Here it is 🙂

Making this website, like almost everything with coding, was fun but involved a lot of trouble shooting. There were a few cases where I made a seemingly small change in value (like the sizing of an element) that ended up having a major impact on the layout.  For example, I wanted to change the margins for the photos on my about page, but this ended up exceeding the height of the container. I resolved this by reducing the height of the footer and increasing the height of the navigator and content. 

I was also torn between adding containers to the style.css file and making a new file for different webpages, since I thought this would make it less cluttered. I decided to just add more to the existing style.css file so that I could styles from elements on other pages. This ended up being a good move, I think, because it would have become tedious to repeat many of the style features (like color, outline thickness, etc) that I wanted to keep consistent throughout the site. 

I also tried to figure out ways to do something without looking online first. One of my failed attempts  was make the link text change color when hovered over with the mouse by adding 

.profile-box:hover{
background-color: steelblue

a{
color: seashell;
font-family:sans-serif;

}

to the CSS file, but it seems that text related values cannot be added within a container. This is something I would like to keep looking into though, and also how to make an image a link in itself.  Even though I know relatively little about coding, I like trying to do it without initially looking for online sources because I find it is a good way to think about how the code is being read, and makes me retain better what does and does not work. 

Above are the photos on my about page with the links leading to external sites. I ended up using “.profile-box:hover” to make the background of the link change color rather than the link itself. 

I was also pleasantly surprised by how well our previous exercise in CSS prepared us to make a variety of layouts, because the shapes and sizes of elements can be so easily manipulated. I initially spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my aboutpage images were aligning in a column rather than a row, despite using flex-direction: row. It was especially puzzling because I wasn’t having that problem with items on the portfolio page, even though I was using the same properties (below). It turned out to be that I needed to add “float:right” although I’m still not sure why I was only having the problem with one page and not the other. 

In the end I was able to resolve the issues I ran into and create a simple but (I think) nice looking site. I’m excited to apply this in the future as well!

Open Sky

In this project a bit of my home sickness for Abu Dhabi came through. I started with the neon “open” sign and thought of it floating in an exaggerated night sky because of its brightness and blue-pink colors. I chose a sand dune as the foreground because in the desert, without any buildings or trees to fill the space, the sky makes an overwhelming impression. 

Below are the original images I used for the project. 

I combined the 3 images by layering them with the sky in the back, the dunes in the middle, and the open sign in front and used the magic wand tool to erase the open sign background and the blue sky of the dunes image. I also removed some of the desert background and

Marshal McLuhan makes the bold claim that, rather than the content of the media being the only message, the nature of the medium itself is inherent to the meaning. I must admit I had a hard time making sense of his argument at first, but it became clearer to me when he framed it as the following: “A message, it seemed, was the content as people used to ask what a painting is about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, or a house or a dress.” This illustrated to me that we assume an intention in every item we encounter. A dress or house we assume the intention of functionality and to some extent aesthetics, however we don’t normally look for life advice or political discourse in these items. In some media, however, we assume the medium itself to be only a vessel of a deeper message– one where we do look for life advice or political discourse — and we disregard the active role that the medium plays in shaping our life individually and that of society. That being said, McLuhan goes on to argue that the medium cannot be excused from the havoc it wreaks. Contrary to Sarnoff’s statement (and a widely shared sentiment) it does not suffice to call a medium “neither good nor bad” because the medium does influence and enable the way in which it is used. This part of McLuhan’s argument is less persuasive to me because I fail to see any advantage in condemning every item that could theoretically be used for bad purposes. There are some items that are necessarily labeled as dangerous and therefore controlled, however the majority of things must be allowed and we must trust the users’ intentions or we would be left with nothing.