January 20-26

What I Did This Week

            This week I did the last step of the creation of my product: have it printed. I am glad that I had it printed earlier than the day before it is due, because I encountered a few problems that I would not have the time to solve in one night. More about those problems in the next heading. I also organized my Personal Project binder according to the table of contents given by my school.

Difficulties Faced

            Printing the calendar was a huge issue for me. I simply did not have time. On top of that, the workers there could not open my InDesign files. I found out that they could only open picture files, Photoshop files, and PDFs. Later, after the problem was sorted out, I was looking through my calendar and found a typo. One typo. And a blank page at the back.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

            Since I did not have time to go to the print shop, my mom went for me. Also, since the workers could not open my Indesign files, she had to come all the way home and wait for me to save all of my calendar pages as PDF files so they could be printed. We fixed the typo and reprinted the calendar. One of the only differences was that I filled in the blank page with a picture of myself taking a picture outdoors, with a caption saying my name and school.

Although I had some issues with the printing of the calendar, overall it turned out very well and turned out just as I had imagined it. I am so happy that all of that is officially over and done with, and hopefully I will pass with good Personal Project grades so I will not get held back next year and have to start the PP process all over again with a different project.

            This will likely be my last process journal entry, ever. Hope you enjoyed looking at how my Personal Project has progressed and how I have grown throughout the process. Now, to conclude, here is a picture of me with my freshly-printed calendar. Thank you.

January 13-19

What I Did This Week

            I finished all my calendar pages. After all that, I am finally done with my product. Now all I have to do is have it printed and it will be ready for evaluation. The calendar pages that I finished this week were the Wildlife Conservation page (September), Park Maintenance (October), Tree Planting (November), and Hydroelectric Renewable Energy (March). Screenshots are below.

Difficulties Faced

            I realized that I still did not have the Water Conservation picture, so I ended up using my Grand Canyon picture and doing the Park and Zoo Maintenance calendar page instead of the Water Conservation page. Another difficulty I faced was that I was not very organized, and I had not decided on what month would go with what topic.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

            To solve the problem of my disorganization of the various months and their topics, I created a table and organized my topics according to the month they would correspond to. As I was creating the calendar pages, to be more organized I filled in the box with yellow once I was already finished. All of the boxes are yellow now because I have finished. A screenshot is below.

Although there were quite a few ups and downs and things that went wrong during my process, I have learned from my mistakes and even if a certain circumstance was not my fault, I have learned to be prepared to solve the issue (if it can be solved, which it usually can).

December 30-January 5

What I Did This Week

            This week, I finished a few more calendar pages, specifically for September 2014 and January 2015. Respectively, their topics are Wildlife Conservation and Biodegradable Plastic. I also went on a helicopter ride into the Grand Canyon, as my family and I are currently in Las Vegas on holiday. I got a picture of Hoover Dam there for my Hydroelectric Renewable Energy calendar page, and the pilot of the helicopter told me a few informational facts about the area and the Canyon and Hoover Dam itself, which I will use in the informational part of my calendar. I also got a good picture of the Grand Canyon, which I can use as backup if one of my topics does not work out. The Grand Canyon picture would likely fall under Park and Zoo Maintenance calendar page, if needed.

John McArthur, the pilot of the helicopter my family and I rode in

Hoover Dam

Grand Canyon

Difficulties Faced

            A difficulty that I faced was that there were other people in the helicopter, and so whenever I tried to take a picture through the window, there would usually be someone else’s hand or another body part in the picture, which was not a good thing. Also, I had forgotten to bring a notebook because I thought I was only going on the helicopter ride for the picture, so by the time I got back to the hotel, I had forgotten quite a lot of what the pilot told me.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

            For the problem of unwanted people accidentally getting into my pictures, I was able to crop some of the pictures without them looking too bad. I was unable to fully solve the problem of not bringing a notebook as my memory is quite bad, but I remembered a few important things, which I used in my calendar. I learned to always be prepared with a notebook wherever I go. I also learned to have a backup topic for certain large projects just in case something goes wrong with one of the topics and one needs to change it, fast. I feel more at ease now that I have my Grand Canyon picture, because I know that I have a backup topic. This is the last week before school starts up again, and I am planning to finish all my calendar pages before the break ends, so when I get back that is one of the primary things that I will try to get done.

