Melissa Loa’s Weblog

Copy is an important part of a website. If the copy is full of fillers, then there really is no point to its existence. As of late, my peers and I have been learning about the importance of copy and how to write a good copy. I have been browsing through several websites to see how each copy is different (depening on their content and target audience.)

Let’s take a look at my two favourite music blogs.

Vinyl and Vodka & Ali’s Blog
In these two websites, there is little or mediocre amount of copy in both sites. The copy mostly promotes the (new or old) singer/band’s album, music videos, and singles –it describes what the single sounds like, and how they are liking the song/abum. Their target audience are mostly teenagers, young adults (in their 20s) who are into mainstream music (pop, hip hop, r&b, dance) or indie music. The target audience is clear, as the writing style is informal.

I am looking back on my past entries on WordPress from back when I was in the Digital Animation program and they are horrible; they have no title, no targeted audience, no content and filled with filler text. I’m reading through each entry, and I can tell that I was just blogging for the sake of blogging and finishing my assignment (I do recall… Val allowing us to blog about anything, given that we blogged about Digital Animation or the industry for half of the entry.) I did not learn much about copy writing back then, as I am learning now.

It is important to know how good copy looks like and whether or not it’s necessary to have a lot or little content on a website. I plan on improving my copy writing skills by looking through the copy of websites more thoroughly from here on in, so I can get a gist of what copy on the web should look like.  Someone could have a well built website, but what good is it, if they have bad (and unnecessary) copy on each page? They will end up scaring their users away.

A brief history about my interest in web development… at the age of twelve, I picked up web  design as a hobby. I started creating my very first website in Geocities with their page builder.  I would just drag, drop, upload pictures and place them wherever and Geocities would do the rest of the work. I would visit random  personal websites, and if I had liked anything (i.e. their colored scrollbar) I would view their source and try to figure out which code it was. Eventually, I taught myself  enough to be able to create my own website out of simple, basic HTML. I then transferred to Angelfire to further push and advance my knowledge, as Angelfire did not have a page builder which forced me to start from scratch. Back then, I did not know what CSS was, nor did I know how to create CSS stylesheets. I would go page per page, creating and editing codes which was extremely tedious and time consuming. If I forgot to to put in a “>” closing my tags, all hell would break lose and nothing would work;  I would spend a copious amount of time going through each page looking for that missing “>.” No, it was not fun at all. 

I’m new to CSS and I had only started learning about how to create stylesheets last week in Web Overview. I am, for lack of a better word, glad that we were taught how to create stylesheets and how to put it into our pages with just ONE code. I’m quite relieved that when I update future websites, I only have to update one file (the stylesheet). Although it can get confusing and almost seem impossible to understand, and a little disheartening when you spend such a long time on a page only to view it and see nothing working, I am most definitely enjoying this course. Lately, I’ve been working on creating a restaurant website for class as an assignment; we are to use div tags to create our menu, submenu, and content.  We were recently taught how to create three columns side by side, or two on top of one. I have never been taught how to create columns or create layouts from div tags, so this is all new (but useful) to me. Also, we were taught how to let the text wrap (or float) around the image using CSS. This is quite different from the way I used to align images (back then, I would manually align each image either left or right using <img src=”url” align=”right”>) which was also quite cumbersome. Out with the bad old, cumbersome ways and in with the better, easier, new ways!

We took an online colour IQ test last week in our first scanning and resolution class. The lower your score was, the better your color IQ is. The higher your score was,  well, the lower your color IQ is. I scored 19 on it, which is pretty bad. I didn’t read the instructions or the fine print, so when I thought I did well when I scored a high score. In reality, I didn’t… much to my disappointment.  The test was still pretty cool though. I made my sister try it as well as a few friends of mine and they scored in the 0-4 area. We learnt about colors in our photoshop and scanning and resolution classes. We learnt about saturation (the amount of purity of the color there is), hue, and brightness. In our scanning and resolution class, we took a quiz (not really a quiz, but just an activity) to test our knowledge about how colours mix and how light passes through, as well as reflectivity. Also, we learnt how lighting makes colours look different. If the color is on a dark background, it looks slightly different than when it is on a white background. I didn’t know much, so I guess I have to re-read my notes all over again. However, I did pretty well with mixing the colors together (then again, if you choose the wrong color to mix, it repels right away which only makes you drag, drop and guess which is the right color!) We played around with photoshop in our classes. We touched on the levels of hue, saturation, and brightness to improve the color and brightness of a photo.  That was fun! It allowed us to become more familiar with the tools in photoshop, although I’ve had experience with photoshop already. There are still some tools that I am not aware of in photoshop (or I wasn’t required to use them as much when I was taking the digital animation course.) I’m hoping we receive more hands on training as the year progresses!

