Very postmortem note

Just for personal record of the process I am attaching an evaluation. Although nobody reads this blog, I want to keep on going with my ideas and as I promised myself, grow some more "trees of theory" soon.

I put my heart into this project and I will carry on, just for myself! I am planning to use it as a part of portfolio for my application for Masters degree, of course when I extend it and shoot all the mistakes (I discovered some after uploading the website; however, I decided to correct them at the same time when I add some new features to my jungle of ideas). But not to make you sleep, dear non-existent audience, here is bit more words on the issue of self-evaluation.


The project titled The Femininity Hills is a medium sized interactive website produced using such digital media tools as Adobe Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. My main aim was to create a fictional forest of ideas on gender and femininity where my audiences could wander clicking on different buttons. Each part of the forest was supposed to marked by a different composition created in Photoshop. From the very beginning I thought the idea of forest would be ideal for my needs. First of all, I was not sure which approaches I would take in particular in my research on gender. I have read quite a few books on the related issues and still feel that there so muchis still left to be said. Such a feeling can be overwhelming and I was often feeling stressed thinking about the amounts of material I would have to read in order to be able to produce an informed utterance on gender, femininity and sexuality.

I feel it is not necessary to provide a bibliography here as I was doing it regularly on my blog where I kept quite regular notes on my ideas’ development. I treated this project very personally, and was getting inspired very easily. I enjoyed collecting theories for this project. After first few weeks I decided to abandon my initial idea to deploy only texts I have already known and I moved into reading new books and articles. This was parallel to the core readings for my other module titled Language and Gender; it proved to be very influential in gaining theoretical background. However, looking at the actual shape of my website I am not sure if that was a correct approach. Although I touched a lot of different ideas and theories in my website I have an impression that I did not go deep enough with any of these concepts. This is certainly an idea that is worth developing and digging deeper as an independent pursuit.

Also the technological part of my project does nit leave me satisfied. I planned to produce far more complicated and sophisticated structure of the website, with more interactive attractions. Due to my mediocre knowledge of Flash I feel I achieved less satisfying effect. However, in terms of my own development I see this website as a huge step forward. Half a year ago I was not even able to think about producing a small banner in Flash andnow it is not a problem. I am sure that my Flash skills will be improving and that this website was a great breakthrough for my own development.

I had to finish my project in the very last minute and I clearly see that this does not help to structure an interesting project. For a long time I was putting off the actual production as I could not decide which format I should follow, as I described it at that time on my blog. The choice of a formula was a crucial step in planning all following phases and I am worried that if I have started it earlier the final product could have been much better. Just before writing this words I had a final look at the sites in the folders and I can now see that I forgot to place some important links and other elements which in my opinion would make this project worth more attention than now. As a result I feel this project is far less the amount of time and effort I put into researching it. I learned my lesson and now I know that I have to start the actual work much earlier.

However, although I feel that this website is not particularly good, I would like to say that I am happy with the series of digital images I produced for the needs of the project. Again, I see now that I could have considered some aspects of production earlier in time, however it is too late now to cry over the spilt milk. I showed my images to several people and got very positive opinions.

Probably, if I knew that I would not have enough time to produce a site including Flash I would stick with the photographic one. As I noted earlier, I treated this project as a personal challenge and see that I made some significant mistakes.

I hope that this will be my lesson for the future: to start planning earlier and not being complacent with doing some stuff which will not be used in the project anyway. This is what happened to my series of images I was very concerned in the beginning of the production. Now I see that my time management skills have to be improved and this will positively influence my future project.

I think writing an evaluation could be useful for my own development. I guess it will be good to review and rethink my ideas towards new concepts for extending the forest. I would like to shift more to linguistics and theories on sexism and exclusive/inclusive language and I will use materials from the Language and Gender module (module leader Susanne LaBelle). I want to keep consistency in aesthetic matters with the previous part.

NOTE FOR MYSELF: -insert links in the page on acknowledgements
- more music by Masskotki?

ok for now.