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This semester, communication study expand the area of studying. We do not only have the core class and the lecture, but also three other streams - Future, Craft and Strategy, which prepared us a better route for the further study.

The whole semester 2 were around the topic of “Food”, all the students prepared a big event altogether in the week 13. To be honest, I didn’t understand the topic at all at first, I had no idea either with the food project or the class model we had for both Monday class and Friday soap kitchen class. I was also quite unsure with the thing that we are doing for both parts at the beginning. But as Andy explained more and showing more case studies to us, I started to realise what we are doing and even got some inspirations.

Our group is doing the digital narrative, we had quite a few gap weeks in between because we supposed to collect people’s documents so we had to wait before started our website. However, we did not just stay there and look people around, we were also busy working our other elements such as the template and the layouts. After the event, the most workload is based on our group, because we have to present a wonderful website that will make everyone happy. So we had several focus meetings after the class, decide and alternate the best choices for our website. I think the good part of the teamwork is that people in the group are always ready to help you when you get in trouble, and you can always ask them if you need help.

During the meetings, I also found that there are a lot of issues between us, but I can totally understand that. We are all different people with a different style of designing. It is great that people have different ideas because we will then have several plans to choose. However, if there are too many plans there, it will also make us hard to make decisions. I believed that these were all the beautiful things that we learned and gained from the teamwork.

We also had other three specialists this semester. My first specialist was strategy. To combine the design with the business strategy will obviously expand our pathway in the future. I think I still need to learn more and research more in this area to be able to understand the domain. Because so far, I think what I learned in the class was just the fur. I did the company brand - Pandora for this study, I could really see that how Pandora had the strong strategy in both their design part or business part.

The second specialist I had was future. That was the most confuse stream amount all the others. I wonder what future is. Is it the futurism? or futuristic… We are able to exchange our favourite song with the partner and make an artificial. My partner Shervin had pictured me a beautiful scene during our conversation, I had then made this picture into a dramatic artificial. I guess the future may be understand as imagination?

The last stream I had for the communication design specialist was craft. Making things and drawing something is always my best part for the semester. I always expect to have those classes before I had them. For my craft stream, I had the brief “you are what you eat”. It is confusing and difficult to understand, but since it is an open topic that you can create whatever you want for the project just related to food, I guess I can to do. I also relate my drawing into the social ethical problem - meat analogue and meat ethical.

So this is basically what I have got and what I had learnt for the semester. I expect what’s next for the next year, and I am always ready to take new challenges.

Luckily, there are still something that I could use from what I did for the group 14. But since the content we put in is minimized, so I still have to arrange everything. And then added other two group’s work.

This would probably our final meeting. So we really need to get everything done, not done but in order. Everyone knows what they are doing, so I think that wouldn’t be a problem :D can’t wait…

But we changed the idea a bit again because some of our group members find difficult to collect people’s work. So since we haven’t done the second part (groups), we decided to do the same way as the first part. That means after the presentation week 7, we will continue doing week 8, week 9 until week 13.

Again, I was a bit unhappy again because that means what I did overnight is useless again. But I think we were in a group,  what we do together is to make our website better. so I have to overturn again to make a new one.

The new way was far more relaxed than the original idea. We just need to include the groups who did work for that week. Here is the list that Vivian and Alexa arranged from each group showing which group has updates in which week.

So we just need to put corresponding content to the appropriate week. To do this way, we actually need to refresh our mind again, to restart knowing other groups which we are not familiar with, and collect things from them again. To be honest, I was a bit exhausted. That’s actually a big problem for us who had already done the separate page for groups.

I finished making Week 8 during the meeting.

I have arranged folder for the four groups I am in charged. Within the folder, there are the things that I had collected from group member’s Tumblr. 

For example Group 4. Not only the collection of images, but also the texts, descriptions they said in the Tumblr, which are all the important information we need for our website. (Don’t feel creepy that I had been watching, reading, reviewing your Tumblr for few weeks haha) As I mentioned before, to collect people’s work is really a large amount of work to do, so to well-organized files and folder will reduce the wasting time.

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I had spent the whole night to make only one group done. I tried to keep the style same as what we did before, but I kind of like the style that I created. I think it would be still interesting to look at if there are different styles, you will find they are made by different people. 

It is really not easy to do everything. I felt like if we get this website done, it will be really like a gift for everyone. The gift that we were been working on for so many weeks.

