It's a brand new week and I'm already exhausted. Team Lombard is still in first place! My team is great and we're having so much fun.
Today's topic was mostly marketing based. Lots of advertising, user interfaces, user experience, graphic design, and branding. Personally, I was really looking forward to UI/UX since that's a little more technical, but it ended up being about tricking consumers into spending more money. I really dislike this shady aspect of business. Businesses that are in it for the sole purpose of making money and not actually bettering something or someone is just not my style and I prefer to stay out of that.
Anyway, today's group project was a very involved graphic design and marketing challenge. We were given a prompt to have one company acquire another. We chose to hypothetically have Lyft acquire goPuff. This combines the ridesharing with delivery service that can compete with Uber and UberEats. I was tasked with creating a logo for the merger, and also an Instagram post to advertise it.
If you look through my GitHub repository in my Day06 directory, you can see the iterations and concepts I went through when creating the logo and posts. I played with colors and alignment and language with the logo. I ended up choosing the final logo with aspects of the Lyft pink and the goPuff blue. I played with different angles in the concept art. I tried to have the colors in our Instagram post match those from the logo but with a darker, nighttime mood. We chose Will Smith as a hypothetical ambassador. He and the goPuff fish are driving a Lyft car through Philly at night, making those late night snack deliveries.
We had a bit more time to work on our group projects this week. A little over 12 hours this time around. It was nice to have more time to put thought into our designs. I'm happy with what I made overnight. Overall, today I enjoyed the group project a million times more than the many speakers.
Due to the later due date, I don't know how Lombard is doing today. I hope we're still doing alright. Based on the amount of effort I put into graphic design yesterday, I hope we're still winning.
Today is a great day for me! It's a technical day about Python. It was a really
simple introduction to numpy and pandas and using Python as a way to show
data manipulation. It was very quick. I spent the training answering questions in
the chat and going over basic syntax and explanations. The presenters were doing
a great job talking and I didn't want them to get overwhelmed with the chat. I
know I tend to do so in lecture.
While I was really excited for Python and had an awesome time going through the training, the rest of the day was severely disappointing. The group activity was going to websites and playing around with the user interfaces. There was also a random part of the group project about talking with other groups to share points. Lombard street is probably gonna be kicked off our top spot, so that's annoying. I hate gross disgusting business tactics that have nothing to do with your ability or what you learned. The afternoon speaker talked about finances. I really dislike business and this really reminded me that. It's really a shame how that played out.
Due to the shady redistribution of points yesterday, Lombard was bumped down to sixth place. I ended up speaking to the person in charge and he said the original project was supposed to be in Python, but he got bored and chose the point game instead. So that's horribly disappointing. Hopefully we can get our lead back.
Today was horribly boring. It's another advertising day. Today we talked about targeted ads. I think the absolute worst quote from one of our speakers today was "Businesses exist to get customers" which I think is backwards and gross. I think businesses should exist to help people and not just extort them for money. This advertising and marketing game is getting into that gross aspect of using money to get more money that I'm not about. The group project was about spending money on ads and stuff. It was really boring. I feel like we're really drifting away from skills and just focusing on random money numbers and I hate it.
I honestly can't say anything interesting happened today. We talked with some people from Campus Philly who talked to us about what Philadelphia has to offer. As someone who's lived in Philly for the past 3 years, and lived outside of Philly for the other 18, I know my way around. It felt a little touristy for me.
Instead of a group project, we got out final prompt for our group project. It's a massive project about creating a product and a company surrounding that item. We had to prepare a slide deck with data visualizations, create a brand and logo and marketing plan. We had to plan out hiring. For the most part, one guy in my group took the lead. He had an idea for a flashy Internet of Things (IOT) smart coffee table that links to your phone and stuff. I'm an old fashioned CS guy who wants nothing to do with all these smart home devices, so I was left to graphic design. I'm not complaining.
It's the last day of the program. This morning, we finished up our presentation and chose a presenter. The panel was about leaving Philadelphia to go work in a different city, so as someone planning to go to grad school in Philadelphia, it wasn't too interesting. Lombard Street did not win, somehow. They said out presentation looked the best, but we didn't move onto the final rounds. You win some you lose some.
I am not a business major. I now know that as a fact. While I'm glad I participated and got the chance to learn some skills, I would never attend something like this in the future. I probably wouldn't have attended if I knew what I was getting into. I feel like they did present some good aspects of business, but also, they tried to gloss over some shady parts of business or make it look not shady. I'm not a fan of that. Overall, it was not my style. I'm a technical CS major at heart and it's good to remember that. My largest takeaway was probably the way I applied CS problem solving skills to business problems. I wasn't bad at anything they threw at me, it was just not interesting. Great job to kepler for putting this together.