For the GIF task, I was following my tutor's advice and decided to think about it only after I write my essay for it to communicate better. Once I finished my writing, I started thinking about what would best summarize the essay and would be easily recognizable. I thought about the various platforms that I've written about and my own experience with them. I remembered using Canva a few years ago when I was first looking for a summer job but didn't have a CV. Back then I was unable to use Photoshop or InDesign and making the CV myself completely from scratch or using Word just did not seem like a good option. I decided to google some design tools and came upon Canva which helped me build my CV completely for free which looked quite unique compared to the ones I've seen of the people I knew which were kind of bland and ordinary.
That's how I came up with the idea to make a short GIF showing how easy and quick it is to generate a design for yourself using such tools and how it all happens with a click of a button. It was quite an interesting experience to try using as little frames as possible and communicating such an idea.
To be honest, this essay task had quite a toll on me as I was really struggling to choose between the topics. Maybe it was because I found this unit so interesting and it became too hard to choose from so many different directions this essay could take me. At last, I found myself most interested in the digital topic as I am really keen on creating digitally and reading about developing digital technologies in general.
I do not have an explanation of how exactly I came upon this particular topic about design tools but it just came into my head. I decided to dig deeper into the development of automatically generating tools that offer you pre-designed templates for either commercial or personal use including creating websites, designs for your businesses, etc. I wanted to focus on how they work and why they are successful and sometimes preferred over freelancing artists or design studios that you can hire.
I would lie if I said I am extremely happy with the outcome with my essay as I struggled a bit to find adequate references to support some of the points that I have made. I wish to get better at researching either Google Scholar or other databases just to find the right references and examples for my writing so it would become richer. On the other hand, I was happy to explore this topic and I think I gave quite a solid answer to the question of how do digital technologies affect design communication.