I think that this project went pretty well, considering what our objective were to begin with. Sophie Foster and I said that we wanted to create a digital version of an advent calendar, and we did. I’m not going to say that it was easy, but I think it worked better than either of us anticipated. Normally, I feel like when I plan out projects, I overlook something, or some javascript or css doesn’t do what I want. However, in this project, I think pretty much everything actually went to plan. I thought that we would be able to use flexbox for the css arrangement, and we could. We thought that the particular organization of our components would work, and it did. That is sort of how the entire project went (which is a really lovely change from the normal sort of situation). We did have a touch of trouble figuring out how to do the design of the site, but that was mostly because our thoughts on design differ a bit. I think I found the font pretty unreadable when it was over layed on the tree, and I think Sophie thought I was just blind (which is a little true. I don’t do well with low contrast). It is possible that we could have added more (we talked about adding a little flurry of snow that fell when you opened a box, or adding a song to play in the background) but I was against it. I thought that sort of stuff would become annoying for a user really fast and feel like cheap design. Also, if we wanted to stick to the model that the physical advent calendars set, they don’t have sounds or snow. We compromised and went with a single bell tone when you opened a fact. In critique, our professor and some classmates mentioned that we could have used circles instead of rectangles and “rotated” the tree to show new days, which I think would have been a nice touch. The tree was actually sort of an unplanned addition—we knew we wanted a background image, but we didn’t know it would be a tree, so I don’t think it even occurred to us to make the boxes into ornaments. If I were to redo this exact project, trying to make the tree “rotate” or the facts into ornaments to offer a little more dynamic movement for the user would definitely be high priority.
That being said, I don’t think I would choose to do this project again. I’m happy it came together so well, but I don’t know how thrilled I am with the final product. It is fine, but only fine. I don’t think that we could have pushed the advent calendar idea that much harder, which leads me to say that if I were actually to completely redo the one-page react app project, I wouldn’t choose to do an advent calendar. It doesn’t have enough moving parts to deserve to use react—react was nice to use, but not necessary. I guess advent calendars are a little more static and boring than I remember from my childhood (maybe because an online app cannot give you chocolate, which is honestly the only reason to have an advent calendar).
The site is more responsive than I had hoped, which is nice, and I think the aesthetic is fairly honest to the idea. The components make logical sense, and we passed state up effectively, so I think overall I’d call the project a success.
We didn’t use any code sources, but our fact and image sources are below:
Ally's Process Blog 