Semester 1 Fundamentals Reflection
Finally, write a reflection entry to complete the Tumblr site - this should collect your thoughts on the course, discuss some challenges, what you've learned, what you might take forward and what you'd like to learn more of within the three applications moving forward.
Now that we’ve finally finished the Semester, Software Fundamentals has come to a close. I really did enjoy this topic, it was like a nice refresher on Friday mornings every week. Being able to create lots of different projects was a nice touch. The practical side of this course was fulfilling enough to get through the drowsy, but necessary, Tumblr documentation. As you can see I persevered through the boredom, because this will be my eighteenth post this semester. Toby was a good teacher overall, I grew used to him quickly, especially having him also teach Animation for the first half of the Semester.
I learnt a lot in this class, and there is definitely a lot to take away, for example I had already applied the Illustrator skills that I learnt to make assets for a Game I was making in another class. I used these skills for about 21 objects so I was really happy with that. I also used a range of colour correction techniques in Photoshop to better the quality of those said assets.
I already did have a little knowledge on how to use Photoshop, but most of the stuff that Toby taught me was new and exciting.
The first software that we learnt this Semester was Adobe Illustrator. To kick that off we began learning all about the Pen Tool and Bezier Curves. To assist in this was the Bezier Game, which I thought was really fun, I had a good time competing with my friends to beat the game in the least amount of control points. After that we used those techniques to create a variety of images and shapes to further our skills.
Moving on from Illustrator was Adobe Photoshop, in there we learnt a lot about Image Adjustments, including Colour Correction and Colour Grading, we then applied these to a bunch of different types of images to develop our skills. After that we learnt about Layers, Masks and Selections, and also applied those to a couple of individual projects.
Lastly, we did InDesign which was by far the most simple of all. It was also the shortest topic. There was overall not a lot to cover, but we learnt about Paragraph Styles, Characters Styles, Parent Pages and Margins & Columns.
All of what I learnt allowed me to put together the Nursery Rhyme book that I did.
Overall I’m really happy with this course so far, and I can’t wait for Semester 2.