This is our second week of classes (excluding the first week which was just system management) in the New Media program at BCIT. Over the past few days, I have learnt quite a bit. In particular, Mak, our Photoshop instructor, taught us scanning and resolution. He taught us how to transfer images from it’s original size to a larger size or smaller size canvas in Photoshop or how to calculate the proper size for whatever resolution (ppi) you are creating your image in (how many pixels in length and width the canvas should be.) He taught us this method so that we don’t make the mistake of printing out our images from Photoshop and having it come out smaller than what we imagined when it comes to creating pieces for our portfolio or homework. I thought that this was quite interesting and helpful. Speaking of Mak, he was also my composting (for the program Discreet Combustion) instructor when I was taking the digital animation course. It’s nice to have a familiar face in class. He is a great instructor! He really knows his stuff and he teaches the programs very thoroughly!

In information architecture, we learnt about what information architects do (map out websites whilst being considerate of the users in regards to navigation, labelling, organization, etc.) Ron, our teacher, showed us some intersting statistics about which countries in the world use the internet the most, China being the leading country that uses it the most. It’s crazy how the internet has evolved so quickly over the past years. It has gone from the ”old internet” being more static and having simple HTML to having YouTube, Skype, Facebook,  eLearning, and so much more all online at the user’s convenience. With our internet now, we pretty much don’t need to leave the house to entertain ourselves; we can socialize, learn, and entertain ourselves with the internet.  Ron also showed us some videos on YouTube (from CommonCraft) about how to use Twitter, Wikki, and Delicious. I think I may have to use Wikki when planning events and trips with my friends (we are very disorganized people and we cannot keep track of our emails, let alone check our emails on a daily basis.) We also learnt about the types of websites there are –advocate, promotional, eCommerce, content sites, portals, and personal websites. Did you know that Google pays $1.6 billion for YouTube and Facebook is valued at 15 billion? Wow. Who knew that Facebook and YouTube could cost so much?

The previous blog entries have been for the Digital Animation program that I was taking at BCIT from October 2007 to October 2008.

I’ve always been a fan of graphics design and websites. Creating websites and playing around with Adobe Photoshop has been a past hobby of mine ever since I was in grade 8.  However, after I graduated from high school I decided to take up digital animation  just to try out something new. As much fun as 3D was, I realized my passion was meant for graphics design. I suppose it’d benefit me to have the skills that I have learnt from both programs, the digital animation program as well as the new media program.

It’s our second week into the program. We’ve gone to almost all of our classes for this term. Like the digital animation program, I know that the new media and design program will become more demanding as the program progresses and I have created some goals for myself to ensure that I will stay on track and focused this year. My goals in this program are to be able to create and design websites that are organized and well structured. Also, I would also like to create well constructed advertisements, posters, and etc. by the end of the program. I would also like to create my own business, sometime in the future, creating websites and graphics design for companies. I’m hoping that at the end of all this, we’ll all be able to find jobs in the industry. We had our first Photoshop class today. I enjoyed it. We learned about scanning and resolution. I found it quite useful, because I never knew how to find the appropriate size for my documents (without my work becoming all pixelated when it was enlarged). This information will definitely come in handy for all the future projects that I do! I also learned what the difference was between vector art and rasterized art. I have seen vector art many times, especially in magazines. I think vector art is pretty neat, and I can’t wait to try it for myself (I’ve tried to teach myself before, but the end product didn’t really turn out like what I had pictured in my mind. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying again! Perhaps when I familiarize myself more with Illustrator, or techniques, and whatnot… it will work out the next time I try it!)

Graphics design and web development are jobs that I seem to find postings for all the time on the internet or Craigslist. Luckily, those are my interests! I seem to be able to find more jobs for graphics design and web development than digital animation. I guess it’s just timing. Speaking of digital animation, I tried modeling in 3D today and I still have it in me! I’m quite happy with the fact that I still have the knowledge and skills to model (basic items anyway, nothing too complex!) I asked a friend of mine about this year’s industry night. Apparently, it’s happening next Wednesday at Radical Entertainment! I hope I can make it, I’d really like to see what their portfolios are like. They just keep getting better and better each year!