December 16-22

What I Did This Week

          This week I got two calendar and picture pages done: July 2014 and June 2015. Their respective topics are Saving the Coral Reefs, and Recycling. These two pages are (respectively) the first and last pages of the calendar, so they need to have good pictures and look good overall. So far for the pictures, I have a picture of a jellyfish (an animal that lives in coral reefs) for the Saving the Coral Reefs page, and a picture of a recyclable plastic water bottle with lights in the background for the Recycling page. Hopefully these pictures will be good enough. About the Coral Reefs page, I will go snorkeling with my new underwater camera this coming holiday, so if I take a better picture of the reefs in the Caribbean then I will replace the jellyfish. But for now, the jellyfish will suffice. Screenshots are below.

Difficulties Faced

I did not have much time this week to work on my Personal Project because, as this week is one of the last weeks of school, there is a lot of work to get done before the holidays, including a research paper that counts for most of our final grade for the term. So this was difficult because a lot of time was required to complete all my assignments, and I was stressed out quite a bit.

Also, I could not figure out what color to use for the top row of the calendar pages for June and July, as the corresponding pictures had the same main color: dark blue. What was also a problem is that if I changed the color of the top row for either one of them, it would not look good because it does not fall into the complementary colors on the figurative color wheel.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

To solve the challenge of my workload, I needed to learn to manage my time well. So this is what I did. I feel that procrastination plays a huge part in my poor time management and I need to put a stop to that and give myself the willpower to get my work done before I do what I want.

            I solved my color dilemma by choosing a dark blue color that would look good with the green background of the calendar pages (this would be used in one of the calendar pages; I chose June) and simply changing the hue and saturation of the color by making it darker, more like navy blue. Since the two pages are quite far from each other (the first and last pages, to be exact), it is unlikely that people would compare the two colors to each other and say, “That color of blue looks almost the same as that other page, I thought all the colors were supposed to be different!”

December 2-8

What I Did This Week

I am happy to say that the Progress Exhibition went fine. There were not too many hiccups in my presentation (other than the fact that I only had four calendar pages and four picture pages done). However, my goal is to finish all the pages, both calendar and picture pages, by the end of the Christmas break. To be able to accomplish this, I need to really work on the pages and manage my time well so that I will not become stressed out. This week, I created the May calendar and picture pages; the topic being Plant Conservation. Screenshots of the pages are below.

Difficulties Faced

As always, there is other work to be done besides my Personal Project. However, this was not my biggest problem. My biggest problem was not having enough information from the website I cited in my official bibliography. There was enough information about conserving plants for the description box at the bottom of the May picture page, but not for the tip part. The website itself that I cited was quite informative, but the tips it gave to help conserve plants were already some of the tips used in my other calendar pages.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

As the challenge was to find a tip for the May picture page that was different from all the other topics in my calendar, I tried to think of easy alternatives to conserve plants. What I thought of was telling my audience to plant a miniature garden in their backyard or even just plant a seed in a pot and let it grow. I thought it was okay, but my dad read it and told me that it did not make any sense and to tell the audience to use less paper instead, which helps conserve plants because paper is made from plants.

What I learned this week was that Adobe Indesign has a preview mode. All this time, when I wanted to see what the page would look like without all the gridlines, I had to create a .jpeg image that was a ridiculously large file and delete it afterwards so it would not waste my laptop’s storage space. Now that I can preview the image without going through all that extra trouble of creating a .jpeg, it is so much easier to see whether the page looks good.

