Author: Kai Zheng

Link to CSS Portfolio

Styling with css is very tricky, but also very rewarding. My old portfolio now has some delicious-looking colors, a snazzy font, and an orderly layout.

It took me a few tries to understand that I should put my whereabouts and favorites into different divs, and then into a compound div to get the side by side flexbox layout that I wanted. But, thanks to the help of IMA fellow Tristan, I was able to get my webpage looking more structured. 

For the colors, fonts, I already preset that before I went to anyone for help, because that’s actually the fun part, and it’s not as tricky. For the colors of the font and background, I did something really special. I found an image of some nail polish from a blog post somewhere on the web, and I uploaded it into photoshop, so that I could color pick the colors on the nails and then use those numbers in my css. 

An additional component I really wanted for my webpage, is for the links to go to a new tab instead of taking the place of the current tab. I also learnt to add links to pages that I personally made within my webpage. Previously, I only linked to other website’s webpages, but now my whereabouts and favorites go to their own pages, albeit they’re the same information, just different in how they’re centered. 

Anyhow, I believe this was really fun to do, and I look forward to utilizing the skills I learned in the interactive comic project. 

At first glance, Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art” is eye-catching, alluring, and atypical of the books I normally pick up. Jumping into the first chapter, “Setting the record straight,” I find that McCloud has a clear motive, to unravel the mystery of comics so we can appreciate the form in all its complexity. Actually, one of his first points: “if people failed to understand comics, it was because they defined what comics could be too narrowly,” (3) really dispels the mainstream misconception that comics are categorically an inferior art or form of storytelling. I think that’s why he gets so detailed and strategic in defining comics, just so that we don’t adopt that narrowed pinhole view. Rather, we are introduced to the history of comics, going back to as early as 1519’s Pre-Columbian picture manuscript (10) as well as the modern-day comic that exhibits a combination of panels, cartooning, words and pictures. With this basic outline, we briefly feel secure in our knowledge of comics, but McCloud pulls a few abstract concepts when we cross into chapter two that really muddled my clarity. Fortunately, when I come across icons, I’m back to understanding, perhaps just by how easily recognizable they are and how familiar they feel. I even enjoy the part where you can imaginarily trace the word face by drawing vertical lines on page 46. In chapter three, when we understand closure in comic talk, it feels so satisfying to finally have a word to describe those moments when our minds piece together something complete from observed fragments. In chapters four and five, we get to the elements of comics: time and line, as they contribute to the originality of a comic. I know we didn’t have to read chapter five, but lines seemed interesting and I had some extra time. Overall, I am floored by the utility of this book; it will definitely be referenced again when we begin the individual project.

Link to flexbox portfolio

Process:
I started out with the example solution posted by my professor on google drive, but even though I understood partially that I had to use <div> and class to get my html page operating with css, I still needed way more help than that. So, I used this page: https://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_flexbox.asp to set up most of the code that I needed to do. Of course, I’ll still have to alter the code a bit to my style, such as font, color, and even the incorporation of some images of fireworks. However, the process was still very difficult and I will probably need to talk to a fellow or a learning assistant next week to help me comprehend more of the inner-workings of css. Although I got the page to look pretty this time, I know it will take me much longer to reach the type of clarity that allows for consistent craftsmanship. 

For some odd reason, as an adequate and frequent analogist, I interpreted the medium is the message through an image of medium being a certain spoon that feeds the content (food) to our face. However in this case, the spoon, the medium, that part is just as edible and dissolves into our mouths just as the food/content does. This is because, when we are consuming information, “content” nowadays, we aren’t just getting it without a medium to float it into our heads. Rather, unbeknownst to us, the content is in the form of print or speech, and we are swallowing it alongside the empty calories of the spoon.

My favorite line in this article: “For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups” (161). I find this line significant because the medium which we use to relay content matters, to the extent that the medium (or plural, media) can damage us, go on to make us antagonistic to each other. Knowing this makes me see how medium is an impactful tool which we must hold responsibly. Now, in the digital age, we cannot escape media and we still have to retain the same level of awareness as before or else we will pay for our mistakes.

Intro: 

For this photoshop collage, which I title: f.lwer child, by a mix of spontaneity and spelling error, is a mashup of three individual photos. They comprise of a bouquet of flowers, an ELLE magazine cover, and shark infested waters. 

Image sources: 

Inspiration:

While in class, I believe it was last Monday, we were show some examples of photoshopped images, and one of them had these portraits where the head and neck from collared shirts were cut off, replaced by flowers, starting from their green stems. 
This gave me the idea that I could do something of the same concept with a bouquet of flowers, so found the first image of beautiful flowers that have this illustrative property. Then, when I searched ELLE covers, looking for portraits of women and found the photo of this lady with her bouquet-like hair style, I knew that I could make this work. Only when I realized later that I had to incorporate a third image, did I think of the shark invested waters image for the background. 

Process:  

In photoshop, I used mostly the quick select, magic wand, healing, and clone stamp tools. The quick select and magic wand would let me pick up an oddly shaped amount of the same color, such as the hair, and replace it with another image, such as the bouquet. The healing brush helped me get rid of the text in  various places on the skin. The clone stamp helped me do the same same thing as the healing brush, except I used it where there was clothing -the red shirt, to a better effect that the healing brush could not attain. Finally, for the shark background, I used a clipping mask for that layer so that I could adjust its colors without directly affecting the rest of the image. 

Final Thoughts:

Not a half-bad job for one of my first photoshop collages. No lie, this wouldn’t be my first time working in photoshop, but it still gave me more opportunity to get better at photoshop and really use it to my advantage.