1. State of the Art, Project Management and Documentation#

Nothing can stop curious minds

we may not speak the same first language
or come from the same hemisphere
but a shared wavelength
led us here

Week 1 Assignment#

From the Fabricademy Student Handbook:

Lecture Reflections#

“The Current State of the Fashion Industry” presented by Anastasia Pistofidou, Fabricademy Instructor (Lecture 1)

What I found most interesting about this week’s topic was the concept and definition of a “start-up”.

A start-up is a small company that does not have the means to scale up. Anastasia pointed out that “we do not necessarily promote “scaling up”, but there are different ways to scale up and we will talk about this later in this course.” Start-ups are a relatively new model, but one that is rapidly expanding.

I am looking forward to learning how the model can and already has been applied in the fashion industry.

What tools can we apply from this model? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each type of “scaling-up”?


Many design startups are innovating with biomaterials, but most people only hear about biomaterials when big brands do it, like Adidas’ launch of BioSteel technology

Documentation#

Step 1: Draft outline of the webpage content and formatting


Organizing webpage layout in Keynote slides


Designing my webpage layout in my notebook

Step 2: Gathering and organizing ideas
- Consolidated mood boards and streamlined the content that I wanted to include in my webpage


Creating webpage categories and starting to organize images for each


Grouping images to collage for my mood boards

Step 3: Translating the outline into GitLab
- Learned basic coding in GitLab
- Learned how to use GIMP
- GIMP is an image manipulation software that I will be using for the entire course, since I don’t have Photoshop.
- I used GIMP to crop and scale my images to meet the pixel requirements of GitLab.


Scaling my image in GIMP to the maximum image size allowed for GitLab (1000 pixels)

Step 4: Linking pages and images

Problems and Challenges#

I really enjoyed my introduction to coding and website building. It was a helpful exercise in starting to focus my ideas and think of my goals for this course.

I had one issue this week with publishing my website on GitLab. I thought creating a fork was necessary, then discovered it was not and so deleted the fork. However, unbeknowst to me, when you delete the fork, the Project still exists. I had unknowingly created a whole other project, and was working in this project. This is why it appeared my published website was not updating. However, at the last minute I finally realized the problem. The solution was simple - all I had to do was copy my code from the wrong project and paste it into the correct project.

Also, I think the communication and instructions for the webpage assignment could have been clearer as there were mixed instructions from last year to this year. Going forward, I would like the expectations to be clearer, and I will make sure to clarify all the steps.