So, 2012 has come.
I didn’t really celebrate this year, just like I ended up not celebrating Christmas. It was too soon after being back from San Francisco. I wasn’t in the Christmas spirit, nor in an holidays-and-end-of-the-year mood. And well I also happened to be sick between the 23rd and the 25th of December.
But 2012 has come, and with it a lot more hopes and expectations. I realized how fast this internship is gonna go. Once it’s done, in just 6 more months, I’ll have to go back to Brighton, England and finish up my Digital Media degree. And after that, a lot of decisions will need to be taken.
So for now, all I want is to learn, improve, and prepare the future as much as I can. In terms of putting this into New Year’s Resolution, this means two things:
- Setting up realistic goals that I WILL be able to fulfill. I don’t want to do one of those crazy goals that you end up dropping after a week or two – the real achievements would be for me to be able to properly design and develop for the web. What I mean by that is that I want to be good, not only in designing a website, but also in Digital Arts such as photo-manipulations and things you’d expect to see on DeviantArt or 500px
- The second part of this is to be able to program/code/develop, either websites or apps (if possible) so that I an as autonomous and independent as possible when I decide to launch my projects. I also believe that getting better at coding and development will have a positive impact on the way I live my life, in terms of organization, mostly.
So here’s how I will plan to do this:
- First of all, I’ll try to read and consume more information regarding design, either design of objects and homes, or visual arts and websites.
- Then, obviously I’ll have to get my hands dirty in Visual Graphics and Design. This means spending a lot of time doing tutorials online.
- To add another layer of difficulty, I want my learning of design to reflect my current philosophy that my lifestyle and apps must be well-designed. In other words, I want to add another level by forcing myself to learn and be good at Pixelmator rather than Photoshop. This is a personal choice (of course) that an app that is both well designed, tailored for the Mac and developed by an independent small company must be supported.
- The development part will happen through two different websites (at least for now): the first one is called CodeAcademy, and is about learning through lessons, small exercises, and trials & errors. They even came up with an idea to help people use Coding as their New Year’s Resolution (that’s really what triggered me to go full gear on to trying to improve at coding/developing/programming.) It’s called Code Year, and you should definitely check it out!
- The second is called TreeHouse and seems to have much more to learn than Code Academy. On the HUGE plus side, they have three different courses: development for iOS (iPhone/iPad), Web Design, and Web Development. The downside of this is that it is paid, unlike CodeAcademy, but they’re rolling out a new offer for student, which I really advise you to look at (at the moment you need to contact them, or you can wait until the info is on the website.)
Here are my resolutions for the year 2012! I’m very excited, as you can tell!
What do you think? Do you think I can make it? Are you having resolutions too this year? Feel free to share it in the comments below!
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