This project really kicked my butt.
I’m appreciative of the amount of time we were given to figure things out because I really needed it. I knew I wanted to work on the front matter of the full report immediately, and I definitely don’t regret my decision but it was really hard. This project was a lot of trying things in Word, and putting them on the screen, just for it not to work or look bad. Eventually though, I’d put something down that didn’t look too bad. I remember when I had the breakthrough moment with the title page. I stopped trying to figure out Word and instead started doing things I knew how to do, that being image wrapping and pressing return a bunch of times.
After all, the people using this won’t want to have to learn new things in Word either! Through this, I was able to also learn about Opacity settings in Word which was really helpful.
Something that was really frustrating in Word was their customization panel, especially for my grouped shapes and text. When you click on an item, there’s two tabs, one for shape and one for text where you can change the color, opacity, and other features. The problem is, both tabs come up even if there’s no text in the shape, and it always pulled up the text tab first. I’d be trying to change the color of my icons or images so many times, and nothing would happen, until I’d realize about two minutes later that I’d been in the text tab the entire time.
Although Word was frustrating, I think it was still a valuable experience to work with it, especially in this class when everything we’re learning is about accessibility. It was interesting to actually use a bad system, and actually take note of the things that could be better, which was a good exercise in and of itself. Professor Khalili says that she has created so many Word templates for clients, and so it’s a valuable skill to know as well, but I just have to say that I never have to do that again. Or if I do, that there is some breakthrough in a new update of Word in the future.
I think this project was also really valuable for the real world experience it gave us. It’s honestly kind of surreal that we actually got to design for the government, and that they liked what we did! Over these past couple of weeks, I’ve been really grateful that I chose to come to UofSC and the leaps and bounds that I’ve seen this program take while I’ve been here. I have three client projects in all three of my design classes right now, and although it’s extremely busy and overwhelming, I’m trying to look at it as a positive! I’m making some really cool stuff.
September 30, 2022