talcarfas

[talcarfas]

Growing feathers while the world is on fire

The Sukkot holiday will soon be over and I feel like a dinosaur the day the comet hit going “Oh, SHIT!”

I need to finalize my rent in a new apartment, move in as soon as I can, finish the UI/UX course, maybe make a prototype, learn After Effects (when did this come up???) Finish the two weeks I have to do in my job before they fire me, finalize the divorce.

This is what I call “world on fire”, the only way for me to survive this is to evolve, to mutate, to change and become something new, something that can survive this hell.

In other words, like the dinosaurs, grow feathers and learn to fly.

I’m proud to say that I’m close to passing the 60% of the course, which is a small victory, but a victory none the less, I wasn’t sure if I’ll make it this far. However, I’m disappointed with this course.

I still have about 3 hours of video to go though before I finish the course, but I don’t think I’ll give it a score higher than 2, or even 1.5 stars. It’s clear that  HU Shahir knows his job and he’s more than an adequate designer, but he is not a good instructor: his accent is thick and some words are very hard to decipher, even after a second hearing and the transcript isn’t much help either. He moves very fast, I’m lucky because I know programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash, so I know how to use tools that he is using, but for someone new to this, It might be very hard to follow and might cause them to leave half way though. This is especially true when we get to the After Effects section. He doesn’t seem to be following any design rules.You need to have certain design rules so that you know why you’re doing the things you’re doing, the way you’re doing them: Icons should be a certain size so that they match the size of your fingers, things should be align so that the design don’t feel messy and unprofessional, yet it doesn’t feel as if HU uses these rules, It feels more like he’s eyeballing it. It gets really weird when we get to the part of After Effects, personally, I feel that HU uses too much animation. I don’t think that every button needs to be animated, but that’s my personal opinion... That being said, there is no explanation on how to export files or even save the file we’re working on. It doesn’t really matter, because the section after that touches on the subject of using Flinto as an app prototyping tool, but this is only a tool for iPhones an Mac users, I use a PC and have an Android, so I can’t actually use this program, It would have been nice to see other alternatives for none iPhone users. Plus, all the things we went through with After Effects are not used here(!) instead we’re using screenshots that are, probably, taken from Photoshop.

So that’s my rant. There is another course I bought called:  Mobile UI and UX Design by  Stone River eLearning that I hope will be better. There are still the books I need to read and I really hope that I’ll find a job in this very soon, maybe in UI/UX, maybe in Gaming, maybe in After Effects... I Just hope it will be some place that I can make a better salary. 

[talcarfas]

One pace forward, Half a pace back...

There are a lot of things I need to figure out, and I need to figure them out NOW. I’m about 25% into the UI/UX udemy course, and I need to figure how I keep moving forward... the next stage, the third stage should be wireframing, yet, this is a subject that is barely touched upon in the course. So I need to decide whether I’m going with the idea I had for the Vampire: Dark Ages app I’ve been working on, or leave it for now and continue working with the materials and examples that are part of the course. Another thing I have to do is, what I’m going to do next: Humble Bundle is giving between 4 and 14 digital books about Ui and Ux design to whoever donates between $1 and $15. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as divine or cosmic intervention, but there is a part of me that deeply wants to see this as a sign. Now, $15 isn’t that much, but right now I’m kinda in a place where I think four times before taking out any cash... and putting it back in my wallet. So I paid for the $8 bundle and got some excellent books like:  The Essential Guide to User Interface Design: An Introduction to GUI Design Principles and Techniques and  Communicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation.

Looking through these book makes me remember just how much I never wanted to be a designer but if this lets me get to a better place... than I’ll have to keep going and stop making excuses for myself, reading a 900-page book is not something that a lot of people do, so after I do it, I will know things that those same people don’t know...

I’m starting to get a clearer view of what needs to happen. Writing it down makes it seem much easier. This is something that is very much an Attention Deficit Disorder: when I have to much to do, I get frustrated, and making lists of everything, makes me get more control of everything I need to do. Hopefully, the psychiatrist I’ll be meeting soon, can help me out with something that has been a huge hindrances in my life and has never been taken care of.

So this is what I’m gonna do:

The Vampire app is gonna have to wait. I’ll have to do the course examples and then find a way to use what I've learned, and apply that on the things I actually want to do.

Right after that I’ll make the design for the app.

The third step is going to be a lot of reading. Starting with the two books I’ve mentioned.

All this means, like the title of this post, is that I need to take a step back and leave a lot of things that I’ve already made for the app behind. That also means that I’m gonna have to kick it into a higher gear very soon, but that will have to wait for tomorrow... for now, sleep...

[talcarfas]

I think I should be panicking

“Should”...? Who said I’m not???

