As part of my Producing Media for Learning course, I designed a small How To website. My goal was to create a few short tutorials for young girl hair-dos. In order to get my tutorials in order, I recruited a few friends to help. It was a blast to include some helpers and attempt to cover a topic that had nothing to do with my professional life. I like to think that if I were to have a side business, it would be in doing little girls’ hair at birthday parties on the weekends.
My Gurly Hair How To website was designed with fathers in mind, but could fit any audience needs: moms, older sisters, aunts, grandpa, nanny. You name it.
Design Approach
I used a website as a vehicle for the delivery of these hair tutorials. It was easy to find a website template and service to host. I used Wix because I find the content editing portal easy to use and good for small websites that are also mobile responsive.
Another design decision was to do 3 hair tutorials instead of 10. I had a limited amount of time to produce the videos, edit, post, and host on a website. Because there are only 3 tutorials, I added a few other sections of information. These two sections are Tips and Supplies. In order to make the website more visual, I took pictures of the supplies and added rollover text for more information on each item.
As for the tone and feel, I went for something short and direct. I imagine people visiting the website in a time crunch or while they are trying to learn a new skill. This situation almost always yields a more stressful environment in which learners do not want to read extensive descriptions to get the information they want.
Hair-Dos
Pony Tail – This one is a classic. Pony tails are good for sports, playing, and keeping hair out of your eyes. Also, fairly easy to attempt.
Pig Tails – Another classic younger girl hair-do. Pig tails are always cute and can work well in shorter hair with the same benefits of a pony tail.
Simple Braid – I consider this to be a Level 2 hair-do because it does require some extra concentration and dexterity. The tutorial covers how to separate the hair into sections and cross them over to make the braid. I included this Level 3 hair-do because I have had many people ask me to teach them how to do it.
Reflection
I believe this is one of my greatest projects because of a few things. The first is efficiency. I came up with this idea quickly, developed a process, and made a timeline for completion. It felt good to execute my plan because it was fairly simple and turned out well within the time limits I was given for the class. It is a testament to my project planning skills and helper coordination.
Second, my video production was better than on other projects. I did two camera angles for these tutorials. In the process of editing the videos, I further developed my video editing skills by using one audio track but two video sources for the same live action. I am appreciative of this experience because it took a good amount of effort and time. In the future, I would consider the time restraints of this in producing a video for a learning experience for a job or client. It indicates labor costs and design considerations.