The food event held as scheduled. Although the weather report said that it gonna rain at the day but the god was kind of kind that didn’t rain until the whole event finished. 

I went to the court early to help to set up the table for my groupmates. Because we need to collect people’s fingerprint and put them into our website. As we discussed early last week, we are going to just have people’s fingerprint on one several sheets of blank paper and edit afterward.

Table!!! ✅

Poster ✅

Once we got the table, I asked Suwii to type some words on the paper for people to know what we are doing. Suwii ran to the Building 9 to get them printed and run back. We then stick them with the blue tag around the table.

More and more people come to finish their fingerprint. It looks great! We encouraged people to do as more creative as they can. So before the event actually started, our group members did some interesting examples for them to take reference…………..We finally got Andy to do his fingerprint for us!!!

Considered people may need to wipe away the ink from their finger, I bought the moisture tissue before to solve this problem. We also had a garbage bag hanging there to throw away the wasted tissue and rubbish.

Anyway, big thank to everyone who gets this event work! 

PS: Another surprise seeing my recipe in the book from the recipe group :D

Week 13 - 10.19 Final Focus Meeting 2

At the beginning of the meeting, Lucy brought us a completely different website from what we did the last meeting. I was a bit sad because that means what I did for the last two nights will be just no used. But after I review the new website, I found it was far better than our last website. More fancy, more interesting, and more narrative.

The whole structure has been changed as well. So instead of each field distributed in different pages, this version is basically aligned all in one page and divided by each week. So each week we gonna not only have the case studies, what we up to, but also our group’s contribution to the whole event.

This is the original structure layout.

This is the new layout.

The good thing about our new look is like Lucy had already added widgets to it, so everytime we just copy and paste the widget. Another thing looks better was the colour. We wanted that the whole page designed in Black and white and greys. Some groups members were not so happy with that. But this time, yellow comes in, which really bright up the whole website. Yellow represented happy and hungry, it is a really suitable colour for the design.

Each week we will introduce some of the groups we remembered and also introduce the groups we were in charged which really pops up in our mind. And of course, our group’s activity is essential as well.

We did week 3, 4, 5 and 6 together with the same style as Lucy. I guess it was a productive day for all of us.

At the end of the day, I got the copy of the new website from Lucy and it is time for the rest of us to edit the website.

After the meeting, I went back home and started to design my bits of the website - Case Studies. There are 7 case Studies in total this semester. I am going to do the first four case studies plus a small home page for the case study, and Su is going to do the rest 4 case studies.

I went back to the home and did a few layout sketch for the case study according to one of the digital narrative website - The Grand Budapest Hotel. The website itself is like a book for people to read. Each text and images you can click to enlarge and close with the cross icon.

With a little bit of background research, I started to add more pages to the structure. 

The keep the case study pages in the same style, I told Su try to not exceed 700, so it will have a harmony. 

Some of the pages I did…

The website has some of the points that I really cared about, so I record them down. I felt like some of the part if it’s not too difficult to do, I can just edit it. The website has a background music which is really creepy, but it suitable for the theme of the website. Also, the sound effect, when you flip over the page, it gives you the sound of flipping the book. When you jump from one page to another, it is not like you suddenly enter another page. It has a smooth transition between pages. I went to lynda.com and learn how to do that and download the widget.

Here are some websites that allow you to download free widgets you like. They also have the tutorial video for you to learn how to apply each widget. I found that really helpful, I think it will make our website more functional and beautiful.

The process at this point, I really need to collect every group’s work from their Tumblr or from themselves. For some of the groups that people didn’t do Tumblr for their SKO, I also emailed them, urging them to just send anything to me.

This is a huge challenge for me to collect people’s work from their Tumblr. Each group has Min. 2 people and Max. 6 people. Let’s take the average of 4, each one has at least 10 Tumblr posts. I have to go through one by one and read what they are writing because I have to know what they are doing. This job contains large amounts of work. And actually, it’s an unsure thing to do, because what if people don’t upload their posts frequently.

Anyway, these are what I have got so far.

I have to cover some part of the contents to protect people’s privacy.

Things we collected are divided into groups. Easy for us to arrange and pick what we need. The student in RMIT who has the link of sharing will be able to access the folder.

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Today’s meeting, we aimed to create a basic structure of the website, the home page, and decide who in gonna charge to each bit.

We set our document setting exactly the same as what we did in the intro to publication design class. With 5 columns - easy for us to keep the whole structure coherence.

