Mission 1: Creativity

Creative Coding

My initial fascination for this was due to a memory I have of my 12 year old self messing around with some pretty CSS templates people posted online. So, I was initially surprised on how unpopular this topic was to the rest of the year when I asked around. Eventually, Cormac, Lusine, and I formed a group together. Although our goal was to playfully experiment with some HTML and CSS, I didn't realize that it was still going to be difficult.

The three of us discussed and agreed to make it our goal to do some research and be aware of various aspects of coding that exist today. 

Our end-product for this mission is to create three functional web pages that linked to each other. The idea was that we would each display certain website features while  having some information about a certain aspect of coding.
 We didn't want to go overboard with the writing because ultimately, it was about showing off the website features, not writing an essay. 

Here is a rough idea about what we were going to include in the three web pages: 

First page) Home page: A small introduction to our group as well as an introduction to the topic of coding. The page will contain a short explanation on coding is, the various types of coding and its relevance to the world today. Since Cormac had some experience with coding, we thought it would make sense if he introduced the topic. 

Second Page) Poem page: The idea for this page was that the user could interact with it more. Lusine was fascinated by the idea of basing it on a poem. There would be a button to turn on audio of someone doing a narration for the poem. In addition to that there would also be a relaxing music running in the background to complement the mood of the poem.

Third page) Gallery page: I offered to work on the last page of our website. What I had in mind was that it would resemble  a gallery page you may find online. However, instead of standard images there would be animations with an explanation on the more 'creative' aspect of coding.  


Of course, we only had some basic knowledge from our Web Development module in which we were just introduced to HTML at the time. The trouble was making it look less like a Word document and more like a web page. And this meant jumping 10 steps ahead of what we were currently working in our labs as well as diving straight into some CSS (which was an unexplored terrain for us). 

HTML & CSS by Jon Duckett was a great recommendation for beginners with explanations that are easy to understand opposed to the traditional programming books. However, the book is quite lengthy (almost 500 pages). With a short deadline around the corner, I couldn't rely on it too much as my main resource. So, this is where w3shools.com makes an entrance. It's short, concise, and provides understandable explanations as well as examples for the code you're trying to learn  which you can then edit and test yourself. I tell you it was life-saver without having to mess up your own code to see if something works out (or not).


After some research I hope to create the animations using a programming language I found,  known as processing. Processing is a free and open source software that uses elements of Java in a more simplified manner specifically made for artists and designers. It places an emphasis on visual media and be used to create drawings, animations and interactive visuals like video games. I may be biting more than I can chew here, but I hope I can go for something simple and yet interesting.