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LILLIAN LI - HOUSE MEMBER

 SEMESTER 1

Semester1

BLOG #1

Week 9/9/2019

Aidan, Anahi and I set ourselves to the task of planning the mode of presentation for our house logo on the pod wall. After some deliberation, we decided to laser cut the logo onto translucent acrylic and mount it onto a nice piece of wood with stylish, chunky screws. We proceeded to select some wood from Miller's good wood cabinet after rifling through the regular wood once we decided on what acrylic we'd use. We didn't get any kind of physical product, as we spent the rest of the period searching for the proper screws, but hopefully we'll be able to test it out next week.

BLOG #2

Week 9/16/2019

On Tuesday, I worked on updating the website complete with a shopping tab for our scrunchies! I developed the scrunchy shop so products and be changed and added easily, so as the amount/variation of products we can manufacture change I can update the shop accordingly. I had a few things here and there that I needed to revise on the website and clean up as well. I had gotten feedback that the site was a little much to look at, so I toned it down by eliminating some of the patters and opting for more blocks of color over multiple busy images.
On Thursday I worked on passing all of the Propaganda safety tests. In order to get the website done as soon as possible, I bypassed doing any of the safety tests. Now that the website is stable for the time being, I could focus my energy into passing the safety tests and designing products! I didn't get super far—I only got to the vinyl cutting test—but I intend on finishing them up this week or Monday.

BLOG #3

Week 9/23/2019

The week began with collecting various requests and needs for the website from members of my house and compiling it into a to-do list for the week. The biggest task that took me well into after-school hours was transferring everyone’s portfolios to the website proper, which was suggested by Mr. Li in an effort to aid the overall professional polish of our website (and subsequently our
business’s presentation). Although this took a while, I’m happy with how it turned out and take comfort in knowing everyone is in charge of posting their own portfolios. It’s easy to do, but it’s time-consuming and if I were to be the sole arbiter of everyone’s portfolios that would be the only thing I have time for! 

BLOG #4

Week 9/30/2019

This week we had multiple discussions regarding our house’s direction, our aesthetic and our mission. These talks were pretty constructive and I left the week feeling as though we were making good progress in this start-up period. As far as lab work goes, we finalized our momentarily halted plans for our logo acrylic sign. After cutting the acrylic on the laser cutting (with a few technical difficulties we worked through), we decided to opt for two different colored sheets of transparent acrylic over a piece of opaque white acrylic. I also worked on passing more safety tests, mainly the Canon Pro printer and the silkscreen process. I passed the printer test easily. However,  I didn’t have the opportunity to take the silkscreen test, as learning the process is long and will probably require me to do it at home and take notes. But I’m planning on getting it done by the weekend of next week!

BLOG #5

Week 10/7/2019

This week was cut short, as I wasn’t at school for our last day of work for a field trip. However, I did get a few things done this week—primarily fixing up the website, silkscreen research and helping out around the lab. There were a few things Hannah wanted me to fix on the site, such as the positioning of a few items, some of which apparently didn’t save onto the site when I adjusted them two weeks prior. Someone also accidentally added a “member’s area” and an open-to-the-public blog, which took a little work to completely delete from the site. This most likely happened when they were trying to insert their portfolio blogs onto their portion of the website, although I don’t know for sure. In addition to working on the site, I researched the silkscreen process a little bit more, and since I missed the day we made shirts and mugs for the first time I’ll be sure to study over the weekend so I can get caught up next week. Additionally, I started to teach Hannah how to use the vinyl cutter, but we didn’t have enough time to get through the process so hopefully I can help her out next week if she hasn’t gotten to it yet. 

BLOG #6

Week 10/14/2019

Throughout this week Hannah and I developed our Trello board according to our needs and Li’s obligations. I used my experience with Trello from the Foothill Dragon Press and molded our model to accommodate Nova. I think the board is efficient and clear, and I hope it serves us well in the future! It’s definitely still a work in progress, but that’s fine, and if we run into issues with it the nice thing is we can always change it. My other task this week was to learn to use Adobe Illustrator in order to learn to make stickers, but unfortunately I didn’t get very far. I thought it would be similar to Photoshop, which I learned easily and am pretty handy at, but it really isn’t. The learning curve for Illustrator was quite a bit steeper than I initially thought it was going to be, but I’ll do my best to figure it out enough to make a mockup next week. We’ve also been having some issues with the site, as only one person could work on it at a time and we weren’t communicating when we would be on it. So this week we also established a system to ensure two won’t be on it at once. Hannah and I just wanted people to text when we’d be on the site to the group chat because it’s simple. Others wanted to create a spreadsheet with established times to use to site, or to sign in and out of the sheet, but personally I thought that was too complicated and unnecessary. I maintain that perspective, but I do think I could have been a little kinder when I expressed it this week.

