Reflection on technology
I have a weird relationship with technology, I often don't really like working only with it. I'm a very very practical person, I've always found that I prefer doing physical work and then putting a design or some sort of work into a software. But very often even this is to the bare minimum as a lot of the time it will just be putting the image in, playing around with layering it over each other and playing with opacity. I never truly expand out of this.
But this module has sort of changed my mind about the definition of technology, whenever I thought of technology I think adobe software. I never really thought about how coding or similar methods could fit in even if its not design, I also never thought of AI to be a helpful resource but instead a bit of a gimmick, which quickly changed.
A big thing that changed my view on using AI was doing the coding workshop to generate 100 random pages and learning adobe aero workshop. I didn't quite respond well to coding itself, but something it did teach me was to think of AI as a quick google replacement on a process. Instead of spending hours searching on how to do something, its easier to quickly put it in ChatGPT, get a quick response and then if you encounter any specific difficulties to then use google to specify.
Its extremely broad but it gives you a general idea of where to begin.





An example looking at how quick it is to get a break down and examples from ChatGPT, it may be broad but at least it gives you a direct answer, google does not.
I think I probably missed a lot with coding as it doesn't interest me, but at least I tried it and found that ChatGPT isn't just a gimmick and can be used in an actually really useful way.
It is definitely limited in ways . BUT, If you have prior knowledge to a subject and or process you can filter out anything that chatGPT gets wrong.
I used chat GPT quite a bit in my random 100p brief as I wanted to push it a bit further but didn't really have the knowhow, I think this proves that you can push through without any prior knowledge on a subject, but said prior knowledge definitely helps as I ran into a lot of problems and frustrations when going in with none.

My experience prodding chat GPT to give me correct answers.
I think I could've definitely used this in my 6x6 response when putting an artwork into illustrator, as I wanted to get more comfortable using Illustrator but found it a very long slog to recreate a sketch into an artwork on illustrator. Now though that I've gone through this process once though I will know what to expect and how to prepare for it in the actual sketching phase.
The original artwork was also never meant to be for illustrator so I imagine there are ways I can make the illustrator process easier. Especially if I had gone in originally with procreate like I had planned to, as it would have been digital and easier to spot and change any errors.
Part of the reason why this took so long to draw up was I also had to mess with the perspective (which still isn't perfect but that's ok.) and change up a lot of the original drawing.




I went back out of curiosity to explore what this might've come out with and I got some interesting results, a lot of these things mentioned I haven't heard of, such as the smooth paths tool or the image trace tool.
Something I discovered though from this brief was an interested in HTML coding.
https://leeds.graphics/html-experiments/
I really enjoyed this side of coding over the processing way of coding, I'm not quite sure why, I think it may be because it was far more visual than the processing coding, it also felt a lot more straight forward and less like I was fighting the program and code. I would really like to some sort of website design and programming as I really want to set up some sort of brutalist design portfolio, very similar to James Singleton's site. I think it would be a really good portfolio site as its straight forward blunt and not over crowded.



I think admittedly some parts of this brief didn't particularly click with me, I think the Aero work didn't work with me at all, whether thats from adobe aero itself being in beta and seemingly being very unrefined or not.

I think looking back I should've been using adobe aero to debug problems alike to the workshop but I didn't, I however did really like my idea, it just needs more refinement.
I also think the coding work itself didn't click, but it did however lead to me experimenting a lot with chatGPT which is a silver lining.
Ultimately I am quite happy with how I've learned more about technology, specifically ChatGPT, a lot of what holds me back is figuring out how to do things, but with ChatGPT I can debug and poke different questions, this paired with YouTube guides and other resources is a pretty powerful tool to be had.