I continued my summer re-education process with taking online Lynda.com training on the foundations of layout and composition. Thanks to Lynda.com, I learn so much clearly when I watch these visual/ audio video tutorials. And I can watch these tutorials each day from home studio on my own time, day or night, weekday or weekend, while trying to balance doing artwork and husband/ father responsibilities. After 15 years of focusing on such a large variety of areas in video editing, cinematography, sound design and mixing, computer animation, computer modeling, digital compositing, and motion graphics, it is time to re-focus on my design essentials.
What I realized the most was that I knew these design essentials. I just need to focus more time on researching good designs and making an archive of such. I’m going about doing things way too difficultly for myself by trying to start from scratch with no starting point. Therefore, I am ending up with poor to mediocre designs. I also need to get more feedback on these designs to make sure everything is ready to publish.
I have learned about a lot of my mistakes. For example, “It’s a common mistake to work on a layout, feel that something is wrong and add something to fix it.”
This is where the summer is a critical time for me as a teacher. I am able to use this “time off” to refocus my skills and re-tune myself. During the school year, there is simply too much going on. I feel overwhelmed and unable to take on learning yet another new thing to learn on top of the other fourteen new programs and tools to learn. Yet during the summer, I can find some peace and gain a new, undistracted perspective that I greatly need. And learning new things while not feeling overwhelmed is actually quite a joy! I love Lynda.com and all it’s giving me. It feels like I’m Popeye and I’m eating me spinach. I’ve been doing screen captures of the visual examples as well to help me retain all the visual information.
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