Semester 1 Review

Now that I have completed the first semester of study for the course, I can look back and evaluate how it has gone.

The first couple of weeks were difficult for me, as I struggled in the past to settle into new courses and new routine. I quickly found that Steve had engineered tasks to help us fit in over the first few weeks, and I think this helped everyone a lot. It took only a few weeks for the class to feel like one tight unit, and I feel this has really helped the stability of everybody’s learning.

I think that I learn a lot about working with people from the first few tasks on the course, as it got me talking to people and discussing things in a way I hadn’t done so much on previous courses. When it came to starting the first assignment, I thought that it was going to be a daunting task. Using unfamiliar programs was hard getting use to at first, and the idea of having very strict rules for handing in the assignment formatted in the correct way was also a new challenge for me.

At some points during the first assignment, I felt that with some tasks I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing. I soon discovered from talking to others that these grey areas were being experienced with everyone, and they were also willing to discuss them with colleagues. This reassured me that I wasn’t the only one having to battle with making crucial decisions and then having to justify them.

When it came to handing in the first assignment, I felt fairly relaxed. I had managed either by skill, but more probably luck, to leave myself enough time to get all of my documents together. This left me with only a few small tasks to do on the final day before deadline, which I completed easily within the time limit. Although I had got everything done, I still felt anxious about getting all the technical parts of the assignment correct, something which I still seem obsessive about even now. Knowing that everything has to be right in this before anything else is assessable is still quite a challenge.

I was very pleased to have passed the first assignment, as I had expected that I would have made silly mistakes somewhere, or that I had not mentioned something crucial to pass the assignment. As soon as this assignment was out of the way, I had another two to do over the next few weeks. I found this a bit demoralising, as I knew things such as time management hadn’t been so good in the first assignment. This made me concentrate of getting it right this time round. Creating an overall plan for the run up to Christmas really helped me visualise what I needed to do and when, and started to relieve me of some anxiety.

Approaching the end of the second assignment, I could look back at how I had progressed from the very start of the course. I found that my design work was many times better than it was only a few weeks before. Any work I have done outside of college has also improved, as I now know to look closely for mistakes, and how to design in a way which is clear to understand. This is a massive improvement over what has only been a couple of months, and I think this will only get better as the course continues. I now have the confidence to try other programs, such as InDesign and Premiere, and apply the skills I have learnt at college when using them.

Looking back at my Formative Statement, which is the very first blog entry, I only really mention being able to use Photoshop. I can now add many other programs to this list, some of which we have used on the course, and other which I have used outside. I also mention that I would want to be a freelance designer. I wouldn’t say that I have completely gone off this idea, but I find working with people on the course adds a lot to the experience. It allows me to see other ideas and hear other opinions, which can improve my work.

If someone had said to me a year ago that I would be doing a course which I would enjoy, make lots of new friends and actually be able to cope with it all, I would have never believed them. A couple of months on this course has taught my infinitely more than I would have learn at university, which now looks farcical in comparison. As for the future, I just hope that everything from the first semester will continue to improve. There isn’t a single element of the course I haven’t enjoyed (except maybe presentations!) and I hope that this is a trend that will continue when we return after Christmas.

Keep on Plowing

As the deadline is only a week away, the main objective is to get both A3 and A4 up to submission standard. After last week’s despair at not being able to design a decent website layout, this was one of the main tasks of my self study time. I looked at Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think” book, which clarified what I needed to do for my design. I went to work in my sketchpad, and made a substantially better design than I had done previously. My design can be seen below.

In Wednesday’s lesson we had a production day, where I churned out substantial parts of my project, including the feedback form and site structure diagram. I feel that these both looked radically different from the first project, and that I’m becoming more of a designer each week. I felt proud that I overcame problems from last week, and created results which were far better than I could have expected. I hope that when it comes to marking my assignment, Steve will also notice the improvement in quality over A2.

Thursday was all about the template. Although most of A3 had been put into it, I still had fiddly parts like bullet points and captions to put in. A4 is currently being put into the template, and I hope to complete it over the weekend. My aim for the current week is to get everything ready to hand in on Wednesday, so that I can spend the day checking my work for any silly mistakes.

