Several things have been converging recently. I ordered Jane Bozarth’s beautiful book: Show Your Work. I also started following Nancy Duarte. And, most important of all, I had a request from a coworker and SME to sort of pick my brain over video creation after she saw my course trailer (which I hope to be able to share soon! – Waiting for official course announcements.) All of that made me really think: I should be doing more to show my work —illustrate my process —not only personally but also as a team player at work. Many of the side projects that I do, like creating course trailers or other marketing materials, are currently unique to the team, but I could add value if I showed the process to my teammates. It might not answer all of their questions, they might still need to come to me for clarification, but it would provide a place to start a conversation. Anywhoodle, I decided to take a step in that direction with Elearning Heroes Challenge Digital Magazines and Interactive E-Learning.
Getting over the Weirdness
I was a little reticent about this, firstly because I felt a little like a narcissist. I mean, who cares how I created this project? Secondly, I kind of felt like I was wasting precious video time. The first few minutes of the full length video is me trying to crop an image to my liking.(Don’t worry. It goes by quickly at 400% speed!) Thirdly, I really didn’t know what I was doing or what it should look like. I’d seen a great video of Kevin Thorn’s creation of the Jane-o-Lantern. So that was my reference:
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Last but not least, I was a little concerned about the ability of my computer to handle both my editing and recording. So I cut the recording after the first hour of development. I want to do more investigation into what kinds of projects people record and how long. I had a self-imposed time limit of 5 minutes (which I exceeded by a bit).
What You’ll See
There were definitely some benefits to this audacious undertaking. Most importantly, I saw and was able to articulate my process. I curated several different images beforehand but during the video, I’m searching for colors and fancy lorem ipsum generators that I know of (see a list of my sources in the original post) and I’m also constantly referencing my UI inspiration. Part of my process is to essentially create a lookbook of design inspiration for myself. I want to take this a step further and create an actual lookbook, perhaps in PPT or Pinterest, with notes on things I like. I also noticed that I referenced my first slide several times. In thinking further about why I did this so often, I think I can say that I was continually reinforcing that my look and feel was consistent. The third important thing I noticed about my process was, though I did do a little rough sketch of my design ideas at the very beginning, I’m constantly trying things on the fly: putting in pictures and then deleting them; trying several different fonts until I got the right fit. Thinking back to other creative projects, this is something I do alot. I don’t know if this is the most efficient way to work but it’s the way I work.
What You Won’t See
I was doing some serious multitasking in some of the pauses in the video. I downloaded a couple of different magazine previews on my iPad and was using those as references for design and user experience.
The Video
Here goes!
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