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SMAD 203 Course Overview

SMAD stands for the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University. 

Once you are admitted to the SMAD program, you must complete three baseline classes, one of those being SMAD 203. 

The course description as listed in the syllabus is: “Study of the aesthetic principles and practices of web and interactive narrative design. Emphasis on visual communication in an interactive media context.”

During this course, our first project was the User Research project. This project focused on a design question in which you must conduct interviews and form research to solve the problem and create an app Proposal. 

The second project was the Information Architecture project. The objective of that project, as stated in the syllabus, was: “Building on the User Research assignment, continue solving that design problem. Create a basic content inventory spreadsheet for your app. Determine the basic content organization and navigation structure for your app. Then use Axure to build a static wireframe for the home page that visualizes the information architecture and hierarchy. “

The third project was the User Story Narratives project. The objective, as stated in the syllabus, was: “Create a user story grid to brainstorm app features and value propositions. Define and explain 3 value propositions for your app. Develop 3 user stories based on your user research. Choose one of your personas and write 2 short narrative stories describing that user’s “pain” and 2 short narrative stories solving those pains with your app.” 

Next came the CSS Zen Garden project, which was our first look into how to use and manipulate CSS. We were given a blank index.html page to manipulate. We were told to edit color, font, and other similar details.

After that, we had our First Website project. The difference between this project, and the portfolio you are viewing now, is that we had to focus a lot on the HTML and CSS, given that we were given a template index.html file and had to manipulate it from scratch. 

The last project we had is the portfolio WordPress Website that you are currently viewing. It represents all the work we have completed in SMAD 203, and was built merely from a theme template that I picked to best represent the work I have done. 

Home page photo credit: Stephan Seeber (retrieved from pexels.com)