Six Degrees of You and Me: A UI / UX Assignment: The Denouement

The last little bit about this assignment: I finished it a week early. Mind you,  I thought I was running behind and was furiously working on it up to the very last instant. I couldn’t get it done it by the 11:59 deadline so I stayed up past 3 AM to try to complete it. I wound up submitting it via e-mail and then collapsing exhausted on the couch. The very next day I get an e-mail from my instructor informing me that the project was due AFTER Spring Break. Several tastefully chosen expletives later I noticed that he had sent a  PDF all marked up with comments for improvement. I was able to respond to almost every suggestion he made (and he made a lot). Many of them were small details – a line too long here, a block of text too close to the border there. Some involved major flaws in my thought process regarding how I presented my material. If you read the very first post I ever wrote for this blog, I talk about an instructor who called me out for pencil marks on my work – same guy. But the thing is – this is an advanced class and one of the key descriptors in the project expectations was “a portfolio-quality attention to detail”. Ultimately, this was my most important lesson – he saw minute flaws I hadn’t even noticed. And if I want to do this professionally, I have to notice.

 

Here is a thumbnail grid of all 14 finished pages of this project

 

And here is a thumbnail grid of my original submission. Note the wordiness, the improperly rotated page, the spillover onto the metal bar on page 3, the poorly constructed sign overlay on page 4, the thin white bar that appears on the second monitor on page 7, the tightness of the text in the arcade game screen.I could go on – there’s something on almost very page. Portfolio Quality Attention to Detail. – Worth remembering.