Coming to a Close

My Final Reflection Essay:

By the beginning of fourth quarter, I was well into my creation process. I had already finished my Robotics and Red Cross infographics, and was in the middle of collecting information about the National Honor Society. One of my biggest concerns at the start of this quarter was trying to finalize what I was actually going to do with my infographics once they were all complete and printed. I was able to communicate with Mr. Winslow during third quarter, and he said that he expected my posters would be very useful for Step-up Day and Freshman Orientation. However, he didn’t give me any specific dates that I needed to have the posters done by, and I started to fear that I would be stuck in a similar situation to when I was trying to meet the last minute yearbook deadline. Fortunately, that didn’t really end up being an issue, and I was able to complete my four final infographics the week before my final presentation.

In terms of actually creating the infographics, they took a lot longer to make than I initially expected. I wasn’t quite so surprised by how long it took me to make the Robotics one because I figured that it was mainly because I was just getting used to using Illustrator again. Plus, it was my first ever attempt at making an infographic, so I figured it would take me longer than normal to apply the new skills I’d learned from my sources earlier in the year. This didn’t turn out to be the case. In fact, it seemed quite the opposite. The language clubs graphic was my last one, and I’m pretty sure that one took me the longest to complete. It took me several hours to make each individual food item, like the crepes, the macarons, and the nachos, not to mention the strawberries and bananas inside the crepes! If I hadn’t made the whole graphic in color right off the bat, it probably would have taken me at least another two hours just to go from a black and white version to full color – especially since many of the icons and items required more than three colors each.

I definitely found my favorite part of the entire creation process to be printing the posters with Mrs. Heaton. I had a little trouble finding a good day for us to do it because we needed to access the conference room in the library. Multiple times a tutor seemed to have taken over the room even when I thought we had reserved it for my project. It was critical that we made sure not only that we were printing everything in time for my presentation, but also that the laminator was all warmed up when we printed the posters – allowing us to laminate right away. Lucky for me, Mrs. Heaton is super awesome and was able to get everything set up for me on the Monday before my presentation. During my senior options period, I handed her my flashdrive with all my graphics saved as PDFs, and with a just a few customizations on the computer we were able to sit back and watch as my infographics came to life. I had become so used to just seeing one or two parts of each graphic really close up, and otherwise looking at the whole design on the small computer screen, but it was so amazing to actually hold my work in front of me and see what I had accomplished.

Over this last week I have continued to work with Mr. Winslow to make some plans about how my work from this year can be evolved in the coming years. I’d love to continue making these graphics for the high school over the summer or even in my spare time next school year. However, there are a lot of clubs at our school and the number continues to grow every year. Being realistic, I likely would not be able to make all of those infographics on my own. Because of this, we thought it might be a neat assignment to introduce into the Intro to Graphic Arts class with Mr. I. His curriculum already covers the general skills students would need to use Adobe Illustrator, so this could be a fun assignment offered to everyone in the class, or as an extra credit opportunity. Maybe someone will even choose to further my work as their own senior project.

Looking back on everything I have done over this past year, I’m really proud of the work I have completed. Not only did I learn a lot about how much hard work and time goes into making these kinds of graphic visuals, but I also feel like I have evolved as a person. I was essentially forced into becoming more outgoing because I needed to speak with people I’d never even met before in order to get information about some of the groups. I definitely expanded my problem solving skills while experiencing what it feels like to push so hard to meet a deadline and fail, and how to come to terms with that while searching for a new solution. I’ve always heard people say, “You know, in the real world, people aren’t just going to give you an extension when you can’t make a deadline. You do whatever it takes to complete that goal, even if it means staying up all night to get it done, and if you don’t make it, it’s up to you to figure it out,” but until now, I never fully understood what that meant. It just sounded scary, so I always got my homework in on time. I’ve also developed a stronger appreciation for other people’s work. It has been so rewarding to see everyone else’s projects come together after going through this exploration process all year. Like Matt said in his presentation, we’ve all developed a new uniqueness that has only served to make us stronger people.