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.

October 28 - November 3

Organizational Skills

            I was not able to do much work on my project this week because this was the week of the spiritual retreat for my grade, as well as the students from grade 9 and 12 (it was amazing, by the way). As we were hiking in the mountains (that is where the retreat was), I came across a pretty flower that I took a picture of. I was thinking about using it as one of the calendar pictures, in the Plant Conservation section. There are also some other flowers I took pictures of on the retreat as alternatives so I would have some selection. None of these have been edited in Photoshop yet, by the way.

Communication

            There was a Personal Project meeting with my supervisor last week. I was told by my supervisor and the other students in my group to change the title font of the calendar and the background color as well because it looked a bit childish. Apparently the font was too curly and looked a bit like Comic Sans, which I definitely do not want. The background, on the other hand, was too bright. As I was making it, I was not actually sure whether to use this background because I also noticed that this was so.

Information Literacy

            There was a parent meeting for the 10^th grade parents on 

Friday, which was the day my classmates and I got back from the 

retreat. My mom went to the meeting, and afterwards told me

about the Progress Exhibition next PP meeting. Apparently it is a

“big deadline”, for which I have to get a lot of work done. I aim to

finish at least half of my calendar by that time near the end of 

November. Initially I was thinking that I would just relax and only 

do a bit of my Personal Project because the Progress Exhibition is 

only to exhibit one’s progress (hence the name). A particular point 

in the Project, such as 50% done, is not actually specified. After 

hearing what my mom had to say about the Exhibition, I realized 

that I should try to get as much done as possible before the 

Progress Exhibition so that I have more to show for it, as well as 

less work to do over the winter break. During the supervisor 

meeting last week, I was also told that my pictures for the calendar 

may not be professional enough, and they might need some degree 

of similarity, such as the same filter on all of them or something 

like that. This is so that each picture of each environmental issue 

will relate and be unified with all the others.

October 21-27

What I Did This Week

            I continued to work on some of the calendar pages, such as the month of December (which will be focused on energy, mostly light energy, conservation).

I also changed the background of the February calendar page because I realized it looked quite boring. Now it looks a bit childish so I may change the background again later.

Difficulties I Faced

            I sent my laptop in for servicing a few weeks ago since it had a virus. I got it back about a week ago and found that they deleted all my files and reinstalled the operating system: Windows. Fortunately, I had backed up most of my files so I did not lose much. Except my photos, which were all gone and I am very sad about. Anyway, the Windows operating system that the people at the shop reinstalled turned out to be a fake. Microsoft informed me of this after a few days of my having my laptop back. I did not know what Microsoft would do to my laptop if I kept on using the fake operating system; maybe shut it down, forever.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

            I solved this challenge by backing up my files and pictures, taking my laptop back to the store, and telling them to reinstall the genuine Windows operating system that I had before all this happened so that I could get back to living my life without any more problems. So they did, and reinstalled some of my programs as well, like Skype, Google Chrome, VLC Media Player, iTunes, and others. Then I had to go to the other store where I bought Adobe Photoshop and InDesign and ask the people there to reinstall the two programs. Now I have it, a genuine version of Windows (I hope), and all my files on Dropbox instead of in the internal storage of my laptop. I am not letting this happen again. What I learned from this experience is that not everything one downloads from the Internet is beneficial to one’s laptop (the virus that started this whole thing was part of a download link). I already had been told that by many people, but it never really stuck in my head. Now that I have had this experience, I can safely say that it is stuck in my head. I have also learned to constantly back up my pictures in a safe place. I lost all of them, and only have the ones that I put on Facebook. Those are not even very good quality, but it is all I have. Hopefully things will look up in the near future and this will not happen again.

October 14-20

Organizational Skills

            Fall break is here! Now I have a lot more time to work on my Personal Project and get some other work done. To start off, I looked at the calendar dates (2014 to 2015) that I found last week.

http://annystudio.com/calendars/2014/2014-calendar-row-mo-portrt.gif

http://annystudio.com/calendars/

            I also found a list of Indonesian public holidays for both the end of 2014 and all of 2015, which I can use as a reference for my calendar’s red days.

http://publicholiday.org/calendar/indonesia-public-holidays-2014-calendar/

http://www.printablehub.com/indonesia-2015-printable-holiday-calendar/

Communication

            I asked the woman at the program store if she knew how to use Indesign, and she told me that she did. In addition, she was going to show me a few of the tools and how they worked, but when she opened the program I realized that it was just like Photoshop with a few tools added. I did not want to waste anymore of her time since she had other customers waiting, so I told her I would just look up some web tutorials to figure out how to use the tools that were not in Photoshop.

