Throughout the semester, I have worked on many projects pertaining to design and Photoshop. One of these projects was a magazine project where we chose a magazine cover and had to replicate it in Photoshop using the tools we had learned.
For this project, I chose a magazine cover from Swimming World, a popular swim magazine. This cover (pictured top left) stood out to me because I had noticed that the image on the front of Michael Phelps looked a lot like an image of me swimming.
I changed Swimming World to Swim United and some of the text below it. This project helped me learn the endless possibilities that were enclosed within Photoshop, such as the layers tool, the opacity tool, the fill tool, and the magic wand tool.
My replicated cover is shown bottom left.
Another project that I enjoyed was designing my own website. I was very surprised with the amount of code required to run one page of a website. The project, which is also this website, allowed me to explore different code that was available to me on the web, such as adding in web downloaded fonts.
The project had as much thought into the alignment of elements and the look of the page as it did HTML and CSS code. I learned that code is not the only thing that matters on a website. The design, including colors, fonts, and images are as important and need to be chosen carefully to ensure the page looks clean and professional.
I was able to utilize Photoshop for this project. Some of the images were too big or too bright, so I had to edit them in Photoshop. The JL logo in the top left corner of the home page was also designed in Photoshop. I made the logo transparent and made the color white which was the same as the navbar text color.
I did experience challenges while creating this website. Making the images all the same size and aligning the text was one thing I had trouble with. Another challenge was making my logo. It took many tries to finally be able to download the image to a flash drive, which slowed down making the website. However, this project was my favorite of the projects we had done in this class and I hope to continue to code and make websites like this one.
This course was an eye opener to the possibilities of code and photoshop. Without these tools, we as coders would not be able to make or design websites. Photoshop is a useful tool for many projects, and I am glad I was able to learn how to use these tools. To learn more about Natick Web Design, click here.
