Reflection
My First Blog Post - Up to this moment
By William Liu
Saturday, 03 October 2020 02:00
At Home | Sydney
This is my very first blog post on my customised online portfolio initiated since late November in 2019. I think the best to share is what I have been up to in 2020.
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has reshaped every aspect of our life, that also includes me. Fortunately, this has only reduced my frequency of going out, excluding essential purposes for going to the supermarkets, and I have spent more time making myself good meals and learning new skills.
Following my graduation from my undergraduate honours degree at the end of last year, I chose to reward myself a break in 2020, to up-skill my creative knowledge in 2D animation, photography, graphic design and website development. I have also subscribed to the LinkedIn Learning to help to boost my self-motivation in learning new skills. Here are my highlights up to this moment.
In February, I picked up learning Javascript and JQuery, I thought these two skills are vital to my passion in website development, where I could use them to create stunning effects and better integrate into the User Interface Design. One of my favourite design was changing the opacity of the page header after scrolling away from the top.
In May, I randomly discovered an Adobe Daily Creative Challenge, I picked Illustrator. I felt shocked to realise myself I had endless of skills that I had still yet to know since I first use the program while studying. I took a 9-day challenge to create space-themed illustrations, and I later received around 50 reactions through my Behance Portfolio. Later in the same month, I felt the honour to complete a brand and website for UNSW Future Vehicles, an initiative to bring UNSW’s three-vehicle teams into a single hub. Through the project, I can also give back to the university community following my successful experience with their Solar Racing Team Sunswift.
In August, I received my first-ever freelance commission in branding and website development for a new health care business in Australia. I can’t tell too much in detail at the moment as it was working in progress. I want to appreciate the opportunity introduced by a friend of mine who has a strong business background with extensive industry connections.
With all being said, so you may ask, “What is my next step?”. Well, I think I am now interested in exploring the User Interface (UI) Design. This decision is inspired by hundreds of excellent websites and prototypes I have seen online and social media. I have huge admire into how those crazy ideas or imaginations generated by those who spent the time to create experiences to their customers or fans and inspire to people like me and push me to think what I can do while incorporating both my creative and technical knowledge. The most important for such is I could parallel it with my existing skills in 2D animation, photography and graphic design.
I look forward to how my passion could unfold into something that I continue to love to do.
If you are coming straight to read my blog, feel free to explore my recently revamped online portfolio, built with GitHub Pages and Jekyll scripting.