Information Literacy

To make my first calendar page, I used a tutorial on Youtube by “btscreativesuite”.

It helped greatly because I learned a lot about making tables in Indesign, coloring them, and resizing the different columns and rows. The color scheme I am planning to use for each calendar page will be according to the color scheme of its corresponding picture. Like the issue of Wolf Conservation:

            Since the wolves in the picture are grey, I decided to make the rows of dates grey. Also, the background is mostly green, so the title row is colored green. I decided that if they were switched (the title being grey and the dates being green, the green may be too dark for anybody to write their important events on, rendering it useless). I also drew some calendar designs. I had created some before, in the beginning of the school year, but I realized that the main focus of the picture page of the calendar should be the picture itself, not the short paragraph and tip. So I made the space allotted for the picture bigger, and the text space smaller.

This is the first rough draft of the design of my calendar.

This is the second draft. It puts a lot more emphasis on the picture, which people will probably pay more attention to anyway.

October 7-13

Organizational Skills

            I realized that Wednesday, the 9^th of October, is the last day before our fall break. This, I am very happy about because I can finally relax somewhat. I plan to use most of the time to work on creating my Personal Project product, the calendar, and getting some other projects done. I also found some pictures of 2014 and 2015 calendars so I will know which date goes on which day of the week (I searched for both 2014 and 2015 calendars because I decided I would make my calendar months different than usual: instead of January to December, I will use July 2014 to June 2015.

Communication

            I communicated with my mom about how to balance my social life and my studies during this coming week-long break. She told me to prioritize the studies over the social life, but not completely block out my friends. So I went out to a waterpark with my friends on the first day of the holiday (Thursday), and focused on my homework and Personal Project the rest of the time.

Information Literacy

            I changed from trying to do January to December 2014 to July 2014 to June 2015. This is because I realized that if I did the whole year of 2014, by the time I was finished presenting it and giving it to people, half of the year would already be gone. This would mean that my calendar would only be good for half a year and not a full year as I planned. I also flipped through a book about photography, called Click: The Ultimate Photography Guide for Generation Now. The authors are Charlie Styr and Maria Wakem.

As I was looking at the photographs in the Nature section, I read that using a wide angle is the best thing for shooting landscapes. In addition, Aperture Priority Mode should be used when taking photographs outdoors.

This way, the camera chooses the optimal shutter speed for a certain setting while the person chooses the aperture so that the picture will not be too bright or too dark. I also learned that silhouettes of subject matter instead of brighter, colored subject matter looks good in sunset scenes. Lens flares as well.

I learned not to be afraid to use monochrome coloring for photos; it actually makes them look really good. Also, fog in a picture gives an eerie feeling to viewers, as shown.

            I should not use monochrome in excess, however, because most of the time colors are what bring out the character in the subject matter. I noticed that a lot of the pictures in the book use the rule of thirds. So I decided to try.

            All the above pictures are my own, just in case any readers were wondering; except for the monochrome one of me (my friend took that one).

September 30-October 6

Organizational Skills

            I organized my time this week by bookmarking website tutorials on how to make calendars in Adobe Photoshop. I also found a website from WWF (World Wildlife Fund) that helps one calculate their own personal carbon footprint; I filed it carefully into my Personal Project folder in my list of bookmarks in my Internet browser. The URL is http://ecoguru.panda.org/#/intro. In addition, I joined the Photography Club at school so I could learn more about taking good photos for my calendar.

Communication

            I talked to my supervisor for some tips on how to make calendars in Photoshop because she was my Digital Art teacher last year (my classmates and I made art pieces using Photoshop). She did not give me any tips about it, but instead she told me to use Adobe InDesign, a program that I had never heard of, instead.

Information Literacy

            Initially I did not want to take my supervisor’s advice into account because of how much extra work it would be to go to the store and install Adobe InDesign, not to mention the amount of time it would take to learn how to use it. But then my laptop got a virus on it, so all of my files and programs had to be deleted because they got contaminated. This meant that I would have to bring my program disks to the store and have them re-installed. When I got to the store, I realized that I could just buy and install InDesign while my other programs were being installed. When I got home with my new programs, I opened InDesign and found that the tools were quite similar to Photoshop. This was a blessing because now I do not have to learn how to use all the features in the program; I already know about most of them. In addition, I tried out the website that calculates one’s carbon footprint. I am sad to say that I am currently using the energy and resources of 2.3 planets.

