BIO– After my first year at Parsons I have decided to continue with the Integrated Design program. Its versatility will allow me to continue working with different materials, something that I think will be helpful to me throughout life. This year, I have worked with countless materials. Many of them I have never used before, or I feel that I honed a better skill. The materials that come to my mind are wire, resin, woodworking, ceramics, sewing, Illustrator, HTML coding, Premiere, digital photography, sound recording, and printing.
SUMMARY– One of the major things that I learned this year was that research doesn’t have to come in the form of reading from books or designated sources. It can come from drawing from images, taking photographs of things, looking at other people’s journals, your own personal writing and readings, conversations with friends, teachers, strangers, mentors, etc… As long as it is at some point recognized as research and exploration of a subject it can be considered research for a topic. Sure, you probably can’t cite a sketch that you made of someone as a source for a formal paper, but familiarization of the things around us help us to understand everything better. I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator in Time class and Adobe InDesign in Studio 1. Both of these I used in my second semester classes to create layout for a poster in my Studio 2 class, and for creating tessellations, patterns, and wording in my Drawing/Imaging class. Aside from the obvious Bridge projects that connect Studio and Seminar classes, it is easy to see that a lot of my work has a conceptual basis behind it. This would not be possible if not for the reading and writing done in my academic classes. In the most literal sense of connection between academics and art, in my Made In New York class, we researched manufacturers across the five boroughs, and then took the information that we found and put it into maps.
HIGHLIGHTS– One of the best things I learned to do this year was code HTML to create a website. In my Time class I was assigned a project where you had to make a site specific website. In order to do this I used the TextWrangler program to write my code. My teacher Dan Hill taught us the beginnings of coding so that we could get our website up and running. I started out by planning out the links and pathway of my website in my journal. I wrote notes and made a mind map of how I wanted the site to work. Then I started coding and organizing each page in the site before finally uploading, testing, and refining it all. The assignment for this class actually helped me with organization for all other classes. When coding a website, the folders for each link have to be in exactly the right place or else the website will not work. Not my folders for each class include a different folder for each project and then even more division under each project. I thought that I handled this project in a really personal way. I decided that I couldn’t make the website look the way I wanted it to with the time and level of experience I had, so I hand drew all of my pages. This resulted in a really individual look for my website, something that I think I could carry on into other projects, something that I did do later this year.
Another thing that I learned, from the same class actually, was how to use a camera in Manual mode. I always joke that the reason I’m so good at Photoshop is that I couldn’t figure our how to use a camera correctly in high school. As much as I’m kidding, it’s true, and it took a while for me to figure it out here in the city. I started out learning to take photos manually again so that I could complete assignments for tasks that included blurring the foreground, middle ground, and background.
