Three quotes make me a better designer

Personal Learning story

“ Don’t be afraid to do anything, just do it!”

Making a worksite was my first assignment, which surprised me at the beginning of the semester. I never created a website before, so I felt so nervous that I would screw up the assignment.

But after I watched the video demo that kate provided, I felt more confident to do it.

I followed the steps of the demo and finally created my first website.

“ Don’t be afraid to do anything, just do it” was a small thing I learned at the beginning of the semester, but it gave me a big help throughout the whole semester, making me believe I could achieve my story learning goal.

“stay hungry, stay foolish”

“Drawing a comic? That sounds pretty easy. I could draw when I was five years old.” This was my first reaction when I saw the assignment.

I drew eight squares in the same size as the comic frame, and then I drew my story inside the frame. I dragged my comic in the Moodle and clicked “submit.” “ It’s so simple” I thought and then I went to bed.

Later I woke up to my phone ringing. It showed that Kate gave me feedback on my homework. I opened the feedback. It said, “ Hi peter, what you submitted is a storyboard, not a comic. Frames in comics always have different sizes, different positions and different shapes to show the plots or character’s mood, so you need to play with the frames and see how it works”

I suddenly realized that I was too confident about what I learned before, so I refused to accept new knowledge. A good designer needs to be modest. Just like Steven Jobs said, “stay hungry ,stay foolish.”

In the end, I learned two things in this assignment: how to draw comics and how to be a modest man.

“Nothing can be perfect”

“wait, what? We need to make a verbal story?We only have one minute to present?”

That was my assignment in the story class, which gave me a shock because I never tried to present in only one minute.

“I can do it”, I tried to encourage myself. So I started to draw the story arc and wrote down the story. I wrote about 1000 words, and I added tons of details in the story. I believed this was a perfect story, and then I started to practice. I set a timer on my phone, trying to count the time.

“Peter is an … he has… then some..something happened”, “BiBiBi”, the timer reminded me that I should stop, but I still had half of the story left to read. I reset the timer and tried again. But the result was the same after I tried three times.

I suddenly felt so depressed because It should be a perfect story if there is no time limit. To meet the requirement of this assignment, I had to cut all the details that I liked. Then I practised my story again, and it finally met the time requirement, but I still worried about if the story worked well without those details. The other day in the class, I got a lot of good feedback after I presented. At that time, I realized that “nothing can be perfect.” I needed to balance the time and the content, and not try to put too many details. The story arc is the heart of the story, and the details are the decorations. When I don’t have too much time to tell the story, I should focus on the story arc not the details. Two days later, I will have another presentation. This time it will be a two-minute presentation, and I will have 100% confidence to balance the time and the story’s content.