Biography
By Ana Lee
I am a KU Sophomore who recently switched over from the School of Business to the School of Journalism, and I am considering turning my WGSS Minor into a Major or double-Minoring in EALC.
I have always been fascinated by the sociopolitical effects and implications of cultural perceptions towards presentation, identity, and community, especially in relation to ethnic heritage and global history
I plan to work in the field of Digital Marketing, hopefully something tangential to creative design and/or public relations.
I am fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese. I have over five years of experience in graphics design, customer sales, management, reception work, and bookkeeping. Visual art has always been my passion— I have run a self-owned freelance Illustration business since November of 2019. I receive commissions to create pieces ranging from portraits and landscapes for personal use to book covers for indie publishing.
In 2023, I co-managed a multi-medium art show developed by Sparks and Steam’s Gallery in Topeka, KS that was created to raise funds for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Through my freelance illustration business, I was contracted to create 15 pieces to be displayed and be made saleable at the event. 30% of all revenue acquired from our sales and admissions was donated to NAMI Topeka.
The way I have learned coding thus far has been through a good amount of trial and error. While still trying to get most concepts down, I have learned immensely from the interactive elements that coding makes use of. How else to design a website but by utilizing the unique connection a digital platform can create with a user? Part of how people are able to scroll through social media for so long is due in part to the designs of the platforms in the first place. It’s definitely something to keep in mind when developing your own website too, which is why I want to bring in some of my unique creations. Let’s see my first design, which is just a basic image and a caption:
Certainly not too difficult. However, some things become more complex, such as this:
| Name | Age | Major |
|---|---|---|
| Ana Lee | 20 | Digital Marketing |
While coding photos requires a lot of consideration regarding margins and floating, tables are in-line elements. Coding is never quite so linear – even in books do we commonly see tables that are computer-generated. The only way someone could’ve thought to design a table displaying either scientific or mathematical data was from their own savviness with coding.
Here’s another:
A very simple button, yes, but do take note that the interactivity of any website rests on these types of tools. Clicks, buttons, scrolling, zooms and minimizing — they’re all the essence of the web. A simple button opens an entirely different world.
Lastly, scroll up to the top of this page. This page has a menu bar, linking to different websites which brings one page in the context of many others. This menu bar carries the entire equation of linking my pages. Although this is the only page I have available for viewing, I have no doubt with the usage of HTML, I can open many different possibilities.
When designing a website, the “News” tab becomes your news — but the question is, how will you create that? How are we able to access information so easily and conveniently? That lays in coding on both the front and back ends. It takes a great amount of technique to set the whole thing into motion, which is why I’ve found a new appreciation for coding. This class has not only helped me design my own creations with a new approach to art; it has also shown me the amount of technique that website developing requires. Each piece is integral to the establishment to the entire composition.
Having drawn and written all my life, coding, I believe, has found its place into my canon of creation. I’m excited to use these skills in diverse ways after this class, and I’m just as excited to dive deeper into how we use the tools of HTML, CSS and JavaScript not just to increase our repertoires, but to provide others access to our digitally connected world.