I think that my time planning has improved a lot over the A2 assignment, but I still do not feel as though it is coming naturally to me. I believe that with the production unit next semester I will struggle to learn Dreamweaver, as I have absolutely no experience with that program. The only way that I will be able to pick it up is if I put in a lot of time learning the program, and following tutorials on books so that I will feel more comfortable with using the program.

Recently I have been getting into print based design more than the web design side of the course. I enjoy the tangible element of print design, rather than the web design which I feel has less creative scope for me at the moment. As I am currently making a document for print in my own time, and have been collecting print resources, I feel that this is the direction I am currently heading in. This could easily change of course, as we start the web building unit after Christmas. I have enjoyed the A4 assignment task 2, and think I have learnt alot of skills from it by putting PARC into practice. My banners can be seen below.

The feedback groups for after the Christmas break have been decided. I am working with Scott and Mihrad, which I am very pleased about. I feel that Scott can bring an element of professionalism to the group, which will add an interesting new angle. I am excited by working with Mihrad, as he is a fellow Photoshop fan, and after looking at his banner designs I think that I can learn a lot from him.

Due to so much time being dedicated to the project, there isn’t a whole lot of outside work being done. However, avid readers will be interested to know that the Tony Benn website creator did get back to me (after a wait of several weeks). He basically said that he uses the Lycos web design tool, which is rather limited. He asked if I could give him some advice on how to make the website better. I have not got back to him yet, but will aim to do so over the weekend.

My confidence has certainly improved over the past week, and I am now starting to see the improvements in my design skills. I believe my outside projects are allowing me to become more familiar with the considerations which are being made in every piece of design work. I can not only see what decisions other people have made in their designs, but what aspects I can replicate in my own work. I’m hoping that this new level of confidence will show in the quality of my assignments. Roll on deadline day!

The older I get, the better I was

This week I seemed to spend more time learning what I couldn’t do, rather than learning how to do things. On Wednesday, I had to create the design of my website on screen. This would have been an effortless piece of work, had my initial design been any good. As I have never made a website before, I really have no Idea where to start. I don’t know the limitations of the programs, what people like/don’t like, or indeed anything to measure the quality of my website.

My design soon changed when nobody liked either the colour scheme or the layout. At this point, I really couldn’t care about designing a decent webpage. It seemed to be pointless for me even attempt to do so, as there was an immense amount I didn’t know, and everything I could think of was quickly resigned to the bin. I simply cannot design something for limitations I don’t know, programs I don’t understand, made out of languages I haven’t ever written.

I really don’t know what I can do to fix this, and to top it all off, I have to be able to replicate it in PageMaker. Having recently converted to the vastly superior InDesign, PageMaker isn’t so much a step down, but a vertical drop of a few thousand metres down. I will need more than Christmas to replace the hair being pulled out using this program.

On Wednesday, we continued with the much more pleasant A4 assignment. Steve made us create thumbnails under timed conditions, so that we would put ideas straight down rather than thinking about what we were going to do. I found that when the time got down to 30 seconds this exercise became pointless, because with so little time to think of something and get it down on paper that it just looked like a incomprehensible scribble, which isn’t really ideal to work from later on. After this was done, we drew up our best designs in neat. I felt that with the 3 minute time limit applied, it was still not enough time to do it to a standard I would be happy with. It almost feels like cheating because it takes so little time.

Doing all this quick design work reminded me that my artistic background was a very different place. In art, you can literally spend hours, days, weeks, even months creating one piece of work. Below I have posted a picture of a picture I drew in the first year of A-level. A picture such as this would have taken any number of false starts, reiterations, and several weeks just to mentally prepare to draw it. Although it’s rather damaged by time and PVA glue, its still one of the better drawing I have done.

This certainly isn’t the kind of detail Steve means when he says “neat”. Although I was never a good technical drawer, as my picture shows, it was always a good lesson in attention to detail. I believe I can spot infinitely more mistakes in it than anyone else, an important skill for any designer. Can I ever reach the same error detection that I learnt in Art?