I learned to be more energy conscious and to watch what I eat, how much I recycle, what kind of transportation I use, the distance of the places I go on holiday, and how much energy I consume. What is good about the website is that it does not only tell one how much they are consuming, but also what they can do to consume less energy. This could be a good website to tell people about in my calendar because it helps them be aware of just how much of the earth’s resources they are consuming and how to consume less. As I mentioned before, I signed up for the Photography club at school, which meets on Mondays at lunchtime. So far there have been two meetings; I did not learn much at the first meeting because it was more of an introductory session and I skipped the second because I needed to take pictures of the Battle of the Bands (a band competition at school) for the school newspaper.

September 23-29

This week I am merely fulfilling the requirements of the next Personal Project meeting, so I only have the "Information Literacy" heading instead of the other two headings ("Organizational Skills" and "Communication").

Information Literacy

-          Development of Personal Thought

o   Research

Based on the research I have done in previous stages such as the Plan stage last month, I have realized that the damage to the environment and the earth itself done by humans is a lot more serious than I initially thought. However, I have also realized that there is still a small spark of hope to stop (but not entirely) the damage being done. This requires just about everyone on earth to be environmentally conscious, not just a few people here and there. This fueled my desire to raise environmental awareness even more because everyone should know about the earth’s problems that they themselves are contributing to without even knowing it.

o   Process of Creation

Since most people do not care about or do not know about the damage they are doing to the environment, I feel that I should take the initiative to inform them. One of my personal thoughts based on the creation process would be that making use of Adobe InDesign for the calendar pages is much easier than I thought it would be. Also, I realized that my first design for the picture pages of the calendar were quite unattractive because the picture should be the main focus of the page (hence the name “picture page”), but instead the space is divided equally with the background information. I made a 2^nd draft in which the allotted space for the picture was a lot bigger than the space for the background information because many people will probably look at the picture instead of the background information anyway.

-          Development of Understanding of AOI

o   Research

I thought I knew a lot about and cared about the environment before I started this project, but I was wrong. Now that I have done some research about my AOI, Environments, I feel that I now know a lot more about the various environmental issues than I did before. Also, since I read through the guiding questions of my AOI in the Personal Project Guide, I realized that these questions will be quite valuable throughout my creation process, so I should keep them in mind.

o   Process of Creation

I learned quite a lot from experimenting with the unfamiliar tools in Adobe InDesign. I now know how to make a calendar from a simple table (with the help of an online tutorial) and create the layout of the picture pages. The tip will be in a small rounded rectangle up at the top of the picture, and the background information will be underneath the picture. By looking at the pictures I have taken for each calendar month, I have realized the natural beauty of the environment and how important it is to save it from the damage being caused by humans. This, I believe, is the essence of my AOI.

September 16-22

What I Did This Week

            As the Personal Project Exhibition is in a few weeks, I worked on my presentation in order to get ready for it. I have been told by multiple people that the Exhibition is quite important, and that I need to put a lot of effort into my 10-minute Powerpoint presentation in order to get a good grade for the Personal Project section on my report card for the semester. So I am currently putting forth a lot of effort into my presentation.

            For the presentation, I have written a summary of my design specifications and what I plan to do with my goal. Also, I have gone over how my goal relates to my Area of Interaction. In addition, I went over each of my resources that I chose for my bibliography and made sure that they were varied and exceeded the minimum number (three). I have 13 right now, so I think I will get an “Exceeding Expectations” grade with that particular section, at least.

Difficulties I Faced

            According to the rubric that I will be assessed with, my PP binder should be organized. I have quite a lot of papers in my binder, and it sometimes can take a while to find a specific page. Also, I looked at the Exhibition guidelines posted on Managebac and it said that I would need detailed ways to test my design specifications. I had not done this because it was not required when the design specifications were created, quite a while back.

How I Solved the Challenges/What I Learned

In order to make my binder more organized so that I can get a better organization grade during the Personal Project Exhibition, I put tabs that mark important documents in the binder for easier navigation for the teachers that will assess me, including my supervisor. For the testing of the design specifications, I brainstormed and thought of ways to test each and every one of my design specifications. I typed up these methods of testing, printed them, and placed them into my binder. I will put a tab on it soon so teachers can see that I have done it. What I learned was not to procrastinate, and take initiative to do work ahead of schedule, because it saves a lot of stress and it feels good to be productive. Looking at the rubric for the Personal Project Exhibition, there is a lot more work to do than I thought there would be. I initially thought that all we (the 10^th grade students) had to do was tell the teachers about how much of the product was finished. It is actually much more than that: process journal entries, timelines, diagrams, sketches, reflections, bibliographies, design specifications, and more.