When reflecting on this short multimedia project, I had several takeaways I want to highlight. Learning to code is a personal journey much like taking a leap of faith into the unknown. When you decide to code, you have to get dirty with it. It has to be done in a way only you could understand. That might be terrifying or exciting to the student who lives to tell the tale but the rewards are great. It’s a versatile art that anyone could teach themselves to work with. With that said, we never stop learning. Languages are constantly updated and that is the fun of taking on this journey. You are always going to improve if you put in the work.
For my specific contributions to the published multimedia project, I brainstormed with my team and came up with different story lines. We originally had come up with a form of ASCII art to compliment the story but found that it only made coding look that much more intense and not attractive. For the DTC program, we do invest much time and energy into learning the very basics of front-end development.
My main contribution involved the artistic elements on the pages with the illustrations. I specifically want to mention AI image generation and how that came about. Within the stable diffusion plugin of Photoshop, I discovered what “seed” meant and how to make a prompt. Seed means a generation of images that are related to the image you have chosen. The prompts had to be specific in such a way to tell the system what you are hoping to get out of your generator. Not all the time did I get what I was hoping. The downside with stable diffusion was the cost I had to pay. Twenty dollars for a number of image generations. Those included the amazing selfie generations I was able to send to my team. They can now be reused in any project they want. Downside, I spent the credits quicker than I had intended. On the bright side, I discovered Canva has a free beta AI text prompt generator. It does have a limit per day but the upside was that I had found a style of doodle that I wanted to use for the multimedia project. I have so many saved generations on my local computer that were beautiful and detailed. Hence the price of stable diffusion but for this specific project, Canva was able to work.