I took about a  week off of writing and learning, and this is probably the worst thing I can do right now. I need to make more money, I need to find a new job and I need to be in  a different profession, this is what this blog is really about.  And yet, I get easily overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to do, and find myself doing nothing: looking for an apartment, finding a new job, taking can of the bills, learning new skills in UI/UX, taking care of my daughter... the list just keeps getting longer and longer. It’s holiday time now, with Rosh Hashana and Yom Kipor right after, I should be having a lot of time to learn and keep my head on straight, and then my Soon-too-be-Ex-wife tells me that she has an assignment for her studies and I have to put everything on hold and take care of my girl or clean the shithole of a house I used to call Home, that I’m going to leave in less than 3 weeks...

It all started when we had to go to the bank and split our accounts, I borrowed thousands of shekels from my mom, and now I find that I need more to buy stuff for the apartment I haven’t even begun to rent. I am, literally, penniless. I had to pay 4500 Shekel for her tuition, I still need to pay for her phone, I paid for her refrigerator... and what do I get in return? Another 700 Shekel every month that goes to her pocket. The only way I can get trough this mess is if I start to make more money. This is why I need to get moving with Ui/Ux design.

But this divorces has put me i such a stat of anxiety that I can’t find any time to calm down and start writing 

At this point I’ve started rambling in a way that I actually had to go back and delete about two paragraphs. I try to avoid editing myself in something that is, more or less, a memoir, but it was really crazy, and had nothing to do with anything...

So next post is gonna be all Ui/Ux related and getting my head back in the game.

Bye

[talcarfas]

So far

laundryI was kinda proud of myself after the first post. I don’t talk a lot, unless it’s something that I know a lot about, or it’s something that I’m really passionate about, so I was feeling pretty good about myself after writing so much.

Most writers would tell aspiring writers to write every day, a thousand words, five thousand words are not bad for a beginner, ten thousand words are amazing! Not every word has to be magic, not every line has to be perfect, just write. even if you throw it into the garbage later, just write.

So, as I was saying, I was feeling pretty proud of myself and wanted to see how many I've written so far...

500 words.

Actually, 518 words, to be precise.

That’s not a lot.

So I want to take this time and show what I’m doing so far to become a UI/UX Designer.

I’m taking a course a course though Udemy called: “Become a UI/UX Designer | Everything You need to know” that was created by HU Shahir. The guy knows his work, however, he is not the best person to pass his knowledge on. He has a very heavy accent and sometimes even the captions don’t help.

To begin with, he gives a short lesson about what is UI and what is UX and the stages needed to create an app design.

In UI Design there are 6 stages in the process of designing an app:

Goals and Target Users

Planning

Wireframe / Prototype

Visual Design

Feedback

Mockup Design / Interactive

The first two stages are passed by pretty fast in the course, and the third stage isn’t touched on at all. This might be a problem for someone new to design since some people might think that Visual Design and Design are the same thing. They are not. If you don’t know what screen comes up after your Login page, If you don’t know how many pages you’re going to have, moving straight to Visual Design might cause confusion and frustration. This happened to me when I was trying to make a game when I was learning Game Design, and i”m pretty sure it can happened now, So lets do this Step-by-Step and Stage-by-Stage so I can have more control on the project and know the exact thing I need to do next.

Goals and Target Users

I am a Tabletop Game Roleplayer, One of my favorite games is Vampire: the Masquerade by White Wolf. If you don’t know what Vampire: the Masquerade (or V:tM) is, here’s a short explanation: Role Playing Game, or RPG, is a game that has a group of players and each player has his/her own character with his/her own abilities and attributes. One of the player is the Game master (or Dungeon Master for D&D, or Storyteller in the case of V:tM) who is the narrator, director and rules lawyer, who takes the characters through a story of his/her own making or a ready-made storyline created by the company that made the game.

Vampire: the Masquerade is unique in this gaming genre in that the setting is very close to our world, and unlike most games where you play a hero, here you play a monster, a Vampire.

For a very long time I’ve been telling my friends that I will be running a game set in the Dark ages, in Jerusalem.

I think it will be really Meta to play Vampire: Dark Ages - Jerusalem by Night, in Jerusalem, at night...

I’m hoping that one day soon, I might be able to do a twitch channel where I show this game live, only problem is, I don’t think that I have that good of a voice...

Back to the subject at hand: when I was running a game of Vampire with some friends I, as a Storyteller, had a big problem organizing every thing on paper and in my head. I was using a PDF on a tablet and reading from a notebook. If I wanted to highlite something in the PDF file, I couldn’t do it, which made finding certain things very difficult especially if I needed the information fast Also, if I wanted to add something that wasn’t in the book, I had nowhere to enter it.

