This week’s prompt has us critiquing the design elements of a site we frequent. I thought I would examine the blog that inspired me to start my own… Aestas Book Blog Mauve Pagé highlighted the basic design principles as Balance, Rhythm, Proportion/Scale, Contrast/Point of Focus, and Unity. Balance: Aestas’ blog is very symmetrical, as the middle menu bar featuring specific book covers is even, three on each side. Her title/logo is also centred. This symmetry is very pleasing to me, I really like that feature of the design. Rhythm: Aestas uses consistent typefaces throughout her blog. She has the colour palette of black, white, and beige that she doesn’t stray from. She cannot have a more colour…

This past week’s lecture made me think more about genres. The question “are genres created?” was posed to the class. It got me thinking about my process of categorizing books into genres. I have always been the type of reader who would rather classify something under a specific sub-genre than use the broad main genre terms. I barely ever refer to a book as a fantasy novel. I stress whether that book is urban fantasy or high fantasy because both sub-genres are such different and distinct reading experiences. Another case that comes up for me is actually putting certain books into a genre was so difficult I started calling them an amalgamation of…

These past few weeks from talking to a stranger and from reading John Suler’s The Online Disinhibition Effect, I have thought more about the variations within myself in public and online. Out of everything discussed in the article I found the concept of Minimizing Authority the most prevalent to my online self. Here’s why…   July 10th, 2012 was the first time I interacted with a favourite author on a social platform (in this case Twitter).   Since then I have had authors like, favourite, retweet, and follow me on Twitter. On Instagram, I have received likes from them too. If you were to check my Goodreads friends list you would also see…