I left on Wednesday feeling exhausted and frustrated. Everything I seem to be attempting to do is not good enough, but I can’t see any way of making it better. I feel as if what I am naturally good at isn’t being used, and that I am being shoe horned into designing stuff which I have no idea about. The integrity of my work is diminishing quickly, as is the faith in myself that I will at some point be able to design well. Do I really have what it takes to get through the course?

Strangely, this week has not all been about failure and frustration. Over the last weekend, I had some extremely good news, which heralded the first piece of professional /semi-professional piece of work which I will be undertaking. I emailed an online magazine called Auto Sim Sport about a tutorial on skinning which I have been writing in my spare time over the past few months, using InDesign. I though it was a long shot that I would be able to get my piece of work to tag along with this magazine.

I e-mailed the editor of the magazine and showed some screenshots of how the tutorial looked so far (shown below). To my surprise, I received a reply the next day asking to get it ready for the January issue. I still cannot believe that something I have designed will be distributed to thousands of people! It looks like its going to be a busy Christmas for me, as I will have to finish the tutorial which has been neglected for weeks due to assignment work. I believe this marks the first step on a long journey, a journey which will hopefully include passing my HND interactive media course.

Ram raiding Photoshop

This week was all about work, work, work. The majority of Wednesday was taken up with creating content for the A3 project. I had grossly underestimated how long it would take for me to do this, so as well as doing it all day; I spent a good part of the evening finishing off content.

As I had forgotten to save my image compression essay onto my flash drive, I now have this to finish off. It was frustrating that I could not finish this off, so I will have to time plan to do this sometime for this week. I still managed to fill up my study time with reading through my sketchpad, and gathering inspirational pieces, so maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

On Wednesday morning we had a lecture on typography. I found this very interesting, as a lot of the terminology I had come across in InDesign and Photoshop. A lot of the conventions, like only using display fonts for titles and headlines were common sense. Aspects such as the different width fonts that could be used were new to me, and I will be using these for the coming projects.

On Thursday we started, at last, to use Photoshop. Our task was to repair a damaged photograph, and Steve gave us some pointers on where to start. Interestingly, he did not recommend using new layers for each part of the picture when it came to colouring. This is not how I would have approached it, because I think that using more layers does allow you to readjust or even delete things if they go wrong. I understand that it reduces the file size, but .psd files are always substantially larger than their output files anyway. That’s just my two cents though, and maybe my opinion will alter as I become better at this new artistic approach to Photoshop. My efforts, as they stand now, can be seen below.
Throughout the day I enjoyed working with Photoshop, but also enjoyed discussing the progress with my colleagues. As I am currently making an unrelated tutorial on using Photoshop, it gave me an insight into what problems people come across when using Photoshop. These are usually simple things such as trying to edit something when the marquee box is still present on screen, or having the wrong layer selected.

For self study this week, I will be finishing off my compression essay, and working on my Photoshop picture. I am going to see if using my graphics tablet makes it any easier to use (if I can find any spare USB sockets that is) and I will also try changing the levels setting. I think this is the key to creating a good restoration, as I found mine was too dark and therefore lacked detail. I believe if you get this right, then you restoration will be a lot better.

Hi, my name is Julian; this week’s blog is on…

Presentations. On Wednesday morning, we were given a lecture on the correct presentation techniques. I already knew that a conversational presentation style worked best for me, as I have done presentation in English and Business studies in the past. This presentation, however, would have to be a lot more professional than that. At this stage, I was feeing confident that I would be able to produce a presentation, but on what, and to whom I would not find out until later.

We were each given a colour to research, and had a partner to work with. I was given the colour blue, and had to work with Chris Towell. I felt comfortable working with Chris, as I was in his feedback group in the first assignment. I believe that this allowed us to criticise each others work without fear or a negative reaction. This certainly made the process easier, and we collected enough information to give us some food for thought.

