My answers!

  1. My name is Garrett Ramsey, I'm a senior studying computer science and finance.
  2. I've done internships both in SWE and finance, and am planning to work in the finance field post-grad. I've always loved the more creative side of CS, and decided to pick up an HCI minor in sophomore year. I heard great things about this class from peers who've taken it before, and as such, I'm taking this class to fufill my elective credit.
  3. I have a good amount of experience with HTML/CSS/JS. I worked at a startup doing full-stack development, during which I used NextJS, a JavaScript framework. I also did some work doing UI design with HTML and CSS. I also was a TA for CSE330 for two years, a class that teaches basic HTML/CSS as well as JavaScript/React.
  4. I hope to learn more about CSS and the proper way to acheive certain styles. CSS has always been one of my weaker areas in web development, and I usually would just try things until they worked without really understanding what I was doing. By the end of the semester, I want to be able to actually understand more about CSS and how it intertwines with HTML, and learn more beyond the basics.
  5. When designing on paper, it's much easier to take an idea you have in your head and translate it to the paper. For the screen, the same idea requires the use of an entirely different set of tools. Instead of a pencil, you have HTML and CSS, toolkits that can be as equally confusing as they are powerful. Creating a circle is a perfect example of this. On paper, you can easily create any number of circles just by drawing one. On a computer, that requires writing multiple lines of code, which can be a pain, but it will always be a perfect circle, and you can change its properties (size, color, etc.) with the change of a single number.
  6. KREAM Artist Page: KREAM is a music artist that I follow, and their website is a site I feel does a great job with design. The home page is simple, with a logo, an image and important navigation links/socials. It fits the theme of an electronic music artist, clean and futuristic, without feeling too out of place. The downloads page puts most of the emphasis on the album covers, making it more visually appealing than a list of album titles.
  7. The New York Times: The NY TImes does a great job with communication. They are able to replicate the feeling of a print newspaper in a digital format while also taking advantage of the upgrades that such a format allows for. There are live time updates for current stories. This allows for users to see the most prevalent info at any given time, an effective tool for communication that a physical paper cannot do. They also acheive this in a way that doesn't feel cluttered; each headline only shows a quick snippet of new updates, with the full timeline avaiblable on the article page, keeping the homepage clean.
  8. Gem.app: Gem is a website that I use for finding clothes, and is one that works well. It has a clean, simple UI focused on images, making it easier to both find a specific item you are looking for, or just browse for new items. It has an expansive filter selection to help narrow down by sizes, price, colors, item type, etc. It also compiles search results from numerous second-hand clothing sites, allowing for a single search instead of multiple.