Post!

Post! Post often! Do plan to describe your current project work at least once a week. Special posts will be requested for milestones like design reviews and other assignments. Outside of those requirements we are hoping that you will post links to interesting topics related to the course, and that you will comment freely. Please try to include at least one image for each post, and videos are welcome too. You will have access to fancy features via the Visual Composer editor, available as either ‘backend editor’ or ‘frontend editor’, but it’s your choice.

Feel free to edit, revise, and update your posts, but please don’t delete them. The idea is to show how your thinking evolves over the semester. Yes, you can come back and correct errors, spelling and grammar, fix links and add media, but try not to change the basic content of a post.

Be sure to set a ‘Featured Image’ for your post; that’s another right menu choice when you are editing. Also, don’t forget to credit all the images you use.

Comment guidelines

Constructive criticism is an amazingly powerful skill. If you learn how to honestly identify the strengths of a work your career will zoom you will be desired as a team member, viewed as a perceptive colleague and appreciated as a supervisor. All of us can criticize; for some reason that is easy, but research shows that purely negative criticism is often simply rejected by the recipient. Bringing out the positive aspects is harder, but like any skill, you will improve with practice. Always start a comment with a strength. One trap to avoid is the ‘Yes, but’ construction: “Yes, your design has great structural stability but it will be too heavy to lift”. That ‘but’ is deadly. Instead use a ‘Yes and‘ form. “Yes, your design has great structural stability and keeping the weight down will give it good useability too”.

Some students are worried about how their comments will be taken, and prefer to comment anonymously. If you want to be anonymous, log out of the blog, and then use a fictional name and email for your comments. Pick one to use for the whole semester, and email it to the TA to get credit for your comment work.

Categories and Tags

Please select an appropriate category for your post. The TA will use the categories to find your post for a given assignment. Please don’t create any categories; email me or the TA if there is a missing category. Tags are a different story; feel free to add whatever tags you want to your posts, and go ahead an add new ones to our list.