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.