BLOG #7

Week 10/21/2019

The week was spent working on a design to make into a product for the girl’s volleyball team, mostly. The banquet is coming up, as our season just ended, so I thought it would be nice for each girl to receive a goodie with their team and year, which the program has never gotten before. What exactly that goodie will be, from a sticker to a dye-sublimated bag, I’m not sure yet, but in any case I sketched out the design and lined it on Kelly’s iPad. I’m really grateful for her letting me use it the entire week! I need to figure out a different way to do it though, because it won’t do for me to steal her iPad every time I want to make a sticker. I felt bad using her stuff all week as it is. I didn’t get it completely done, but I trust I will finish it after spring break. Additionally, I got a job making grand opening products for my hair stylist! She’s about to open her own salon, called Bella Rose Salon. I pitched Nova’s services to her and she was completely on board. She emailed me her logo. I hope to start work on that soon too!

BLOG #8

Week 11/4/2019

The sticker design for the volleyball banquet took most of the week, but I finally finished it this week! I attempted to do it on Photoshop or Illustrator on the Big Mac because I felt bad about taking Kelly’s iPad from her all week, but I ended up completing it on her iPad after all. I was almost done, and discovered it was a really good program for my purposes anyway. After I finished outlining the design I put it on my Google Drive and added the text. I made three separate designs—one for frosh/soph, for junior varsity, and for varsity—and included the year on each. I really liked how it turned out, and so did Hannah! I saved each as an SVG and I sent an email to Terry Weaver with the designs. After I finished with the stickers I started redesigning the website. I called it a “facelift,” and I didn’t really get very far but I intend to continue tweaking the site until I’m happy with it. Now that we’re a little farther into the year I feel like I have a better idea of our aesthetics and what we need for our website, and I wanted to reflect that on the site. Plus, I have a ton of issues with how the site looks in general. So I hope I can make it happen next week!

BLOG #10

Week 11/11/2019

This week was a short week, so not too much was done. Hannah had asked me to reformat each House member’s portfolio pages a week or two ago, so I finished doing that. She felt our site would appear more professional if each portfolio site looked uniform, and I agree, although I felt bad about going in and editing each person’s portfolio to make it look like mine. I sent a text to the House group chat informing everyone of the changes I made and what they could still do to personalize it, but I wished I would have included that I’m willing to work with the team to change the aesthetics of the website if they didn’t like it; it’s our website after all, and I don’t want to be a dictator. I’ll probably express that later. In any case, my job for the girl’s volleyball team was cancelled this week as well.  I was told they didn’t have enough money in the budget to buy anything from me, which I respect. I’m disappointed, but I still have my Bella Rosa Salon job. I’m really concerned about not getting enough jobs, though. I want to go out there and drum up business but I feel like I still need to get a grasp on the machines, which I have no experience with. On the bright side, a position opened up for a new minister and I was appointed the position. That means I’ll be doing mostly back end work, which is fine with me because I took to that job a lot anyways, what with the website development. I still want to get involved with more jobs though, even if my job requirement dropped.  

BLOG #11

Week 11/18/2019

This week I made a lot of progress on the new site. I can’t help but feel like this is distracting me from doing actual jobs, as I failed to meet the first deadline because I haven’t actually gotten done with any jobs, but I also feel like giving the House a site that actually looks good is important. On the other hand, following through and actually getting involved with jobs is the whole point of this class, so this was a bit of a rude awakening that I need to get more involved. Honestly it’s been really difficult for me to integrate myself into the class but I’m going to make a better effort. I know I can do really well if I put the work into it. Anyways, I’ve gotten a job from Ashley Pazen for her Christmas presents, which is a good opportunity to do just that. I’m going to get more details from her soon. I’m also going to spearhead the Soldier Project house joust, which is also exciting.