November 11-17

What I Did This Week

            I worked on my product this week (the calendar). I got two more calendar months done: April and August. I also decided to change the color scheme of the entire calendar because the previous one (the dual-color one) looked too childish. The background will not be varied anymore from month to month, but will all be the same color: a medium green color to symbolize the environment. Also, the first row of each calendar page (the row with the days of the week on it) will be the one that is varied. The color (a solid one) will go with the environmental issue and picture of the month. For instance, August’s topic is Reducing One’s Carbon Footprint, so the top row will be black because the picture is of a black footprint. Screenshots of the calendar pages that I have already finished (August, December, February, April) are below.

I also lightened the grey area of the other rows so that it will be easier for people to see the various appointments that they have written in the boxes. To see whether the paper I planned to have was the right kind and size, I went to the print shop and had one calendar page and a picture/information page printed. The pages seemed like they would be thick enough for the calendar, and the size was good too.

Difficulties I Faced

            As stated before, the background of the calendar pages was overwhelming the page. It took attention away from the supposed main focus of the page: either the picture or the calendar dates, depending on which type of page. Also stated before, the grey parts that one is supposed to write on were too dark and as a result, if someone tried to write their appointments or other events inside the box(es) they would not be able to see their own writing. The font was an additional issue. This is because it was quite curly and “looked like Comic Sans” according to my supervisor.

How I Solved The Challenges/What I Learned

            It was somewhat easy to solve the challenges stated above. I changed the background to a more pastel color that was not too bright and complemented the picture an calendar dates somewhat. I also brightened the color of the grey so that it would be a bit whiter and people could write down their various appointments without any difficulty seeing them. In addition, I changed the font from the curly one to an Oldstyle font, called Minion Pro. I think the calendar overall looks more professional now. What I learned from these difficulties is that bright colors are not always good, and that consistency is key to a good calendar. Bright colors can (and most likely will) overwhelm the page, taking the focus away from the intended main focus of the page. In terms of consistency, if the components of the calendar are not consistent for all the pages, the calendar as a whole will not look unified. This is why I made the background for all the pages the same color instead of different colors that reflect the respective topics, which was my initial idea. This is also the reason why I used the same font in all the pages.

November 4-10

Organizational Skills

            This week I mainly focused on taking the photos for my calendar pages. If I am not wrong, I believe I have seven so far: ecological balance maintenance, wildlife conservation, energy conservation, renewable geothermal energy sources, reducing one’s carbon footprint, biodegradable plastics, and plant conservation.

Wildlife Conservation

Plant Conservation

Ecological Balance Maintenance

Biodegradable Plastics

Reducing One's Carbon Footprint

Energy Conservation

Geothermal Renewable Energy Sources

            I have not touched up any of them except for the energy conservation one (the wreath ornament on a Christmas tree with Christmas lights in the background) and the ecological balance maintenance one (the three howling wolves).

Communication

            I communicated with some friends this week about the Personal Project: how much work it actually was as we did not expect there to be this much work. I also talked to my sister about possible title page layouts, but I was not able to actually get to creating a title page for my calendar. She drew a picture of a possible layout, and I redrew it in a neater way inside my notebook. It is shown below.

Information Literacy

         I learned that even if one plans to do something (such as in my case, take a photo of something to use for a calendar page), it will not necessarily work out. Originally, my family and I had gone to a fish hatchery in Yellowstone to get pictures for my Ecological Balance Maintenance calendar page, but I was not able to get any good pictures of the fish or their eggs because there was constantly a glare from the sunlight. Plus, the pools that they were in did not look too good either due to a lot of algae and other aquatic plants residing at the bottom, making the water look dirty. It was also difficult to take the picture about the carbon footprint, because I had to dip my foot in black paint in order to create the footprint. I had to make sure the footprint was in the right place on the newspaper, and had to find a newspaper article that was relevant to the environment, because I initially wanted to take a picture of a newspaper headline with the footprint in the background. Even though I took multiple pictures from various angles, none of them came out well, so I resorted to taking a close-up picture of the “carbon” footprint. This came out better than the other pictures, so I will use that. I am glad that I have already taken more than half of the pictures I need for the calendar; I am planning to take the rest of the pictures in the next few weeks or so, and also during the Christmas break in December.