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Here's me!
Hi there! My name is Katya, and I am a junior at Freestyle, and this is my very first website ever!
The design of this website is meant to resemble myself and my different personalities and interests, as it is in fact a Self Portrait website. This website show's how I have very varied interests, portrayed by all the different stick-figured people, but when it all comes together, it is very simple, as am I.
The colors of my website, are mainly pastel shades and the dominant color is blue. I chose pastel blue because it is a very relaxing and one of my favorite colors. I love the simplicity of it; but the best part is that with a little twist the same blue can become intense and dark, just like my personality.
The music you hear on this webpage, is a song I created using an online tool, an Audio Editor, on http://www.aviary.com. The visual design of my website was not complete without music, so I sequenced the song to evoke a feeling of light-heartedness and simplicity, but if you pay close attention you can hear the low bass notes, hinting at a more complex theme behind the easiness of the song.
I am who I am because of my amazing family and friends. My family has made me a more accepting and happy person. My friends have also had great influence over me and I am a much better person because of them. I could have never gotten where I am today without either of them.
Here at Freestyle, I am learning new skills and working hard to combine both my artistic and technical side. One of our very first design projects was my Self Portrait Diptych; in it I exhibited two possible points of views that I have been struggling with; on one side I have crazy dreams and ideas that may not be very realistic, but they make me who I am, and make me happier inside. My other side was what society has entailed as the definition of success; the part of me that has begun to just focus on the realistic and disregard my dreams in order to fulfill the 'success' model, as someone who works hard and has a high-paying job, yet no excitement in their life.
My Illustration shows my best and worst quality; my adaptiveness. This is my best quality, because I have a tendency to cruise through different environments and never really have an issue with the transition. I can easily adapt to different situations and go with the flow of things. However this is also my worst quality because as I begin to change my personality for each of these settings, I can feel myself loose a little part of myself, and ultimatly this results in identity loss where I don't always know who I really am as a person, outside of any environments.
Although I'm only 16 years old, I have learned some things that I have really affected my outlook on life; these ten lessons I have learned, I have shared with you in my Podcast page.
My writing skills are still in development, but my Essay page contains my personal essay that I created for English class.
In addition, if you wish to see more on my view of the world, check out my photo gallery, where I compiled some of my favorite photos that i have taken in the past couple years.
In only a very short period of time I have learned how to create everything you see on this website. I came into Freestyle with a very limited knowledge about photoshop, and now I know the basics of garageband, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. I'm able to use the allegedly impossible Pen Tool, optimize an image for the web, mix music loops on multitracks, record songs in garageband, properly set disjoint rollovers, manipulate CSS rules to format the look of my webpages, utilize smart objects, use Live Paint Tools, and much much more.
Finally, I am very proud of my Self Portrait website; I feel like it is a great accomplishment to finish in only one quarter of school. I have really enjoyed the production of it, and ultimately, I hope you enjoy it!