BLOG #12

Week 11/25/2019

This week was a short week, only consisting of a single class period. However, I did get some important stuff done and directly contributed to my goal of putting a solid effort into getting involved with more jobs. I did some design work for the Soldier Project house joust, and my house seemed to really like the design. I need to hammer out the specifics, as I had a lot of extra stuff I wanted to do to make it fancy. Like what’s our budget, how big should this really be, etc. I want to paint it and give it an aged look, but I suppose that depends on the time I have to do it. I also got more info from Ashley—she wants a cutting board with a to-be-determined design laser cut into it and a laser-cut metal plate for a bracelet. I talked to Aidan and Hannah, I’m planning on getting the design work done and enlisting either of their help for the actual cutting, so I can learn how to use it (and that goes for the soldier project awards too). After that, I helped Kelly and Hannah out with weeding their vinyl stickers for their job for Fitz. 

BLOG #13

Week 12/2/2019

After our financial literacy lessons, which began this week, the week was spent mostly on a cutting board job for Hannah. Anahi and Aidan offered to put my Soldier Project designs into Inkscape, and as I spent most of my time this week on the bracelet and the cutting board designs they finished out the project in my stead. At first, there was only one cutting board job; however, Hannah, ever the businesswoman, roped in two more customers using the multitude of designs we worked on for the first job, seeing as we didn’t end up using any of them (her uncle, the customer for the first job, ended up wanting omething very specific). So over the week we worked on the initial concepts, then I went into finalizing them. We were working on Photoshop, and to use that familiar platform was beyond a relief. I felt super at home and I think the designs turned out pretty cute!

BLOG #14

Week 12/9/2019

Hannah helped me with Ashley’s bracelet job this week, and we made a lot of headway in designing the cutting boards. As far as the bracelet goes, there were a few hiccups; some of the text Ashley wanted wasn’t going to fit on what she provided me with. So, we ended up only engraving one bracelet as opposed to two. However, the one bracelet offered plenty of obstacles. Ashley wanted it on Thursday, so I enlisted Anahi’s help in engraving it. However, Miller advised us to make a more accurate template in Inkscape, and as I’m not very experienced in Inkscape, I had to let Ashley know I wouldn’t be able to engrave it until the next day. Luckily, she was super chill about it, so during 2nd period Hannah helped me make the template (well, more accurately, she made the template and taught me how) and we finally engraved it. I had seen an engraving before, but Hannah gave me a very in-depth explanation as to how it works, which made me really happy. I don’t really know how to use any of the machines and I don’t really know how to use Inkscape or Illustrator either, so I deeply appreciate Hannah’s patience with me. Ashley was super excited when I gave it to her at lunch, and promised to pay us on Monday. She also let me know another family member had already ordered the cutting board from a different source, so we didn’t need to engrave on after all. After all that, we only made one sale, but it was my first project I spearheaded, and I’m proud of how it went. I needed a lot of help from Hannah, and without her I wouldn’t have been able to do it, but that’s the first step I needed to take: admit that I needed help with the machines and all that instead of avoiding the problem like I was before.

BLOG #15

Week 12/16/2019

This week was the most productive week of my life! It was the week before school got out for winter break, so I was in grind mode all five days to get our various jobs done. I finished up the cutting board designs, and spent extra time on the Eckard cutting board; that thing is honestly my pride and joy. I was worried the laser engraver would make the hatch shading look muddy but it turned out really great! I also decided I would make a decorative wooden sign for my best friend for Christmas. It counted as a job, since her boyfriend paid for it, and I’m really proud of how it turned out! I used Illustrator to make the design and then I engraved it on a nice piece of wood. And yeah we engraved everything on Thursday, much to the entire pod’s dismay—we used the laser engraver for the entire period + a little time after school. But we got so much done! We engraved all three of the cutting boards, my wood for my best friend, and two additional cutting boards for Kelly. It was such a cathartic experience to hold my work in my hands, and see my artwork become a physical project. I’ll be honest, I was really worried about DTech in the beginning, what with my complete and utter lack of experience, but I think this is going to be really fun. 

BLOG #16

Week 1/6/2020

This week I wasn’t there for two out of the three periods for DTech because I was home sick for three days. When I got back, I worked with Hannah to make a design for some La Conchita mugs. She thinks that if we make a “La Conchita Pride” sort of thing the people of La Conchita will buy it, and since she lives there I didn’t question it. We workshopped the logo for awhile in Photoshop and it was honestly kind of difficult. I’m not done with it yet but I hope to get it done by the end of this week. The primary difficulty was drawing the shells—it’s really hard to hand-draw minimalist shell designs! I know I could get some off the internet and trace it but that feels like cheating. I pride myself in hand-drawing everything, and I guess I’ll go down with that ship. 

