Gender x Gender

Gender x Gender is an interactive installation that presents the participant with a multiple choice quiz interface. Society’s binary understanding of gender and gender stereotypes affects the development of people’s identity. The options that are given in the quiz have both ends of the spectrums of male and female stereotypes, such as pink being the correct female’s favourite colour. The quiz results subtly criticize those that are not a perfect match to their gender stereotype. All participants are slowly transformed into the iconic gender role models (Barbie & Ken).

Female Results
You’re Perfect
The perfect combination of sexy and innocent. You don’t even have to play it up to get what you want.

You’re Sexy & You Know It
You’re confident and amazing. Glam it up with a dress and all your accessories. You can be perfect!

You’re Cute & Unique!
You know who you are and enjoy the things that make you different.

You’re adorable!
You fully embrace your uniqueness and know exactly what you want in any situation, no matter what anyone says.

Male Results
Almost there!
You’re almost perfect! Consider going outside a little more often and leaving your computer alone. A few more workouts and you’ll get all the ladies coming to you.

You’re Sexy & You Know It
You’re confident and amazing. Glam it up with a suit and women on your arms. You can be perfect!

You’re a ladies’ man, man’s man, man about town
You know your stuff and can charm your way through any situation.

You Workout!
You’ve got the body that could outmatch any brain and can get all the ladies, even without trying.

Progress: Slider

Working on the slider was difficult. Looking at many examples I ended up with a cropping div and a ul. jQuery causes it to scrollLeft, when people press prev and next. I wanted to get it to go to the next li, but no luck so far. It does have a functioning overflow-x scrollbar. It’s looking functional now. Slowly filling in content.

Source: Woork: Horizontal Scroll | Lighest Slider (380 bytes) | .scrollLeft | Next li

Progress: Lightbox

I got the fullscreen buttons to work, jQuery displays them in linked divs only on the desktop version. When clicked Lightbox 2 comes up, a gorgeous simple Lightbox. It works well and I like how it’s slowly starting to look. It should be done soon, but I want my descriptors to have a slider for all the images associated with that project.

Source: Lightbox 2

Networked Murder Mystery: Documentation

Progress: Gallery

 Working on the gallery was very difficult. I had decided that cropping the gallery would work great on the desktop because the gallery looked uniformed. Using CSS Globe – faux cropping, which consisted of divs to crop the images, which makes it look good. I added a fullscreen button as pressing on the image will show the text that goes with the image instead of enlarging the image.

The mobile version has a good functioning gallery that does not require all the jQuery to run. It shows the full image without cropping. I also added a navigation that appears at the top of every section to allow for control instead of a back button.

Sources: CSS Globe: Faux Cropping

Reading: Make Every Word Count

Making Every Word Count: Tips for Polishing and Tightening Copy by Steve Buttry

There is an importance on writing tight, keeping a reader’s attention and keeping the story moving. As with design, we also have to consider our audience, what information is useful or what the audience would be interested in. Organizing and conveying information can help clarify ideas. Is it better to link to external information, provide short side notes, or include it into the story? Also, writing down the key ideas (as you report) helps develop the focus earlier. Getting to the point is important and sometimes it’s better to write without notes, so that it flows better. Then edit and keep editing to help remove words that are unnecessary (write with active verbs to strengthen and shorten statements).

Good points that apply to all aspects of writing. There is a big difference in writing and I have been told that I do not write active enough. I need to get back to writing for my own sake, not for school. Hopefully with more time, I will be able to get back to creative writing and journaling.

Reading: On Getting Paid

Response to On Getting Paid by Jessica Hische

Going freelance is a difficult leap for many. The worry of not being able to make steady income or having to work with clients. What I find the most difficult is pricing. Like a contractor, you have to figure out the hours and how much you’re going to be paid. On my first freelance job, I definitely got paid 5 dollar an hour. Getting paid for licensing and rights-management and having a licensing limit makes so much sense.

Pricing should be based on the company you’re working for. If it’s a new start up company, maybe make a compremise for now & then later.

EDITORIAL ILLUSTRATION work (magazines and newspapers), you know that the rates are pretty standard across the board: $250-$500 for a spot illustration, $500-$750 for a half page, $1000-$1500 for a full page, $2000-$3000 for a full spread, $1500-$3500 for a cover.

Her advice that talent has value, no matter how up and coming you are never work for less than your value. No matter how cool. Keep the pricing standard. I used to make things for free as a practice, but no more.

I’ve been looking for a summer job, but many are unpaid internships with a possible chance of a job after the 4 months. The argument of experience vs. exposure comes to mind. To get new experience in a different field and not get isn’t very appealing, but there aren’t many paid internships.

I realized working with clients can be difficult and building relationships to get jobs is important, but guidelines need to be set in a contract, so that clients don’t come back with you every 5 min. for a change. I do also make logos and need to figure out how much to charge.

Getting Freelance Jobs for Designers:

Befriend other designers, so that they can refer jobs to designers. Having a portfolio website helps to get jobs as it can be a showcase of your abilities. Doing work for friends is a great place to start and then they start referring people to you.

I agree with everything she says, but the only problem is competing with others. There are so many graphic designers out there that you never know what to ask them for, so that they don’t just go to someone else.

Reading: 10 Steps to Better Blogging

10 Steps to Better Blogging by Dan Frommer

1. Don’t make up stuff, truth & evidence. (Similar to Googling before tweeting)

2. Write the site you want to read

3. Question everything!

4. Give credit, where credit is due

5. Give some context

6. Don’t be unfair

7. Check writing

8. Follow web design principles

9. Be unique, share other stories that you like

10. Try new things! Mix it up, blogs don’t just have to be text or essays

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His short and simple blog is an example of a good post. Easy to understand and useful for him. Similar to a restaurant, it needs to have a niche idea (or in the case ideas), but be efficient and function (I’ve been watching too many episodes of Kitchen Nightmare). I do enjoy blogging more as it is more informal, but running a blog is quite a lot of work. My focus is on school and work. Planning blog posts and writing them requires work. I am doing a 365 project and taking a photo a day is already proving to be difficult.

Progress: Responsive Design

I had to recode the css because UX Booth suggested to program for mobile and then have the media query load for desktop. This is to benefit mobile as it will not have to load all the extra media query css. It seemed to function better, but there was a lot of changes that had to be fixed.

I also found Matt Kersley’s tester for responsive design. Instead of dragging the window to different sizes, since jQuery doesn’t reload, it loads multiple version of the site on one page.

I’m working on the gallery, but there seems to be problems when it switches from mobile to desktop, so I’ll have to work on it.

Source: Matt Kersley: Responsive Design Testing | Smashing Magazine: Responsive | UX Booth: Mobile Responsive Design

Ryerson Webseries: Social Media

Unable to make the meeting, I watched the updates through email as to what needed to be done. The emphasis was social media: youtube, Facebook, and twitter. Looking at all of them, we haven’t quite set them up yet. I went onto rdigitalife’s youtube (which hasn’t been touched) and made sure to change the layout, format, logo, and created a playlist for our first topic. Taking advantage of the feature tab that youtube has. Trying to link it to other social media was difficult, since Facebook kept syncing to my own Facebook.

Since Facebook changed to timeline at the end of March, we still were missing a cover image. I was in class with Nadja and discussed creating a cover image that was related. We upload a shot from one of the interviews with Tom Rand. I installed involver.com to put youtube onto our page and suggested that we create a poll on the page. We made sure to take advantage of the about tab on the page, so that people could easily click to rdigitalife website.

Then made sure to add our profile picture onto google+, also had to add some information.