For Project 3, I created a visual metaphor for the common saying “Time Flies”. Immediately I thought about a bunch of butterflies in the sky with clock faces to represent this metaphor. For my pattern, I added icons of an hourglass, alarm clock, airplane, and a butterfly to represent my metaphor, and I added it into my background to act as a blue sky.
Reflection
1. What did you learn? From project 3, I learned of a lot of more tools in Figma but mainly using plug ins. There are plug ins in Figma for pretty much anything but for this project specifically, Photos, Iconify, SkewDat, Pattern Hero, and Remove BG. It was really neat to see how all of these plug ins can do very different things but all are very useful when making a design.
2. What was easy? The easiest part about this project was coming up with a pattern that relates to the metaphor “time flies” because there were many things that immediately came to mind because both “time” and “flies” can be physically represented in many ways.
3. What was challenging? The most challenging part was finding photos that had a plain background so that Remove BG can work effectively. This project was relatively easy but this was the only difficulty that I came across when working on it.
4. How could your submission be improved? One way my project could have improved is possibly using a more challenging metaphor to represent through image because the one I chose was easy to visualize.
5. How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class? I really dont think anything can be improved other than possibly having every student have a different metaphor so that there is more of a variety.
6. How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios? I can apply the knowledge that I gained from Figma’s plug-ins in future assignments because they are extremely useful and makes it easier to complete the project, such as having a plug-in that automatically removes the background of the main subject rather than having to do it manually.
7. How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you? The reading that helped me was “Making up Metaphors”. Specifically, when the author, John Saito, wrote “Metaphors affect how intuitive a design is. If a design is based on something real and relatable, it’s easier for people to figure it out. If a design is based on something too abstract, there’s a good chance it’ll leave people scratching their heads.”. This inspired me to use the butterflies and the clock faces because it seems that it would be rather straight forward to figure out which metaphor I chose rather than coming up with a more complicated design that will have people wondering what they are looking at. https://medium.com/@jsaito/making-up-metaphors-4bcc85bc1039