Tyler Rubis

Category: POSIEL

  • Peer Review #2

    3–4 minutes

    This week I’m reviewing Asal Ghaffari’s site Music Diary Through Politics. Opening the site, you are immediately greeted by the words “Discover Your Next Great album to listen to” in an easy to read capitalized sans-serif font. Underneath the heading there is a description of Asal’s intentions for the blog, explaining what motivates her album choices and her goals in reviewing them. This heading and description makes the blog’s topic very clear from the beginning. Underneath the heading, there is a section that shows the three most recent posts on the site.

    Perhaps the single most prominent visual feature of the home page is the colour palette. Travis Gertz, in his article Design Machines, said that in an internet full of bland, colourless websites, “I refuse to sit back and let our digital culture fade to corporate beige,” and it seems so does Asal, as her site’s background is a bold, vibrant pink, which immediately grabs and holds the viewer’s attention. This colour choice is a clear artistic decision that sets the site apart from much of the internet, and complements the topics of Asal’s blog which heavily features music that protests and rebels against the status quo.

    If I were to make a suggestion for the homepage, it would be to make a few tweaks to the latest posts section. As the focus of the site is album reviews, making the featured images in this section square instead of rectangular would show the full album cover. It also may make the site’s focus more clear if this section specifically showed the blog posts instead of including POSIEL content as well.

    Moving on to the site’s About me and Weekly Album Review pages reveal large banners across the tops of the pages, which add visual interest and draw the eyes downwards to the pages’ titles and the content on them, however there is a large gap between the page titles and the header which makes a large chunk of the screen appear empty. As the site’s primary content, the Weekly Album Review page is very nicely laid out, with each album listed with its cover and title. 

    Clicking on the albums brings you to Asal’s reviews which dig into the albums, providing context for the reader before going into a deeper lyrical and thematic analysis. As the central idea of the blog is the political messages in the albums, Asal provides enough background information that even someone who is otherwise unfamiliar with the events is able to understand the artists’ inspirations.

    One thing I noticed was that the site’s footer was not visible on the home page, and off centre on the other pages, even when the rest of the content was centred causing parts of the site to feel a bit lopsided. Another thing that caught my attention was that on multiple pages of the site were the “previous” and “next” buttons at the bottom, which felt somewhat out of place on certain pages. I also found that clicking through the buttons cycles through site pages, blog posts, and Posiel content, making navigation within specific categories more difficult, as I would have to go back to that page’s menu. That being said, the site’s navigation menu is well laid out with a pop-down menu on the POSIEL tab that makes finding course content very easy.

    Ultimately, Asal’s site has a memorable design and covers an interesting topic, which while quite specific, is still approachable even if a reader is not familiar with a given album or song. I enjoyed reading her analysis and reviews of albums I knew, and her posts have convinced me to listen to some new music as well! I look forward to seeing her site develop more over the rest of the course.

  • Saving Space

    1–2 minutes

    Development on my site has been a bit stagnant this week as I’ve been working on other courses and have a larger-scale blog post in the works. In the meantime, I’ve also been looking into alternative ways to add content on my website. So far, I’ve been uploading my photos to my WordPress media library, but this limits me to a maximum file size of two megabytes with a maximum of two gigabytes of storage. I have already used over 700 megabytes of this, and will quickly burn through the rest if I continue to import my photos.

     Up to this point, I have been using Elementor’s Image Optimization plugin, which compresses my photos to be well under the limit. The downside is that I have hit my free limit for the number of photos I can optimize with the plugin. I’ve noticed that as a whole, Elementor locks many of their products behind paywalls and makes them nearly useless without paying additional subscriptions, so I am working on alternatives.

    While I have found other optimization plugins, I’m also looking into embedding content from other sites. I have an inactive Flickr account that I set up from high school that I have been meaning to update, and this seems like a perfect opportunity to do so, as it will both let me have all of my photography in a single place, while also theoretically saving space on my website. This would also give me a way to directly add my existing short films that are posted on Youtube to my website. I’m not familiar with embed codes, so I will need to do more research.

  • Mini Assignment #3: Writer’s Block

    Mini Assignment #3: Writer’s Block

    Create a story out of media only: a sequence of images, an audio production, a video production. No text.

  • Growing the Garden

    1–2 minutes

    I’ve been working on a number of improvements to my site, many of which I discussed in my previous process post “Site Layout Planning,” such as organizing my POSIEL content into tabs for Process Posts, Mini Assignments, and Peer Assessments. I also added more to my About Me page, with a new section for my achievements, listing films of mine that have been nominated or selected for film festivals.

    I also began adding content to my portfolio page, though I still have a lot of work to do there. I’m struggling a bit with how to lay out my work, as I have a blend of short films, photo series, and individual photos, which makes organization a bit difficult. I want to maintain a visually interesting layout, and I’m not currently satisfied with the system I’m using, which is divided into tabs, much like my POSIEL page. I also currently only have a handful of photo series, and none of my film work added. 

    My website has been changing slowly but steadily, and thinking back to my first version of the site, just over a month ago, feels very different than it does now. It’s a very different feeling to a social media profile, where your content can change but the layout and format remains essentially identical. Tanya Basu summarizes the idea nicely in her article in MIT Tech review: “In fact, the whole point of digital gardens is that they can grow and change, and that various pages on the same topic can coexist.”

  • Imagined Audience

    Imagined Audience

    As I’ve been developing my site, I’ve been working towards the goal of building a space for sharing more details about my work than I share elsewhere. The audience that I imagine for this site is one that is interested in the films and photography that I post on social media, and wants to know more about my creative process and thoughts through my blog posts. With my goal of using this website as a “professional” portfolio, I’ve been trying to keep the design simple and well-organized and maintain this look across all pages and posts. 

    Especially as I work towards importing my previous work, I want my photos to be the focal point of the site, not simply a decorative element. Ultimately, I feel like my site should be more about my work than it is about me, with my photos and films speaking for themselves. My blog posts are not meant to be technical or necessarily provide explanations for my work, but rather provide a bit of insight into the kinds of things that grab my interest and inspire my creative decisions.

    I don’t really expect to have a regular audience, a public that I speak to directly. I like to think that my site is more of an open journal, a place for my thoughts and ideas about my work that are perhaps too long or dense for social media, but available to read for anyone who is interested. In this way, I feel like I can keep my Instagram and Youtube a place to share my work quickly and in a way that is easily digestible, while still being able to put out more detailed writings as well.