1. State of the art, project management and documentation

Hi everyone!

I'm so glad to start this year the Fabricademy journey. This is the first time for the Ziphouse Design Hub to become a Fabricademy Node. And it's my honour to start this course together with 4 beautiful ladies Elena, Valentina, Elena and Aliona.

From the beggining, this course seemed to me so great. I found it online some time ago and heard about it from Elena and Valentina, who participated in the Bootcamp in June (an one-week intensive introduction to the Fabricademy assignments). I liked the idea of combining different fields all together in creating new textiles. I realize that I could create a different kind of things, with more sustainable materials, learn about new methods and techniques, and so on.

First attempts

This week began with the introduction to the server, site, and communication platforms we will be using throughout our time in Fabricademy.

I was very anxious starting uploading to the GitLab because I have never done something like this before. It took me some time to watch and rewatch the Fabricademy 2022-23 TUTORIALS GITLAB with JULIAN GALIMORE to actually start making changes to my page.

First, with the help of Nuria Robles, our Remote instructor, I logged in and started with changing my name, and uploading the first random photo.

After that I gained a little bit of courage and started to take little steps in udapting my page.

Discovering new tools:

-  Mattermost => open source chat tool
-  Gitlab => repo like GitHub
-  Mkdocs => static site generator with markdown language
-  Nueval => evaluation tool to track progress and discuss feedback

Documentation workflow

I customized my Github webpage using Markdown. I was aiming to keep the style of my page very clear and omogenuous, with the hint of fresh color. Here are a few customizations I used to create that effect. I wanted to continue to play around with customization possibilities, but for now I am quite satisfied with the result and will continue just adding photos, text and some symbols.

• Color primary: light green
• Color accent: purple
• text: Lato

Editing text

Here is a great explanation with do this and don't do this.

For example, to make headers in Markdown, you have to preface the phrase with a hash mark (#). Depending on the size of header that you want, you need to put the same amount of harsh marks before the header text.

Another very useful thing is highlighting something relevant in the text, the way of making a difference between the titles and the text could be to put all the text in bold and leave the rest as regular type.

So these are the code lines you need to write in case you want to use bold, italic or both:

· To make phrases in bold: You need to surround words with two asterisks ( ** )

· To make a phrase italic: You need to surround words with an underscore ( _ )

· To make a phrase both bold & italic: You need to mix the two previous ones, surround the words with the asterisks & the underscores (**_)

There you can find answers not only for basic editing issues, but also for the extended syntax like:

• [x] Tables
• [x] Alignment
• [ ] Formatting Text in Tables
• [ ] Fenced Code Blocks
• [ ] Footnotes
• [ ] Heading IDs
• [ ] Definition Lists
• [ ] Strikethrough
• [x] Task Lists
• [x] Emoji
• [ ] Highlight
• [ ] Subscript
• [ ] Automatic URL Linking

Adding images and video

Images

To make collages and resize the photos I used from the beginning Photoshop. Here is a template¹ I created to make the photos for all the assignments display, just to look the same. It was really a funny adventure to get the right size of the pictures. Most of them were too big and needed around 3 times to resize and save. Only after some weeks I found more practical to use for making the collages the Canva app and to get the needed size with the TinyPNG site.

After resizing and compressing I have uploaded the photos to my GitLab. There are different maps for each week of photos, files and text.

It was not so familiar from the begining with the uploading of things. I'm definitely more a made-by-hand person, then the one that uses softwares. Even when making collages, I prefer to make it analog, touching all the textures and glueing the pictures by hand.

But it's 2022 and using the softwares is a must for an artist. After a while you just begin to enjoy this process of resizing - uploading - creating commit!

Videos

Here are some tips for adding the videos. At first look the code looks so strange, but it turned out that is actually very easy to understand.

I created an account on Vimeo and hopefully I will keep on uploading more of my working processes. You can simply copy the Embed section and paste it in markdown, then the video will be displayed with the width 640 pixels and height 480 pixels. And with the name of the video below and link to the Vimeo account.

Quite the same with the videos from Youtube. You just need to press the share button and then copy the text from the Embed section.

Actually here I found the channel of Loes Bogers called tactility videos of material samples. A beautiful selection of short videos about different materials and their properties.

You can also find here all the support needed to edit the page.

Tools

• TinyPNG
• Markdown
• MkDocs
• Material theme
• Canva
• Vimeo

Inspiration and research

My first step in research was to browse the pages of the Fabricademy alumni from different years and their final projects. From there I have selected a few that had similar themes and ideas near to my interests.

Fabricademy Final Projects 2019-20 - Juan-Felipe Fiallo - WeGoFar from Fabricademy, Textile Academy on Vimeo.

Final Project2 from Ana Correa on Vimeo.

Conclusion

This week was intense! Not only because I had to know all the important details about how to document my research, to resize and upload the process step by step. But because it was also an intense week at Ziphouse. Together with our team we had to organise the biggest fashion show of the year. There were really some sleepless nights before the final day.

I fell out of the course road just for a few days, that's why the documentation came with a delay.

Tip for the next weeks!

Don’t leave the work you can make today on tomorrow, otherwise it’s a mess!

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1. File: Photoshop template ↩

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Last update: 2023-03-06