This week was used primarily as a personal tutorial class to help people with Webflow issues. I personally had not come across any major issues that I couldn’t fix with a few google searches.
I don’t normally bring my laptop into class as it’s large and a little bit of a hindrance, but now as I am seeing more people bringing one in I am beginning to think it’s more of a hindrance to not bring one in due to my inability to show my work and get live feedback.
My progress on my portfolio is going well so far, I have been finding it is quite simple to design my website but am fearful it may be because I am lacking either content or the ambition to design complex user interfaces. I know that as I reflect on this I do change aspects of my designs in order to ease the process although I think this needs to be revised.
I quickly designed some basic icons for my passions section of my website, I then didn’t use them as I thought they weren’t that good they felt too simple.
I saw these images on various places across the web and was inspired to create them using adobe illustrator I may add them in again later if the passions section feels like it has too much text.
I began learning this week about the business and marketing philosophies of Seth Godin. As always I use Youtube wherever possible. In his book Purple Cow he begins by talking about the 5 P’s of marketing.
Product, Pricing, Promotion, Positioning, Packaging
But Seth has identified another P. “Purple Cow” he explains what a purple cow is by asking the reader to imagine they are driving on a long open road and you see a regular cow in a field at first it is interesting as you don’t see many cows in day to day life, but after seeing a more further down the road they lose their wow-factor as you become conditioned to seeing them. This Godin explains is the modern advertising landscape, we see so many products that look the same that many just fall by the wayside. “The Purple Cow” is the one that grabs your attention among the herd.
I find this quite obvious really, he is saying stand out from the crowd, look different and you’ll get noticed but after hearing this I am left with the question “How do I look different?” how do I stand out from the crowd and get people to talk about my work in a positive way. This will take a lot of reflection and definitely a lot of user research. In today’s world, we have to make more niche products that are more remarkable and less average in order to get people talking. I think it’s possible for everyone to do so.
Godin explaining that it is safer to be risky was very inspirational I believe going forward I will keep this in mind and try to implement it in my designs.
