Hello,
It's hard to believe we're already 5 weeks in — next week we'll be halfway through the course already ⛳ For now, we've got an exciting week ahead, including the start of our midterm work period! (And hello this week from both Ace and Elizabeth 💌)
=====
As the midterm is rolled out (and as content gets progressively more challenging), we want to remind everyone that we hold office hours every week! You don't have to have questions to come to OH — please come chat with us :~) This is a great time to troubleshoot personal projects, get fresh eyes on your work, or just talk about the state of design with folks on staff. We would love to meet the people in our community <33
To tie together the first 5 weeks of content, we are releasing our Midterm project! This project features open ended prompts in four directions—Branding, Illustration, and UI/UX for web and mobile. Additionally, you will have the chance to propose your own project and direction if you have an idea that doesn't fit into the three above options. Check back on our Slack or website tonight for more information about the midterm!
This week in lecture we'll start diving into prototyping on Figma! We'll go over the very basics—linking together different pages, then discuss more about specific functions for prototypes: adding different timing and animations for the transitions. We'll also discuss one of the most important things to pay attention to in design: accessibility!
This week, there'll be no specific homework; instead, work on your midterm, practicing the skills learned over the last month. As always, we will have office hours for anyone to come in with any questions or ask for help or guidance.
In this week's lab, we'll walk through some basic prototyping. First, we'll play around with some simple animations, and then we'll also cover some simple and essential interactions, such as clicking on items and dragging. Much of more complex prototyping we see in UI/UX builds on these basics, so this is a good starting point to concretely understand how prototyping mechanisms work in Figma.
As always, our Slack Community is open — join through this link! If you haven't already, please introduce yourself in our #welcome channel 💛
=====
All the best,
Ace Chen (he/him/his)