Despite blue being one of the primary colours, and one of the most popular as our research showed, there wasn’t a massive amount that could create a relevant presentation. I thought that some of the information was hard to fit into a web design context, but managed to draw out issues such as the symbolism of blue, and what connotations it creates. In my presentation, I made these the key areas which I would talk about, as I thought that the audience would find this most relevant.

Apart from creating our presentation, we also had to make a hand out sheet that was to be distributed at the end of the presentation. I believed that a very simple design covering the key parts of the presentation plus additional reading was the best way to go about this. My sheet was simple, but neatly laid out. However, I think that if I did this again, I would have been more ambitions with my design. We are, after all in a creative, communication industry.

After a quick lunch, Chris and I returned to the room. This gave us ample time to read through each other’s slides and handout sheet. This is something that I have started to do more often with classmates, as other people can pick up on discrepancies you may have missed yourself. Chris found that some of the font sizes on my slides were inconsistent, and these were swiftly put right.

At this point, I was feeling confident that I had everything ready. Although I had found the research quite tough to do, I had enough information on my slides and my handout sheet to give a good presentation.

At one o’clock the whole class went down to the refectory to wait to be called up to the room. I tried my best to rehearse my presentation in my head, and thought that I would easily fill up the time with my slides. Once people started going up to do their presentations and returning, the tension started to rise. It was an awful feeling to see people coming back from the classroom with clear signs of relief on their faces as they had got the presentation out of the way.
Word quickly got round that the only people we were presenting to were Steve and Diane. I felt that this was actually tougher then it would have been if we were told we had to present to the class. I don’t really know why this is, possibly because it felt more like a formal assessment rather than a lecture style presentation.

Chris was the first of the two of us to be called up to do his presentation. I feel that this put more pressure on me because I felt mine had to at least match the quality of his. I was the next one to be sent up to the room. This is when the tension really started to mount. Every step that I got closer to the room, the nervousness increased ten fold.

I could not understand why I was so worried, I thought to myself “this really shouldn’t be worrying me, but it is”. In the past, I have been quite relaxed when doing presentations, as I was in the company of people I had known for years. This was very different.

I entered the room, and said as little as possible, trying to keep the professional feel as high as I could. I do now think maybe if I had been a little more conversational it would have helped me to relax.

Thankfully, my file was still on my data stick, and hadn’t vaporised. I began my presentation and the time flew by. During it, I felt my voice warbling, which is always embarrassing and a confidence destroyer. I also started to stumble over my own words, which I hadn’t experienced before. This clearly marked this presentation as a cut above the rest, even though nothing really important was resting on the outcome.

At the end of the presentation, I was given feedback from Steve and Diane. To my amazement, I had overrun by a whole minute, but Steve had not stopped me because he said he was enjoying my presentation so much. This surprised me, as I thought the stuff I had researched was not of the highest quality. I was also waving my arms around too much, like some kind of traffic warden. This is obviously something I will have to stop doing in the future.

Overall the feedback was good. I do feel in some ways that I needed to control my anxiety more, which would have improved the rapport I could have created with the audience. I also need to learn to understand how time seems to become a lot shorter when you are doing a presentation and I should rehearse it more before I stand up and start presenting.

This was the first piece of presentation I had done since my initial interview with Steve. I felt that because I was in control of the subject matter at the interview, I could attenuate my knowledge because I felt almost an authority on it. With my presentation, however, I was given something which I had to research and present on, and this lack of control made if harder for me to have confidence in what I was saying.

I believe in the future I should learn the ad-lib parts better from the research I gather. This will allow my presentation to be more concrete. I know in myself that I like to go into detail about how things are done, as I like to give people reassurance that they are doing or feeling or thinking the right things. These are certainly considerations I will make for the next presentation.

Manic Compression

After a busy week of self study which involved much amended time planning, I was looking forward to coming into college to crack on with my assignments. On Wednesday morning, I arrived to find that my group had been decimated into the singular, so for the mornings lecture on colour I only had myself for company. During the lecture, I came across a lot of familiar terms, most of which was new to me. I found this theory more interesting than last weeks, as it contained lots of pretty colours, and I’m arty like that.

