Hey guys, another week of the newbies initiative just ended, and the task for the week has expired so we’ll be looking at a review of the just-expired task.
As usual, we met during the weekend to first discuss the theme of the week which was “Hive Guidelines, Markdowns and Canva Tutorials”. 
So after the discussion, the task for the week rolled out on the theme “Hive Guidelines, Markdowns and Canva Tutorials”. As the theme suggests, the task focuses on dos and don’ts on Hive, examining practical use of the markdowns and getting newbies to explore Canva and design thumbnails for their posts. This report is an assessment of my team’s performance on the task.
General Team Assessment
Honestly, I’m impressed with the team’s performance this week, especially with the markdowns aspect of the task. I see that the team did their own research outside the discord discussion we had to equip themselves with some very necessary markdowns to give their posts aesthetic looks in terms of presentation. I even learnt some very new stuff like the fact that the justify and text alignment codes could work without adding an extra ”before and after text-justify or pull right or pull left. Also, I’ve always used the dashes and thought it was the only way to create a line break. I didn’t know you could three asterisks to make a line break until I read a team member’s task this week. Honestly, I’m proud.
What was not so encouraging about this week’s task was the fact that only 6 out of 11 team members submitted their task on time and you can see a table of the team members with their post links below. This is 3 less than the number that submitted that task on time last week. If we keep going at this pace, we’ll have no team members submitting their task in the next 2 weeks. Let’s sit up, guys.
| Newbie | Task Link |
|---|---|
 | Task 2 Post Here |
 | Task 2 Post Here |
 | Task 2 Post Here |
 | Task 2 Post Here |
 | Task 2 Post Here |
 | Task 2 Post Here |
Engagement-wise, team members are also not improving their visit to each other’s blogs. We need to remember that how you make friends not just on Hive but in the real world is by talking to them, and the equivalent of that on Hive is called engagement. Please guys, engage with your colleagues and use them to start building your circle of friends.
Some Observations and Comments
I’m not sure whether it was because it was easier or because everyone else was doing it, but I observed almost the entire team used templates in their Canva design. That is not a bad thing at all. I saw many of you pick templates and transform them into some very captivating and creative thumbnails.
However, when everyone is doing the same thing, doing something different makes you stand out and be unique. It’s totally fine that you use a template. But starting your design from scratch would make your stand out and possibly be the one thing that could sway a curator’s mind into selecting your post out of several others - because it’s different. So try to be different in a creative way with your titles, your writing style and other things.
Still on the discord activity, most of us aren’t active and it’s limiting our communication. I’m trying to get in touch with you guys for an important discussion on the way forward with the team, because the team work hasn’t been very good on both my part and yours and we need to work on it.
My thanks goes to 