 SEMESTER 2

Semester 2

BLOG #1

Week 1/27/2020

This week was pretty eventful—I FINALLY finished the new website (yay!!!!) and Hannah & I moved forward with our mug job. Since the new semester was upon us, I kicked myself into gear pretty quickly to get the new website I was somewhat putting off done by the end of the week. It’s by no means completed, as I hope it will be a continually changing and evolving work-in-progress, but the most important elements were finalized and I was ready to introduce it to the house! I learned a few new things about Wix in the final moments as well. I think it looks SO MUCH better than our old site, and although it could always use work, I already feel so much better about it. After and during the website’s development, Hannah and I moved forward with our mug job, improving on our previous mock-ups and changing things in the design that we had problems with last week. We also discovered the other mug press provided much more saturated and dark colors than the one we were using, so we switched to that one. I learned how to work the mug press, I learned how to use Sawgrass, and we made a good amount of mugs—all in all a productive week!

BLOG #2

Week  2/3/2020

We finished our La Conchita mug jobs this week. We got over 20 orders, so dye sublimating each mug and watching the machine took most of the week. In the meantime, I worked on updating the site and polishing it off, as I got into contact with Kathleen again and reopened a discussion on making some products for her salon! So I polished up the website so it can be the best representation of NOVA it can be when she sees it. In addition to some housekeeping here and there, the biggest alteration I made was adding a product page, which described a few of our specialties so clients can have an idea of what we can do. I also am going to connect our Instagram feed into the website, which I’ll do next week once I get the password. 

BLOG #3

Week 2/10/2020

With my part of the mug job done (all Hannah needs to do now is deliver them), I moved on to the next job Hannah had in store for me. The girl’s water polo team requested a shirt design from us, so I spent the two work days (it was a short week) working on that design. I also did some backend work on maintaining the site. I like how the shirt design turned out, but what I was the most excited for by far was my newest project: stickers! But not the vinyl stickers we usually make in DTech; they’re the kind of stickers I’ve always dreamed of making. I spent an evening researching and watching videos, and I discovered how to make stickers by printing them on special sticker paper (choice of matte or glossy) and then cutting them, either by hand or with a special machine. Our vinyl cutter will do the job perfectly. And as if the idea of making stickers with my artwork didn’t excite me enough, both of the videos I watched talked about their packaging, and that REALLY got me excited!! So I ordered some paper through DTech and started designing some stickers in the last 20 minutes of class on Thursday. I think this has the potential to make a lot of money (and make me personally really happy), especially since the three non-DTech people I talked about it to said they would buy a sticker set in a heartbeat. I can’t wait to try it out!

BLOG #4

Week 2/17/2020

Hannah and I adjusted the water polo shirt design a little bit after testing it a few times. Kelly had a few suggestions as well, so I made the alterations and we were ready to produce the final product! We ordered the shirts today as well. We also got a new laser engraver today! I’m super excited, it’s so pretty! I can’t wait to use it. Additionally, I did some more work on my sticker set. I’ve honestly been working on that non stop outside of DTech, and although getting the hang of designing stickers rather than full illustrations is kind of rough I’m REALLY enjoying the process. Can’t wait for more work next week!

BLOG #5

Week 2/24/2020

Hannah and I launched into production this week for the water polo shirts! The shirts came in this week and we finally got to work. There was an initial problem with the way the design showed up on the shirts, as they were a heather grey as opposed to the white we tested on so they were practically transparent on the shirts. We asked Mr. Li for advice, and we all agreed that the design’s colors needed to be adjusted to fit the shirt. So I made it darker and more saturated, and after a few tests we were ready to get into production. After I made the changes, I helped Hannah with heat pressing a few shirts, but the next period I had a scholarship art piece I needed to finish so she graciously allowed me to work on the art piece while she heat pressed the shirts. And, of course, any time I didn’t spend on the scholarship piece I spent on more sticker designs.

BLOG #6

Week 3/2/2020

Please use this template to create your blogs each week! To duplicate the template, simply:

 * click on template --> right click --> go to your portfolio page --> right click --> paste --> do your blog

To add a picture:

 * click on image column --> select "change column background" --> select "image" --> upload your image

REMINDER: these need to be at least 100 words! And make sure to add an image

REMINDER: please take your photos horizontally (landscape) from now on so it's not cropped weirdly.

Please don't change anything about the template, just add the relevant information in and change the font size as necessary. If you have any trouble, questions, or have an idea to improve the website, don't hesitate to text Lilli! 

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