I loved this module! I took art class throughout high school, so concepts of layout and colour theory were all familiar to me and things that I was comfortable with. That is not to say I did not experience difficulties with it, but I was certainly a lot more comfortable with it than the ones that felt more technical (I'm looking at you, Module 2).

The results of exercises 1 and 4 are here, and exercises 2 and 3 are here.

I don't know if there is much I can say about exercise 1. Inkscape was certainly different than the graphics programs I've been familiar with, and although I think I will be keeping it around for the purpose of editing PDFs and the like, I am not sure I'm really a fan of it. It was relatively easy to follow the instructions to change the font and colours on the graph, though, and I managed to figure out how to make a legend even though the instructions did not really elaborate on that point. The notebook writeup for this exercise is here.

Exercise 2 was a lot of fun because I love fonts. I really liked Google Fonts and the font matchmaker game. I'm not entirely sure I did a good job with choosing fonts that go well together (I tried to pick a simple one and a more fancy one in the hopes that they'd contrast), but at least they don't appear to be blatantly mismatched. The challenge of the exercise came in trying to make sure my fonts matched and did not clash too badly, but also remained professional. Left to my own devices, I might have chosen the curliest and wackiest font I could find, but I wanted to keep professionalism in academia in mind, since that is likely the way I'd use what I'd learned in this lesson in the future.

Exercise 3 was trickier, even though it should not have been. I had made simple HTML websites when I was younger, and I continue to edit preexisting Tumblr themes for my own use, so using hexidecimal colour codes was nothing new to me. For some reason, though, I had the hardest time getting the tag in the right place, as evidenced by the slightly embarrassing amount of commits to that repository. Different sites told me conflicting things, and things would work at one point and then break at the next commit. I eventually asked my computer science best friend for help and she figured out where it should go. I thought I'd tried the solution before and gotten nothing, but I guess not.

Colour theory is something that was drilled into my head for four years of high school and in many elementary/middle school art classes before that, so I had no trouble there. I enjoyed picking out an obscenely ugly colour scheme for the example of poor colour choice, and I think I did an alright job of picking out a nice one for the good example. I used the Visibone Webmaster's Palette to get the hex colour codes - the colour choices are limited there and I know there are plenty of other options for finding hex colour codes, but I used to use it back when I was much younger and it just made me feel a little nostalgic. The notebook writeup for exercises 2 and 3 can be found here.

Exercise 4 brought more frustration with Inkscape. I really had a hard time getting it to do what I wanted, and the layer system seemed bizarre and arbitrary. I spent a lot of time just hassling it into selecting the item I wanted or to recolour something properly. I'm not entirely satisfied with the results I came up with, but I did my best given the hassles I was having. As for the poster itself, I wasn't really thrilled with the layout it already had, so I definitely tried to make a lot of changes to improve the format. As I mentioned, I'm still not entirely satisfied with the results partially due to Inkscape issues, but I think I would have also done better if I had more of the original material to work with when building the poster. I made a full breakdown of all the changes I made and why on my notebook writeup for this exercise.

For the most part, the concepts of visual appeal were things I already know, but this module taught me a lot more about the different tools available to me and how to use them. I ran into more issues and frustrations than I thought I would, but I managed to get through all of it. Hurray!