So the past few weeks have been pretty rough. It’ll all be over, soon, hopefully. Today was our last project portfolio class for the term, so that’s something off my back. Tomorrow will be our last career prep class, so that’s pretty exciting. Our projects are due tomorrow, but … ah, six hours of career prep. That’s crazy long! Today we had compositing, our cg spaceship on live footage was supposed to be due… but it got pushed back cos no one had it done. Haha. What else is due soon? Oh. XSI! Bah… I have a lot of work to do. All my friends are starting to get off school for summer… or they’re coming back for summer and I still can’t say no to coffee nights, or whatnot.

Crappy for me, but I couldn’t say NO when my friend already bought me a ticket for a charity banquet on Sunday. I seriously needed that Sunday to do all of my work. I am getting my ass dragged to that banquet, I don’t even want to go that badly. I wouldn’t mind… going as much if I didn’t have a lot of work to do. Yes. School comes first? I know why I can’t say no, it’s because I can’t stand missing out. I don’t like missing out on anything!

I just need to stick it through for the next few weeks, then hopefully the workload will start to lessen. I have my hopes up. Oh. Shoot. My relatives are all starting to come and stay over for a while. Right now, my room is the only place in the house I can stay in without any distractions (actually, there’s quite a few … but I’m resisting). Usually, I have the office all to myself too…  bah. So sad, so sad!

I’ve finally settled with a demo reel idea. It’s not the best, but I think I’m going to have to stick with it, just because I have a little less than 6 months to work on my demo reel. If you’ve known me for a long time, you’re probably going to say that it’s very predictable that I’d do a beach themed demo reel. I just love beaches. I love painting beaches? I have one painting, in my room right now actually that I’m looking at… and wow. It needs so much work. I don’t even remember what my original ideas were for it, but Im definitely going to have to add more onto it. Sadly, it’s incomplete but framed. It was supposed to go in an art gallery for my school art show, … but I never finished. They still framed it though. … which is nice? I guess? I visited my old high school last week, my art teacher wants to see what I’ve done in 3D… I just laughed when she asked me to show my work to her. HA-HA.

Wow. So we’re a little more than half way through the year. That’s kind of scary because I really need to start working on my demo reel. Industry night was last week. It was pretty cool. Everyone did a kick ass job, I think. I’ll miss bugging some of the grads, especially when I’m bored. Haha.

Hmm…our XSI assignment is due on Thursday. I went to school today and yesterday to work on it, but …haha… I barely got anything done. Horrible. I’ll get it done, I swear. Our character model sheet is due on Thursday too, actually I have been working on that. … but agh I have to get my proportions right. What else, what else is due soon? Oh! Our project for career prep is due soon, so I got to start on that too. Bah. Lots of work to do!

I’ve been meaning to get my sketchbook from high school since September (everything I’ve done is in there!) I never really got around to that. Hopefully, it’s still there when I go visit on Friday. I doubt it though. I want to start painting again, but I don’t have the time. I should make time for it, because I have so many unfinished paintings from high school! Yeah, I’m such a slow painter… sometimes I can be a perfectionist? I remember one time I painted one part of my painting like at least five times because I either ran out of the colour (and couldn’t get the right shade again) or I didn’t like the colour. Yeah, my friend was annoyed at me for that. Pft, not like it was her painting anyway, right? I guess she got sick of watching me paint the same thing over and over again. Sad to say, but I threw away some of my old paintings from high school. Sigh. I regret doing that. I wasn’t thinking back then. I remember even using one painting, that I worked my ass off for by the way, as an umbrella (I was really pissed because I didn’t realize what I was doing… I was pretty sleep deprived at the time so I had no clue as to what I was doing). Yeah, I was really pissed off at myself for that.

I finally got a wacom tablet and pen. It’s actually fun. I’m starting to get hooked onto it.

Anyway, once again, I went to the mall almost every day last week. I was so stressed out. So… retail therapy?I need to find a better way to handle stress! My head was all over the place at work, on Saturday, my coworker and customers (the regulars) said straight up that I was a mess. Haha, losing my  composure? Don’t I always? Sometimes stress affects my mood, it did, but I think … I’m not going to let the workload get to me. I’m just gonna go with whatever I have.