So, this is what I was thinking:

I want an app that has all the information I need: text, character sheets, pictures and maps.

I want to be able to add notes.

I want to be able to read about a character, and if the description tells of a certain place, pressing on the name of the place will take me directly to the map and I would be able to put a pin on the map and add a description.

The maps will also be able to show zones where the characters might not want to go though.

I want to be able to create a chart and place pictures and names, draw lines from one to the other and add a few words about the relationship between these characters.

I want to be able to add notes or highlite things from the text that are in the book.

And finally, I want to be able to share as the storyteller information such as pictures or maps and be able to control the amount of information I share with the players.

With me so far? I feel as if this is a pretty clear outline of what I want this app to be. It‘s probably very close to what D&D beyond do, but the emphasis is more about giving the players and storyteller a better way to visualize what the storyteller has in his/her head and less and organizer of stats and equipment.

As for users: Vampire: the Masquerade and White Wolf have a very strong following. At one point in time, this company was stronger than D&D but since the theme and mood of this game is much more adult oriented, the game probably won't reach the numbers that D&D and Wizards of the Coast reach. That being said, the new 5th edition V:tM has just come out and is getting some very good reviews. It shows a lot of promise from old games like myself and new player who might want to play this game for the first time. This app is made first and foremost for Storytellers, that is why I am calling it Storytellers’ Toolkit, there probably will be a free version for the players, but the only way to actually use this app is if the storyteller in the group has the full app. I wonder if it’s possible to have a Storytellers’ Toolkit for the storyteller and a Players’ Toolkit for the players, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be.

For better or worst, this app won’t take the place of the book or the PDF files. If you have the app and you want to run the game, you should have both, so I guess you can download the setting at a bit lower price than the price of the PDF file.

So the answer is, the users of the game will be players who play Vampire: the Masquerade or World of Darkness games. that is probably a smaller group of people than the people who are using D&D beyond, but the group is getting bigger every day.

Right now, I am making the apps’ design with the Dark Ages in mind and the world of Jerusalem by Night in particular. Keeping it small and tight would probably make the end result clear and doable.

That’s it, so far. the word count is almost 1300 words, and that’s not so bad at all. Next step should be Planning, but I feel as thou it’s pretty clear what i’m planning to do from what I’ve written so far, so I’ll skip this stage and go to Wireframing but first, laundry, making dinner for next week and getting ready for my daughters’ first day of first grade. 

Good Luck to all of us!

[talcarfas]

Here I Go...

I’m going to try to do something new here. As far as I know, I haven’t posted anything ever on tumblr and I have only one follower (who probably hasn’t got a clue how that happened) so I’m not too worried about anybody I know reading this or finding something that is too personal. So why am I doing this? I’m trying to do a few things at the same time, which is, from my experience, not the best idea, and I’m adding this blog to all the other shit i’m trying to get through at the same time. Before I start explaining this very long Shit List, I guess I should try to tell a bit about myself: My name is Tal and for the last 35 out of my 40 years of age, I’ve been living (and still live) in Israel, even thou 35 years is a very long time, I still feel like an outsider and, after talking to my psychologist today, “Outsider” is something that easily describes me. Another word that I’m proud to describe myself as, is Father. I have a 6yo daughter named Daria which is probably the thing I am most proud of having. She is an amazingly creative, sensitive, beautiful, blue eyed, blonde haired little girl who I love more than anything in this world. Other titles that I have been given, or gave myself are: Graphic Designer, Game Designer, Writer, Song writer, Nerd, Friend, Atheist, Leftist, Pacifist, and very soon... Divorcee. i don’t have many friends and out of the few I do have there aren’t a lot of people I know who are married. I am the only person I know who is going through a divorce. So, yeah... that... I work at a very shitty adv agency, who shall not be named, with people who I despise. A few days ago they told me they are going to fire me, however, do to the fact that it’s a shit hole, people who know of that place don’t want to work there, and people who don’t know of that place aren’t professional enough to be a good worker there, so they need me, they don’t want me and they defiantly don’t want me there. 

This is where the title of this blog comes into play: After working in advertisement for about 11 years, with some of the worst people I have ever meet, I have turned my sight for a new direction - that of a UI/UX designer. It isn’t too far from what I’ve been doing the last decade, but, hopefully, this will be something with more potential  for a better job, better pay and with better people.

I am going to try to get a job as a UI/UX designer once the Jewish holidays are over (around the end of September). I am taking a couple of courses through udemy.com which I will be chronicling here. All this while I’m getting divorced, looking for a new job, a new apartment, fighting depression and trying desperately to be a good dad...

Here I Go...