How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Talk with others about anything shrine-related, be it presentation, content or something else.
Destinie
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How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by Destinie »

Has working on shrines helped you in other areas of your life or your profession? Do you feel like it's helped you to hone your skills and, if so, what?

I have this thought often and it's one of the fundamental reasons I keep doing what I am doing. Through working on shrines it has helped me to practice and hone my writing abilities, it's helped me to learn about coding standards and allows me to practice using techniques I have learned, and it also lets me play with new design concepts. The feedback that I get from everyone in the community is incredibly helpful and I take it to heart so that I can grow and become even better. I bring a lot of what I learn and practice here to my job every day and for that I am very grateful. :)
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by Robin »

Ways shrining has helped me:

WRITTEN PRESENTATION

I am so much better now at organizing and presenting facts, personal reflections, in-depth analyses, analogies, and research. I used to just go on and on for paragraphs without a tight focus on my point--it was all good writing, but all the facts and feelings were mixed together. Now I can separate them and make them clearer to understand, which helps my writing all around.

TEXT FORMATTING/USE OF HEADLINES

Jumping off my last point, shrining has also helped me learn how to format my text so that people might actually read it. The use of white space and bolded headlines to break apart long paragraphs help me keep focused while I read, and so I implement those ideas to keep my shrine pages more mentally accessible. Because of this formatting technique, I can now write more informational pages that help others in other areas of my life, too!

CODING, DESIGN, AND AESTHETIC

When I began making shrines, I wanted to achieve the type of design style that everyone else had--those perfect graphic blends, either atop fantastic three-column layouts or behind pretty iframe layouts (because I officially started designing in 2003). But I struggled from the start because I'm not gifted much in visual art, nor am I really much of a programmer; my learning curve was incredibly steep and still is, but I was still trying to build and design my own sites anyway. I spent a lot of time in those early years banging my head against the beautifully blended graphic wall, wondering WHY I could not learn how to do it, WHY even my best efforts looked like colorful barf on my screen.

Thankfully, along the way I found individual friends who taught me some handy tricks I still use today (even though the tricks are probably way out of coding date at this point, but hey if it ain't broke...). After coming to Amassment in mid-2014, I also discovered what design aesthetics I prefer (simple but elegant use of color, pattern, and images, plus heavy focus on content first)...and I learned I could embrace that as "my style," because there were so many different design and code styles represented here. It's made me more confident and less stressed about being myself and making my own choices about what I like--a very positive change, indeed.
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by Crystal »

This isn't really something I've thought about myself but I think one thing shrines has done for me is attention to detail. I'm always looking for the little things in order to improve what I'm working on and it has made me more likely to notice things others may have missed (even if I won't tell them that because eep anxiety).

My writing has also improved a lot too I think.
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by dubiousdisc »

Holy shit, I was just thinking about this the other day...

In the last few months, I've returned to making comics, and I've been noticing just how much the mindset of webdesigning has been helping me with that. When I make a comic page, I have to ask myself questions like: where should this picture go? How big should this panel be? How many panels should this action take? And I find that coming from a webdesign background is immensely helpful with this, since this is the same sort of visual problem-solving that I so enjoy about making layouts!

Because of webdesign, I've come to also include design elements in my illustration work - and working on layouts by thinking about their geometry and the visual weight of each element is essentially the same skill used in the making a picture with a good composition, so it's been a great gym for me.

Also, I have always had an interest in typography, but I wouldn't have gotten to work with it so much if I hadn't been doing it all this time with fansites. Now that I have to work with text a lot in the making of comics, I realize just how important this has been for me.

I've also been thinking that, if it hadn't been for fansites, I would have probably stopped writing completely! It's been great to have a non-fiction writing outlet, and, like Robin, I'd say writing for fansites has been really important to help me give a sense of purpose to the way I convey concepts.

More generally, I find that the entire concept of fansites - the writing and the reading of thoughts that people have about media, the things that people notice, the themes that they analyze and find interesting - have helped me a lot in becoming a better storyteller. I can be more aware and conscious about the themes that I inject in my narratives and think about where do they take place within the panorama of other stories and what is about them that intrigues people.

I'm sure there's so much more to say, but this is what I can easily think of right now.
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by nyxmidnight »

I feel shrine-making has made me able to write decent meta and thus enabled me to do my Megaten Philosophy Anthology project a reality, because before shrines my appreciation of things was mostly in the form of dolphin noises and keysmashes.
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Destinie
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by Destinie »

NYX OMG hahahaa! It's good that you feel like you've improved! Practice makes perfect :)

I love how everyone talks about how shrines really helped them with their writing and to keep writing. I feel the same way ^_^
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by Stefi »

Design, in general, has always a kind of outlet for me. A good amount of my family members are visually creative people, and we express ourselves that way through either a hobby or profession. I like to think that mking web sites has been really good for my mental health, haha!

That being said, I've always seen myself as a better designer than a writer. I come from a bilingual/bicultural family that emphasizes actions over words, so I sometimes I struggle to effectively communicate ideas and thoughts through writing due to my upbringing. However, I do think that writing content for shrines has helped improved my analytical skills. It's always been challenging, but a lot of fun for me at the same time.

Speaking of challenges, coding has definitely improved my mental endurance, and has probably helped my problem solving skills in more ways than I can count. I'm also not very good at it, but like writing, I really enjoy learning it!
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Emma
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by Emma »

It helped me get my current job. I had a writing brief for an interview, so I took an about page from a fanlisting (for a historical figure) as a starting point and then modified it to fit the brief. This job also requires a lot of writing and research, which are skills I've greatly improved thanks to shrining. And while I haven't had to do much coding or any design work as of yet, I know having both of those skills helped me get this job.
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by FandomSavant »

This will sound dramatic, but shrining has helped me emotionally. Like a lot. My depression gets me into funks where I lose interest in... well... basically everything. I also get down about not getting to write much anymore (I was a student journalist once upon a time).

Making shrines has given me something to focus on and have fun with. As a bonus, it also really helps me to write the essays/pages for the shrines. I feel like a writer again. :)

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Destinie
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Re: How has shrining helped you in other areas of your life?

Post by Destinie »

All these responses are so awesome! It must be true that practice makes perfect. ;) It's super nice to see and hear about how working a hobby like this can provide positive impact! ♥

@Patricia I don't think that sounds dramatic at all! In fact, I think it's wonderful. :)
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