Making this Powerpuff cartoon was super easy and fun! It reminded me of when I used to play dress-up games on my little IPhone during middle school. I used to download every beauty and makeup-related game I could find and this experience certainly sparked some nostalgia. The process was very straightforward and I liked the different features I could play around with to customize my cartoon. I kept my cartoon fairly simple but I do want to try experimenting with some fun colors and outfits when I get the chance!
For this week’s blog I will be talking about social media platforms I think will effectively promote my website. I’m sure many people have mentioned this platform, but I believe that TikTok will be able to spread my content in the best way possible. Why? Because almost a billion people are on it. TikTok has quickly grown to become the most popular social media app since the global pandemic. When we were stuck at home in quarantine, I can guarantee that many of us found TikTok and its unexplainable addicting charm. Each TikTok video ranges from about 15 seconds to a minutes, which is very different from, for instance, Youtube that utilizes short to very lengthy videos. The ‘For You’ page allows users to mindlessly scroll for hours and hours without realizing that so much time has passed. Personally I went through a horrible phase of just binge-watching Tiktok, and there were multiple times where I would literally spend the entire day in my bed. Thankfully I have grown to learn how to control myself, but it is still difficult to stay away from it.
The nature of my website deals with fun hacks and tips for how to clean properly. I feel like TikTok would open doors for my website because it’s a great place to make short, catchy videos. Because of TikTok’s large audience, it would be much easier to reach as many people as I can in a short time.
This week we had the opportunity to explore Screencast-O-Matic, which allowed us to record our screens and audio at the same time. Now I’ve done something similar when I had to narrate this one video for my friend. I used the screen recording feature on my IPhone and one thing that bothered me was that the audio wasn’t as clear as I wanted it to be. So hearing the audio from Screencast-O-Matic really surprised me because it sounded great, especially from just using the built-in microphone in my laptop. But getting to this final video was quite a challenge. I initially connected my big Sony headphones, which I thought would perform the best. However, recording a good five-minute video, I was shocked to hear what I had just made. There was terrible feedback and it sounded like someone was messing with the frequency in sound- I still don’t know what caused this. So I switched over to my AirPods and with this too, I thought it would be perfectly fine. Unfortunately, it caused the same issue. At this point I didn’t have any more audio devices and decided to give my laptop microphone a chance. Thankfully the audio sounded great and I didn’t have to go searching for another option. Overall my experience working with Screencast-O-Matic was really enjoyable and I learned a lot about preparing and recording my own screencast. I was definitely nervous but it was nice to see myself getting more and more comfortable with speaking into the microphone. I want to explore more of this type of assignment in the future, and this makes me excited to complete our podcast assignment.
For this week’s assignment, we were able to design our image/header. Unfortunately, my theme did not allow me to add a header, so I decided to design a regular image for a blog post. I much prefer the features offered by Canva, so that is what I used instead of Photoshop or Pixlr Editor. The goal behind creating this image was to make my message clean, clear, and aesthetically pleasing. I chose a neutral color palette to match the theme of my website and a thin, sophisticated font to write my website’s name and motto. The two images were obtained through a very simple Google search for “messy sink” and “cleaning”. The tricky part in creating this image was that I felt like I was being “too simple.” Every image of cleaning just had a pile of trash, some towels, and some dishes. If it were some other subject, like dancing, I feel like I can think of so many ways to create this abstract, interesting work. However since my website is about cleaning, it was really hard for me to feel truly satisfied with my work. To be very honest, I think I could’ve done a better job in tidying this up and adding something to it, but I’m still grateful that I got the chance to play around with photo editing.
This was my first time experiencing WordPress and to be quite honest, I was and still am very lost. WordPress reminds me of when I tried to get myself into Notion a year ago, and I eventually gave up because there was so much going on. It took me a while to figure what feature served what function, and most of my knowledge came from viewing several Youtube tutorials on "WordPress"for beginners. I think this assignment really challenged me in a way to start from scratch and trust my own creativity to lead me somewhere. During the first week of this course, we watched videos on how to approach and execute creativity, and I reminded of the saying that hardest part of this process is knowing where to start. For a couple hours, I was just contemplating on what topic I should choose, and every time I would settle on one idea, a better idea would appear. Hopefully during the next few weeks, I will be able to learn how to use WordPress better and work towards making my website more aesthetically pleasing and functional.
bee clean 