This is a space for me (Taj Healy) to log my progress and learning throughout the semester within the Codewords course. I’ve chosen to log my progress weekly with summaries on the recourses I find, future plans, class work and issues I’m facing with my code.
(links to each week can be found below)
Reflecting upon my time in Codewords and re-reading my weekly updates, I’m proud to see how far I’ve come and what I’ve been able to learn despite having never seen code before 12 weeks ago. What I’ve learnt can be broken up into the basics of code and JavaScript, or the concepts and ideas behind how reading as we know it is changing as we continue to move towards mostly digital world.
Within the first five weeks of the course we were introduced to a range of concepts involving virtual worlds, the intricacies of digital reading and typography as well as the basics of coding in JavaScript. Some of the coding basics we learnt in these first five weeks included creating a canvas, drawing shapes, having what’s on screen interact with the mouse, animation and an introduction to preloading typography. Upon completing our first assignment and understanding how reading is changing I began to realise that designers play an important role in the future of creating designed and tailored reading experiences. The foundational coding workshops that took place in these early weeks have paved the way for my future plans to begin integrating JavaScript in my future design work.
Moving on through the semester we began to delve deeper into coding. This included learning how to preload audio, creating random results and paper prototyping / writing pseudo code. These all provided a great foundation for our major projects in which we were asked to publish a digital version of a passage on art and language to GitHub from a chosen reading. In completing this project, I referred back to our previous workshops. Some coding hurdles I’m proud to have overcome in order to complete our major assignment include learning textToPoint, carriage returning text, mapping code and resizing canvases. This was done with help from Karen ann who provided helpful explanations and templates that I was able to examine in order to understand why code works the way it does.
Being provided the opportunity to publish work to a website and seeing the work my peers were able to produce was not only exciting but a great learning opportunity as many of us had no idea how we would go about publishing work online outside of social media. Using GitHub to create interesting and unique websites is now a possibility for me that gives me an advantage over many other designers who will likely rely on subscription service website templates.
I greatly appreciate the coding and publishing skills I have learnt in this course as well as my newfound understanding of how reading and communication is changing. As designers, I believe we must adapt to understand the possibilities of what the future of reading may hold so we may continue to provide innovative design solutions.