Author: kct285

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~kct285/Portfolio_Kimmy/

For the front page of my webpage, I decided on a landscape picture that I took in my recent trip to Seoul, Korea. I chose this picture because I really enjoyed the colours and the ‘rustic’ feel of the city with its traditional houses and roofs. I went for this picture as a background instead of just a plain colour or picture/gif that I would’ve gotten off the internet as it conveys more significance to me and my own experiences. For my font choice, I went with this simple monospace font from google fonts for a more minimalistic look.

I decided to go with a very simple navigation bar: a white background with my “about”, “projects” and “contact” turning an orange colour, to match the background picture, when the mouse is being hovered; I also utilised the fixed position so even when the user scrolls down, the navigation is still seen. Initially, I wanted to have a more complex effect on my navigation bar. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my code so just settled with the simple colour change when the mouse hovered. I also included “scroll-behavior: smooth” for a better flow to the different parts of my portfolio website for when my navigation buttons were clicked.

For my “about” section, I have a small description of my hobbies, background and interests. I decided to make my about-picture in a rounded frame to mimic the way many social medias show profile icons (EG instagram) and I was happy to know that this was possible using only one line of code on CSS.

Perhaps the most difficult and time consuming section for me is the “projects” section. I knew exactly what I wanted this section to look like however, executing it was much harder than initially thought. After getting past some confusions with flex boxes, there was another problem of figuring out how to hover text over an image. After a lot of trial and error, I realised I didn’t group the images and text individually and had some errors with CSS properties like positioning and div classes.

Fortunately, my “contact” section was relatively straightforward in which I used simple icons as buttons to lead to my social medias, email and linkedin. Initially, there was 2 tiny annoying lines that showed up next to my icons but after more trial and errors, this was fixed with setting my text decoration to none. 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed making my own portfolio website despite it being a painstakingly tedious and brain-crunching process. I felt extremely satisfied especially when I finally fix problems with my code and in the end, I’m happy with the end result.

For my photoshop image, I decided to do a reimagined or alternative book cover for a book I recently read over the winter break. I got inspiration from the original book cover – using the same colour palette. 

My three images I used is the one of the old man, the silhouette of the cat and the texture in the back (blended with the blue background). I decided to contrast the real image of the old man, removing the background, against hand-drawn squiggles and the cat silhouette to reflect the book character’s, Ove, unstable mental state in the beginning of the book in which he often dazes out of reality. 

Final photoshopped image: 

3 original images: 

  

In “The Medium Is the Message”, McLuhan attempts to convey his viewpoints on how mediums affect the way a message is communicated. Throughout the article, McLuhan voices his concern over how people often tend to focus on obvious effects that we miss out on the structural changes that happen slowly and gradually over time. In the case of new inventions, people have a good general idea of its intended use, how to use it and its advantages and disadvantages. However, when looking back, we realise there are a number of unintended consequences that we were entirely unaware of. Moreover, a lot of these consequences are caused by the lack of planning and consideration.

The medium, on the other hand, is something where change occurs. Hence, since some sort of change will inevitably happen from every invention and everything we create, he is able to coin the term “the medium is the message”. We are often preoccupied with the medium’s (the new invention or thing we create) content that we don’t realise the other intended consequences.

From this article, it is clear that McLuhan preaches the importance of noticing the change in our culture and society within the effects of the new medium. In doing so, we will then be able to foresee or predict the possible detrimental effects in our society before it happens. Once this is able to happen, we are also then able to influence its development of the new innovation before it becomes destructive.

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~kct285/Wk1/

Over the winter break, I taught myself some of the basics of HTML. As such, this made creating my webpage portfolio much faster as I was able to recall some of the aspects of that make up a webpage.

However, I’m still very new to coding and HTML which meant that I often forgot the functions of different tags and mistyped a lot of them. Perhaps what I found most difficult was including images into my page as I learned that HTML is extremely volatile towards changes of file location.

Overall, I’m looking forward to continue practicing, developing and integrating CSS into our webpages.