Week 8 came, and not everyone seemed to have gotten back on their feet after enjoying a relaxing week 7. 

The majority of week 8’s Making Media session was devoted to going through some key concepts in photography, which included the exposure triangle and the rule of thirds, among other items. While these concepts are not entirely unfamiliar to me, it was useful to revisit them every now and then to really imprint them onto my mind. 

The remaining time in the session was spent going through a rather exciting exercise to practice our InDesign skills. Given a title of ‘Campus Life’, each member of the class must create a magazine cover of their own with a lead article. With some photos of the building 2 staircase already stocked up on my computer, it did not take long for me to come up with a pleasant looking cover whose lead article read ‘What’s up in building 2?’. As someone who values good typography, I chose to overlay the image with the lead article text blended in.

When feedback time came, I got to see other students’ implementation of the same cover and heard some comments from Prof. Felix. While he did like my cover, he noted that it looked more or less the same as some others, signifying that I needed to put in more individuality to stand out. This brought me back to a line I heard in a Youtube video by the channel ‘The Futur’, which went: ‘When you’re on the shelf, you’re competing with everyone’. Indeed, the challenge in making print publications is as much about creating good content as it is about presenting that content in an attractive package that would drive in readers.

Another big mistake that most people in class was making: we forgot to bring the ‘life’ into the ‘campus’, as most of our covers featured images of the RMIT buildings, but not its students. This was a moment of epiphany for me, and it reminded me to always interpret a word or phrase from more than one angle, applying the theories of semiotics. 

Going home from my Making Media class, I immediately jumped on my computer to start building my website in Webflow. Having chosen the tool since week 5, I have barely had time to learn and use it, what with my various tasks as a student, a part-timer and an AIESEC member. 

To make matters worse, Webflow was unlike anything I have used up until now. Rather than operating on a layer basis like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or even After Effects and Premiere, it utilizes a ‘box model’. This ‘box model’ means all elements are placed inside boxes stacked on top, beside, or even inside each other. Furthermore, there were tons of brand new concepts to pick up like ‘margins’, ‘padding’, ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, ‘sticky’, ‘div blocks’, ‘sections’, to name a few. 

Thankfully, the Webflow University - Webflow’s all-in-one tutorial platform - was very helpful in teaching me the core aspects of the interface and functions. With a near-solid foundation, I went on to create the home page of my website, which currently looks like below.

The plan for the site is to have a home page, a blog page, a project showcase page, with an easily accessible navigation bar and footer which contained my contact information.