Essay
For the digital image assignment, I chose to take a photo of my roommates in the backyard of our house. I love to love others, I’m a people person. I thrive off of my connections and interactions with people in my life that truly make me happy, which my roommates do. We lived together last year, randomly assigned, and have managed to become not only compatible roommates but also really good friends. This picture of my roommates and our backyard signifies the importance I put into creating strong, healthy relationships with others and the impact friends have on my happiness. To make this photo successful and utilizing notes from the lecture, I first wanted to capture it candidly. So while I did tell them to hang out in the backyard for a few minutes, I tried to get a natural interaction. Then, I implied the rule of thirds to make sure the main subjects of the photo (roommates) were in place to where the eyes naturally go. I chose to go with an ‘establishment’ type shot, as I needed to capture a majority of the backyard. In editing the photo afterward in Tezza and VSCO, I paid attention to make sure no part of the photo was overexposed as there was a lot of natural lighting at that time of day. In addition, I used a sharpen tool to make sure all elements of the photo were defined well.
In the video assignment, I wanted to do something with my best friend, Sandra, who I’ve been best friends with since kindergarten all the way until now. I had her say something about our friendship, since our friendship is one of the most important things in my life. The pictures at the end are just to show the progression of us throughout the years, with the revision of unlicensed background music included over the pictures. To make a successful video and per lecture tips, I utilized a horizontal position and the rule of thirds to put her where the eye is naturally drawn to. I also made sure to use natural lighting from our living room windows, and paid attention to the headspace and lead room. As for the camera angle, I made sure to position the camera at eye level to show our power levels being the same, as best friends.
I recently got promoted to run the Instagram/social media for my job, which is the clothing store Aerie/American Eagle at Fashion Valley Mall. This has become the biggest part of my life most recently, as there is a ton of planning, creativity and design that goes into creating content for a store, and then executing it in interactive ways for our associates and customers. Since I took over the position in the beginning of October, this assignment was a perfect way for me to detail the growth our Instagram has had in the past month as we’ve utilized new techniques for engagement. Like I’ve mentioned previously, anything to do with design has always fascinated me, so this assignment was extremely fun for me to be creative in executing the information. I included all elements an infographic needs to successfully tell the information, with a headline and byline, analyzed data with labels & using multiple chart formats, as well as short summaries to the relevance of each. In including different ‘blocks’ throughout the page, it makes it easy for the reader to follow the 1,2,3 step process, clearly seeing the number, title, description and chart for each step.
Questions
What is your digital self and how do the digital assignments represent this?
I’d like to think of my digital self as someone who is creative and loves everything to do with design; I tend to use bright colors in creative assignments because it brings me a sort of happiness to view the world I see in such color and dimension. With this, you can see bright colors all throughout my WordPress, with the title color blocks but also with my assignments. I tend to use filters on my photos and images firstly to make photos more vibrant, but also because I’m a perfectionist and cohesiveness is extremely important to me. Another element of my digital self is my connections to others – my mom always told me I was good at making friends when I was little, my best friend always tells me I have a big heart and her favorite thing about me is how much I care for others. So you can see this in my assignments – my digital image was of my roommates and my video assignment was of my best friend. I love my new position at my job because of how immersed I am in social media, which was the significance behind my infographic based on my store’s Instagram insights.
How has this class helped you have a better understanding of digital media principles and design?
This class has helped me understand digital media principles more than I ever thought it would. Going into this class, I knew I loved design – I love interior design, fashion design, designing flyers for my job, etc. But I was not educated at all on actual design principles that would make an image or video or infographic successful. I’ve already taken some of the information I learned during the infographic lesson into the flyers and promotional posters I make for my store as well as digital image principles that I’ve incorporated into the photos I post on the Instagram, so that was an amazing coincidence to have gotten this job and been able to use my educational knowledge. I took a graphic design class in high school, so I learned about things like fixing exposure and contrast and how to apply the rule of thirds. But it was a nice refresh to see the same material I’d learned before plus more.
What digital media principles and design resonated with you the most? Why?
The structural modularity principle probably resonated with me the most because its the one I can use the most in my current job. I pretty much use Canva to make all flyers and posters and oftentimes use their pre-existing templates that I tweak to fit the event theme. The ability to compress or digitize an image is also useful when posting different criteria – if I wanted to post on the story I would use a full size poster format on Canva, but if I were posting it on the grid as well I could change it to the Instagram post format.
Tell me about your experience in creating your digital image, video/audio file and infographic?
I had a pretty positive experience with all of my assignments. For the digital image, I had more of a vision in editing it with cool graphics but I couldn’t really get my concept to work. But in the end, I appreciate the simplicity of the image and it really gives me a sense of peace. I had a pretty decent time doing my video project, since it was super easy to work with my bestfriend and talk about our friendship. It was probably my least favorite in how it came out just because I have little to no video experience so I didn’t have much creativity with it. The infographic was my favorite to create because it was utilizing things I was the most familiar with, like making posters on Canva like I do for my job.
What digital tools and applications did you use to make your digital assignments and why did you choose them?
For the digital image assignment, I first used my iPhone camera because it works just as well as a professional camera, and was the only one I had anyways. I used both Tezza and VSCO to edit the pictures afterward. For the video assignment, I used my iPhone camera, out of convenience once again, to record and used iMovie to put it together – I’m not too familiar with video editing so iMovie was the only one I was semi-comfortable with. For my infographic assignment, I used a template on Canva and adjusted the layout and design.
Describe what were some of the challenging moments of the digital assignments and why?
I can’t think of a specific moment that was actually challenging, but one hardship I did have was perfecting the lighting in my digital image since I was working with natural lighting, so it was a little difficult to balance the exposure, contrast, etc. Another challenge I had was putting together my video assignment, since I’m not too familiar with iMovie and was having trouble with creating cohesive transitions.
Describe what were some of the most enjoyable moments in working on the digital assignments and why?
I honestly had so much fun doing all the assignments in this class because I liked that they were based on something important to me. The digital assignment was so fun because I knew I wanted to take a picture of my roommates, but trying to think of how to ‘set up’ the image in a way that was natural, but still showed their personalities and meaningfulness, was exciting. For the video assignment, I loved that I got to interview my best friend and reflect on our friendship throughout the years – that assignment probably meant the most to me. I liked my concept for the infographic the most because it had a more professional relation and really got me thinking about future careers that I’d be interested in in the media world.
Nicole Checchi -JMS 315 