So things haven’t been all that great for me, hopefully it’ll get better soon. This is the third time I’ve been sick ever since this program started. This really sucks. What the hell? I’m really pissed off. I just got sick right before the break ended too. Oh yeah! I lost my USB, so yeah, that really sucks. I didn’t really have anything that important in it.

Okay. I’ve been slacking off a lot. Yeah. I have a lot to do though.

I have a lot to do in XSI –I got to paint and constrain my mercenary character and grey block and bah, I don’t even want to think about it. It’ll drive me crazy.

BAH. I dont want to think about school right now. I think I’m still in break mode. I went to work everyday during the break though, I think I mentioned that before. Yeha, I wore myself out pretty badly.

I have to think about my demo reel for project portfolio… honestly, I don’t have an idea yet. Yeah. I’m pretty screwed. I know at this point I should have something. I’ll figure something out. I kinda do have something figured out, but … eh. I’d change it, if something else better comes up.

So I almost forgot my portable harddrive at school today. My ass was saved. Thank you.

 My sister’s weddding is coming up soon. Time to stay at school 24/7 because I’m pretty sure I can’t get any work done at home once the visitors come over and stay. That’s okay. I’m excited to see them. I guess. Oh crap. I have to help her with her wedding video whatever though.. by her wedding day. Then I have to go for dress fitting and shoe/jewelry shopping… ah! It’s supposed to be good times, I’m not supposed to be so stressed out!

Anyway, I really need to start working on my character sheet. Tomorrow.

I don’t remember if we’re supposed to blog over the break, so I’m going to… just in case.

Uh. I’ve been working a lot (not on school stuff). I havent started on my previs yet, damn… I’ll do that after. Haha. I’m exhausted. I can’t even find the energy to do anything anymore. Yeah, I think going to work all day… is actually killing me. That’s okay. I have Friday and Monday off.

So last week, I pulled an all-nighter at school. I felt like shit the next day. I kind of learned my lesson on leaving big projects last minute though.

Last week was also the open house, yeah, that was pretty neat.

I need to seriously catch up on my sleep. I’m going crazy. Gah. I am starting to become pissy again, it happens when I’m really sleep deprived. I hate that. I don’t even feel like completing my sentences or even words when I’m tired (dupy. Ha-ha. Funny.)

Anyway, time to focus on school. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.

So today in career prep we took the Myers Briggs test. Apparently, I’m an extrovert. Surprise, surprise! When I took that back in high school,  I swear I was an introvert. Actually, even in elementary school I was really, really shy. I can still be shy. I know that it’s probably hard to believe that I was shy, because I’m so loud now. Believe me, I know there’s still a shy Melissa in me…

Ummm… so, I’m kind of starting to slack off. Well, actually, I was working on my XSI stuff today after class. I’m just taking my sweet ass time with my Maya stuff. It’s due tomorrow though… boo. I have all day to work on it tomorrow though.

I have work on Monday… I was going to devote that whole entire day to my texturing assignment. That’s okay, I’ll probably head to school after work on Sunday … I don’t really feel like going out for dinner with my family this weekend. I have too much work to do! I am so behind on XSI. Agh!

Oh! So… we were assigned a project today in career prep. I’m in a group with Mona and Elizabeth. I belieeeve we’re doing sexism in video games. Yeah. That’s a neat idea.

So today I had my practice interview with Val. I messed up on one of the questions… it came out wrong! Ahh. And then I messed up at the end too, when she asked if I had any questions. I was so close to saying NO when I realized we werent supposed to. Anyway, I still messed up on that. That’s okay!

Half way through the program… crazy. After this program, I think I’m heading off to the Philippines for a while. I’m stoked for that. I haven’t been back to the Philippines since… I was 14. That’s 5 years now! I can’t wait to go to the beaches there are soo pretty. Really!

I feel really bloated right now, I don’t even remember what I had for dinner… Weird.

I need to go shopping for spring/summer clothes. Well, I don’t need to… but I want to. Oh! April… in two weeks, we’re getting our break. Awesome. I’m excited for that too, but ugh… crap, it takes a while for me to get focused and be completely into this program… hopefully that week off doesn’t change me into a slacker again. That’d probably drive me crazy.