We created the template as same as we discussed last time in the class, hoping this will work.

We wanna have a minimization of contents because obviously, we can’t have everything done. So for the home page, we have an event logo centered. On the left side of the page, there is a menu bar in the master page for all the other pages linking to each page.

We spend a lot of time to explore the template we should have. And so far I think it works. Sometimes I found difficult to work with a group. We have got 6 people in the group, everyone has different styles to create or design something. What our group did was to not vote down that person, but try to do what she talked before we decide which style we need to use. I think that’s the charming of collaborating working. And there are lots of group works in the future, so this is what I learned.

We also decided the point size and type font during the meeting. We found the logo is close to Helvetica, so be decide that our title and body texts keep in Helvetica. The title point is 25, all caps, and bold. The point of the body text is 14, regular. The basic tone of the website would be black and white and greys.

At the end of the day, Suwii sent the file to us for everyone to edit their bits. Suwii will do the inspiration/proposal part, Vivian is going to do the values, Alexa will do the “group map” design, Su and Me will do the case Studies. Lucy was absent for the meeting, she will be helping with Suwii with her inspiration/proposal.

To search template from the website this concept is unable to achieve, we didn’t give up. The template that Lucy searched from the internet actually gave us some ideas. We quickly sit down and arrange the ideas we got so far.

I didn’t have the draft we sketched so I did another one by my own.

The first idea is to have each field with a distinct medium. We would have one window with all the group’s images; one window with all the group’s videos; and one with inspirations; also the sketches, drawings, and texts… But this idea will turn out with we have lots and lots of images, but a lack of videos and other fields. ❌

The second idea was to divide into four area of the event - location, activate, communication and document. We will have groups classified to each field. For example, we have group 3,5,19,18 are doing communication. But this idea turns out that some groups may have both fields in what they are doing. For example the core group, they have all the fields in what they are doing. ❌

Our last idea was alone with the timeline. We start with doing inspirations(proposals), values, case studies…first. Because it is a digital narrative website, we wanted to let people, not only the students and core study teachers to know what our main project is, but also people outside of this projects for example year2, 3 students, and also other people who can access to this website to know what this website is about. So we start with introducing all those first and then divide into groups.

 We all thinking that the timeline idea was actually good as it closer to our narrative idea. We decided to combine the timeline idea with others. The first one is to combine with the four fields, and then divided into groups, but as I said some groups may have covered more than one field, this idea should be crossing over. ❎ 

The second combination is the timeline directly with the groups. So we will have one page with all the groups displayed and then each member can edit their group’s page. This seems like a fantastic idea so far. So we decided to meet again in the library to discuss it and started to edit our website. ✅

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At the beginning of the class, Andy discussed our final assignment with us, which made me even panic. That means we need to push ourself a little bit to get things done. 

Fingerprint decision

This was the last class we had for communication studio 1. It is been quite complex the feeling I had. On the one hand, I was glad that finally, I could see this project’s end, on the other hand, it also reminded me that there are lots of stuff I still need to do.

So this class we discussed fingerprint idea which wrote on our proposal as well. There were a lot of ideas between us, so it’s kind of hard to decide which one we should use at the end. All the ideas had its ads and disads.

Some people got the idea of fingerprint tree, we can either make our own tree or download the template from the website. The tree can be one huge tree or 24 small trees that distribute by each group. But that makes some of the groups difficult, that some groups only got 2 people, so it is gonna look lonely…?

Some people also got the idea of our food event logo - that we could have all the people doing their fingerprint on an A3/A2 sized paper with our big logo on it, but this way kind of difficult for us to put them into groups.

Some people also got the idea of having the fingerprint on a piece of lettuce. Since we are having fruit salad on the day, a lettuce would be suitable for the theme. But same, it would be too lonely for one lettuce only got 2 people’s fingerprint.

We then decided to start the idea from very basic. Why we couldn’t have people’s fingerprint individually on one sheet of blank paper, so we can basically cut them out or edit afterward. I was not that happy with this idea, since we already got a lot to do with our website, it obviously a huge work to do to edit the fingerprint which really takes time. But the decision is through the vote amount us, so I have to take this idea. ✅

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Walk-through the event

Andy pretended the seeds were the students, and lead us to walk through the event. I also took notes of some of the points we discussed in the class.

$5 - We were asked to spend max. $5 each to purchase the fruit we liked.

Tools - chopping board, container…

Drinks - drinking table

Wastes - Go back to victoria market.