Week 1- Digital Story

Alaska in August

7 day Alaskan cruise: Tips, Tricks, and Recommendations

By: Alyssa Kolecki
9/5/18

For this project, I wanted to tell the audience all about my trip to Alaska that I took this summer. It was one of the most beautiful vacations I've ever been on and also one of the most researched/planned out trip that I've been on. I spent a lot of time looking up articles (like this one) with packing advice, excursion advice, and what to expect. I knew this was going to be a once in a lifetime trip so I wanted to make it the best that I could!

As I was working on this project, I knew that I had a ton of pictures to choose from (about 500). So I knew that I would have enough images that I would want to use. The biggest issue I had was using the free version of Adobe Spark to get my message across. I wish I had a little bit more freedom to place the images where I wanted on the grid or even change the font to something else. But I understand that it's the free version, so they give just the minimal. For example, I'm happy with how the grid below turned out, but I had to try out a couple of different images to get them all to look in that layout. At first, they were cropped strange and they didn't look right.

For this image, this is the header of one of my sections. There was an option to make the title larger but I wanted to be able to focus more on the background image and not the heading. It would have been nice to change the font to something else.

As far as the final product, I really like how the title image looks. I wants to pick something that was a simple landscape, but I like the movement of the boat because in my head it makes me want to look forward at what else I have to say in this story.
I tried to put my name in the next line, but the software wouldn't let me start a new line and I don't think it looked very good putting "By: Alyssa Kolecki"

I also like how the text appears as you continue to scroll. I was able to put the text right under the images that I wanted.

I tried to section out everything that I wanted to talk about so that it followed a specific format, and it wasn't all thrown together. I think that I took a bit of a different approach to this project than other people in the class did, because mine isn't specifically a story but more of a guide. Something I wish I would've done was be a little bit more specific. I was going to go through my records and find out the exact names of the whale watching tour and the zip-lining tour, but I wasn't sure if it would be too much. I think I could have made this guide even longer and put more pictures and more details about what I packed but I wanted to keep it a little bit more uniform and clean. Also, if I wanted to perfect this, I could've used photoshop to create different fonts for heading titles.

Here is a link for my story! I had a lot of fun creating this and I hope that I got my point across. Enjoy!

https://spark.adobe.com/page/ArFcYl431BghA/