobile team faced was getting our cloud documents to open without crashing. It was difficult to keep track of what different team members were referring to on documents when we were sometimes denied permission to view/ edit documents. However, working in a group was also extremely helpful because everyone came to class with different wireframe sketches and this was useful when we began to determine a starting point for our first draft. At the same time this was a challenge because with so many unique and different ideas, we needed to identify what would be key to making this a successful app. Personally, I felt that three different groups was quite easy to manage and work with, however I also feel that when we came together as a class, having your voice heard was difficult. This makes sense though because with more than a dozen people working on the app everyone has some input. For communicating we used Slack, Google Drive, and group chats which also allowed us to coordinated between groups. One thing I noticed while we were determining what kind of app we should develop was that everyone had different preferences and I feel some students needed to settle on an idea. At first I thought this would kill our motivation to create the best possible app but at the end of the workshop I feel that everyone surprised themselves with how well it all came together, myself included.
The process of creating an app is always developing, for example app stores are always releasing app updates. If I were to improve upon the development of our app I think we could benefit from a larger survey for the targeted demographic (college students). This could possibly ease the decision making processes throughout the brief. Additions to apps are always necessary, from our experience in this workshop I would imagine it is safe to say it is ever so rare to make an app 100% complete the first launch. And that is one thing we discovered as we began to refine our app as the workshop came to a close. Knowing when to stop making adjustments was another challenge we faced, but again I think that more time to focus on this brief could resolve this problem.
Workshop Two | Chris and Kathleen Sleboda
Three Alphabets —
Title Wall —
Exhibit Brochure Spreads—
Photos of Exhibit Brochure —
Rationale and Approach —
The idea behind my approach to curating this museum was a combination of previous curations and the work of Kitasono Katue. Moments of balance and complimentary counter parts of shapes resonated with me when viewing Katue’s plastic poetry work. I thought selecting a typeface with thin delicate serifs and heavier line weight would reflect these moments seen in his work. The color palette was inspired by traditional Japanese colors in addition to common colors seen in his work. Kitasono designed the covers of Vou, an avant-garde magazine that showcased different work, and common design themes of these covers included balance, space, and color. The title wall is red which was pulled from one of the bold Vou covers. The majority of Kitasono’s work was black and white, making the title wall and accent colors an important decision.
Workshop Three | Daphne Geismar
Concept Sentence —
“This text is about new beginnings from a perspective other than myself.”
Reflection —
I had a great experience during this workshop with Daphne Geismar. The brief called for us to select to bodies of text, I selected a body of text from a journal my parents wrote in and a series of poems from the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. One challenge that I faced was handling the different lengths of text. Some journal entries were a full spread while others were one sentence. It was difficult to find a balance between the long and short entries but I then realized that is the nature of journals, so it felt appropriate to have these spreads back to back in the book (see spreads below).
Front Cover —
Four Spreads —
