Mandy's DGMD Sketchbook

June 22nd: people card mock-ups for Margaret

Notes from our conversation in Crema:



#1: ALIENS!

(Margaret likes sci-fi.)

#2: PUPPY FRIEND!

(Margaret has a very cute dog.)



#3: DRANK-O-CLOCK!

(Margaret enjoys delicious cocktails, particularly those containing egg whites. So do I!)

#4: (SEA MONSTERS OR) DRAGONS IN YO FACE!

(Margaret likes sea monsters and dragons.)



#5: LISTS ARE AWESOME!

(Margaret enjoys making lists for all kinds of things. This, too, we share in common.)







Note: I can't figure out how to make the images go upright...

June 27th: people card rough cut + something digital that is also cool

I'm confused about some things with this people card situation (surprise, surprise!), but the link to my CodePen is right here.

And here is a cool thing that I find hilarious. This is a few years old, but when it first came out I watched it about a dozen times within a couple of days. Obviously it's funny how amused the narrator is by her own story, but I think the animator does a great job of highlighting the absurdity of the joke and of the narrator's intoxication (such as the vaudeville-esque music, the slight rippling of the art, and the slight confusion on the faces of the chips when the schoolyard pops up around them). Enjoy!

July 5th: attempting to talk meaningfully about my project

What is your project? Good question! Because my final career goals revolve around Instructional Design, I feel like some sort of educational product would make sense. What does that entail, though? One version might include a short instructional animation followed by a short multiple-choice quiz.

Another version might be a much simpler version of the pomes project--meaning, you click on an icon or photo or whatever, and a text box or an audio recording or similar would activate.

Would either of these be possible for a novice like me to create from scratch? Could I instead modify a template?

Who is its audience, and what do they value? I haven't determined by target audience, as you may have already guessed. Really it could be anyone who is looking to learn. At this point it seems likely that, assuming I do end up in ID, I will be working primarily with/for adult learners--though whether in professional development or continuing education or corporate training, I don't know (seems option #2 is most likely). Regardless, efficiency would be very valuable, as I envision targeting people with full-time jobs and families. They value the ability to stay engaged enough to process the material without having to expend excessive amounts of time and energy.

How will you know if it is successful? I have absolutely no idea how I'll know whether it's successful other than by the most basic requirements: aesthetically pleasing, it works, ya know... that sort of thing. I suppose I could test it on someone outside of the class and see if it's "successful" in anyone else's view but mine.

What is your plan for going about it? Another question I don't know the answer to! There's really no way for me to accomplish any of this without using a lot of animation, which seems a little crazy to me as a beginner. I may use Scratch again--really I'm not sure I have a choice. Even Scratch may not be sophisticated enough for the level of interactivity in mind, although I haven't messed around with it enough to really know for sure. I may be underestimating its power.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a way to scale this back to a more manageable coding level, probably mostly because I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, so there's not much to build on. BAH!!

July 10th: a few questions

What did you accomplish today? Not a whole lot, truth be told. My goals/interests/etc. are still fuzzy enough that I'm not sure what to do when I'm sitting in front of my computer. I've started messing around in Scratch and in tumblr, but I'm still a bit paralyzed.

What do you aim to have done by next session? Um... anything useful? ::womp womp::

In all seriousness, I really NEED to figure out what it is I'm trying to do here. It's tough because on one hand, as you all know, I do not have plans to code beyond this class, but on the other I do want to learn how to code a little something... so every time I think I've landed on the best approach, I change my mind.

What can we (the teaching team) do to help? Oof. I wish I didn't need a bunch of hand-holding, but I kinda feel like I might need a lot of hand-holding (this will surprise none of you, I'm sure). I had hoped I would be past that by now but the paralysis issue is SO REAL. I'm sorry!! :(

July 11th: a few questions, part deux

MONDAY: I felt a little more like I actually accomplished something today—hooray! I'm still reliant on Scratch, but I'm making peace with that. Maybe by the end of the course, I can write my own code from actual scratch (hah, I'm so clever).

