Final Year University Projects

During today's Professional Practices lecture, we were asked what we wanted to specialise in. After explaining that I was interested in Digital Design but more specifically in Web Design & Development, I was told along the lines of: "Web Design is Dead" Although extremely disheartening for a student just starting their journey to hear that their chosen career path is 'dead' or 'dying', I thought gathering some research into whether there was truth in this statement. Learning about others' points of view can be insightful and expand your knowledge further. Personally I chose this industry because designing has always interested me. My creative journey started at a young age when I simply enjoyed drawing. (Gattuso, n.d.). Once I reached secondary school,  this progressed into a GCSE in Fine Art and in ICT. Deciding to attend a STEM technical college, was where I put art to one side and studied Computer Science and Engineering. I really enjoyed both s...

Since September 9th, I have been participating in a Coding Kickstarter course with Code First Girls. This course is an introduction to Web Development. I decided to register because I haven’t practiced much coding while on placement. My internship mainly consisted of design and image manipulation tasks using Sketch and the Adobe Creative Suite, therefore since second year I have only minimally coded in my free time and in the summer. I thought this would be a good refresher course before returning to University as I am likely to use code in my degree project and I am mostly self-taught. This course consists of two projects. The first project is to create a portfolio to teach you the coding basics of HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and JavaScript. The second project is to aid team working skills whereby each team has to build a website on a topic of their choice using what they have learnt from the course. (Code First Girls, 2020). So far, I have actually really enjoyed these sessions. Initially I...

Following the activity, I listed possible starting points for my project: I doubt I will use 'What Ifs' as my starting point as they are very far-fetched in comparison to some of my other ideas from my brainstorm. Some of my favourite ideas from this exercise include:  Raising awareness of medical conditions such as IBS and low fodmap diets. Cooking Channel for students showing how to cook basic meals with basic ingredients. Student teaching platform for other students (however, I would have no idea where to begin with this idea) Student organisation mobile application. Where I would like to take my ideas as a Digital Media Designer: Areas of Digital Media that excite me: Website Design Website Front-End Development UX Design App Design Digital Design Games testing Once graduated, in the media industry I would like to work in either the: Web and Online Technologies Sector Television and radio Sector Projects that will demonstrate my Strengths and Talents include:  Projects wit...

"Think of an app that you have used recently that you found difficult or annoying to use." This activity focuses on how we can improve the user experience not just for ourselves but for the audience we are designing for. Recently Apple updated their operating system to IOS 14 which included a new feature in the form of an app named, 'Shortcuts'. This application is especially useful if you want to automate and add commands to other apps.  As an example, I added a new automation that when opening the notes app, I can run the open folder command which opens any notes assigned with a University tag. This can be useful when wanting to find all of your lecture notes quickly.   As the notes app already has this functionality, as tagged notes are placed into relevant folders, I have added further functionality to the shortcut to make it more customised. Now when opening the notes application, and notification asked whether I would like to use the shortcut. If accepted, the s...

During today's introductory lecture, we briefly touched on the Degree Project assignment which got me thinking more in-depth about my final major project. While on placement, there was a large amount of discussion among my peers about our return to University. Hearing other student's ideas resulted in me starting my own thought process into which type of platform or device(s) I wanted to focus on creating for.  Originally, I was considering building an app which would include user research, prototyping and a coded creation. Although this would be an interesting project, this isn't an area I have much knowledge about. I have previous experience creating app mock-ups using myBalsamiq and prototypes using Invision however I have never coded an app before let alone published one. This gap of knowledge may hinder the development of the application and result in an incomplete project. Therefore I'm leaning towards a web design and development project instead. As I have alread...