WEDNESDAY: Sorry for the gap, here, I got sucked into the above referenced animation (that I still haven't finished) Monday night and last night. I'm getting closer to thinking of a structured-yet-undstructured version of learning to program for my project, similar to the 180 Days of Coding thing—I remembered over the weekend that I had done a drawing-a-day challenge (another thing I didn't finish) a few years ago:



I'm still sorting out exactly how to determine the individual goals associated with such a structure, and part of me is tempted to incorporate some of my own art, though of course I'm aware that that might be overly ambitious for this course. I might take a break from attempting to code tonight in order to brainstorm so that I have a better starting point from which to work at tomorrow's project night.

Progress(???)!

July 13th: YOU GUYS I MADE A THING ALL BY MYSELF

I am so proud of myself! So proud! (Can't figure out how to embed it, though, because the Scratch-provided code didn't work...) Check it out, yay!

July 26th: still really frustrated, lost, confused

I haven't been posting much here because I still, still!, feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. Probably because... I have no idea what I'm doing. I keep thinking I've figured something out, and then the thing doesn't work, and then I get frustrated, and then I have trouble thinking through where I went wrong, and then I get more frustrated, ad infinitum. And all that makes it hard to feel like I've accomplished anything or to set goals for the next session.

Which leads to the how-you-can-help piece: I've resisted asking for tons of one-on-one time or code snippets because I want to be able to do things on my own (and I don't see how having y'all walk me through every. single. thing. I'm trying to do will facilitate that), but then I'm not really able to figure things out, so I'm not really sure what to do here. Using Scratch seems a little silly for the simpler ideas I have in mind, but even the simple tasks are escaping me, so maybe I have to just swallow my pride so that I actually have something to show at the end of the term.

I'll be at project night tomorrow, but I may have to suck it up and ask for some help over the weekend, too. At least I like my drawings thus far?

July 30th: here are some (semi-rejected) mock-ups

I started out doing mock-ups for my drawing-a-day situation, but I found that they were not super helpful for me, at least not in this stage, where I still have no idea what I'm doing in general, and so the process of planning things out doesn't clarify anything for me too much. Nevertheless:





So now I'm just sort of going with my gut, not that that's gotten me very far. More updates soon...

July 31st: 30-Day Drawing Challenge, Days 15, 16, and 17

Day 15's prompt was "family portratit"—a concept that can be a little tricky depending on a lot of factors, in my case divorce and remarriage. I opted to include all my nuclear homies, including those with "step-" in front of their titles. I wanted to convey in a simple way that even complicated families have a lot of love in them. Hence, the portrait turning into a heart.

Day 16's prompt was "inspiration." I wasn't really sure what to do with this, and Alec and I ended up veering off into a very, um, irreverent? direction that simultaneously mocked both religion and inspirtational quote memes. Whoops. The original idea was much more complicated than what I ended up with, and I'm disappointed that I couldn't get the button to work the way I wanted it to (triggering an animation similar to what happens when the page loads). Oh well.

Day 17's prompt was "favorite plant." I figured the dogwood flower was the best choice, given that I have a tattoo of a dogwood branch, and it's the official flower of North Carolina (where I grew up). It's also a flower that's not too hard to find 'round here in New England, which is comforting. This was another one that didn't quite end up the way I wanted it to—I wanted it to spin from the center (like a pinwheel)—but I don't hate it.

I'm still working on things! Ack!

Here is my first stab at the "something new" prompt (Day 19). I've only very recently started doing yoga, so I wanted to do an animation that showed both my vulnerability as a newcomer and my not-always-totally-zen approach. You can see that I shake when you hover over me (accurate!), but I was trying to get the "NAMASTE, BITCHES" part to be invidisible inititally and then to appear and go flying across the screen. At one point I had lifted the code for a back-and-forth movement from something I found online, but I've removed that in favor of attempting to get the result that I really want... but, as you can see, I haven't gotten it to work yet. (Sigh.)

More working on things...

Day 20, "something orange," seemed obvious: my boyfriend's dog, Michi. I'm most proud of this drawing, but I wasn't sure what to do with it—maybe trigger an audio clip of the infamous "Shiba scream." Ultimately, though, I ran out of time.