During the afternoon, we continued with our project work. As I had no one to be distracted by, or rather, I had no one to distract, I made progress with the A3 assignment. For this, I planned out exactly what I wanted to say in my comparative analysis. I have learned since the first assignment that you should get all your thoughts together, re-edit them, and then write your piece. This will reduce the stress and swearing associated with editing type while it is in the PageMaker template.

During Wednesday night, I had to design a logo for a project my Mum was doing for her computing Masters course. I had to create some logo designs in Photoshop so that she could show them to the client she was working for. As her course is based around the technical aspects of coding, it was OK for me to create the graphical parts of the project. One of my designs can be seen below. It proved to be a ‘nice little earner’, as my Mum agreed to pay my petrol money from now until Christmas. I think I may suddenly develop a taste for going on long drives.On Thursday morning, we had a lecture on file compression. I was fairly familiar with some terms, such as RLE as I use it for saving my motorsport skins. However, I use a targa (.tga) format, where you can enable or disable the RLE compression. I find that it reduces the file size to about 40% of its uncompressed .tga size. I also save in 32-bit (yes, it does exist, it is a 24-bit true colour image with an 8-bit alpha channel) so file compression is even more important.

Other features of the lecture, such as an explanation of how some compression formats works were very interesting, as I not encountered the technicalities of this before. This will certainly help with the A4 assignment on image compression, as I can now create a hypothesis and test to see if it is correct.

The A4 assignment could commence after we had done the lecture. I was looking forward to this up till this point, but then it slowly dawned on me that it was going to be a logistical nightmare. With so many things to comment on, and so many picture files to assemble, it is going to take a lot of work to get right. However, during our group’s feedback meeting Steve clarified a lot of issues which we were uncertain about and we could make progress in the remaining afternoon.

Over the weekend, I fuelled my latest fascination, which is creating movie in Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. This made the weeks lectures even more relevant, as I had been working with compression programs, uncompressed files, and codecs. For a 4.01 minute video, the uncompressed file was a staggering 794mb file. This was obviously far too bit, so again, using Jodix, I managed to compress the file into .mp4. The resolution of the video was kept the same, but the file size certainly was not. The final file weighed in at a featherweight total of 60.5mb. That is a 92% reduction in file size, with very little loss in quality. This just goes to prove that file compression is the king when it comes to making fast loading websites. The movie can be seen below.

Days in the P.A.R.C

Following the excitement of the last week, it was back down to hard graft this week. On Wednesday morning, we had a lecture on Layout Principles. This involved copying down five pieces of information for a business card, before doing some thumbnail designs of layouts. I knew the morning was going to be a bad one when I had written upside down in my sketchpad. And not for the first time, I might add.

This was compounded when it came to creating our own. One of the pieces of information was a phone number, and, with my brain seemingly in a “power saving” mode went into automatic, and told my hand to write my own phone number into the design. These were then put on the wall for others to comment on. Obviously, Steve was the first to notice, but reassured me when he said he had done it before himself. This mistake could have been summed up with a quote from my sister, that quote being “MUUUUUH”. After a categorical yet well deserved humiliation in front of everyone, we continued the lecture.

From the lecture we learned about C.R.A.P, or, for the more politically correct, P.A.R.C. This stands for proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast. These are the key elements of page layout, and must be used in the correct way to create good design. I found the lecture very informative, as I have not learnt about what the correct way to go about design is yet, and I believe it will help me improve my next set of screen designs. This is exactly the kind of lecture I needed, as I can now use some theory to justify future design choices, especially in the A3 assignment.

During Wednesday afternoon I had my feedback session for my first assignment. This explained, among other things, why I had to buy a coffee for John, but more importantly the areas which I had to improve for the next assignment. These included time planning, screen designs and recording influences in my sketchpad. During the evenings study time I took this on board and made my own long term time plan. This really clarified what needed to be done when, and I would recommend everyone else to create one. Now that I can see that I only have a couple of sections to do each week, I can concentrate solely on these knowing that I do not have to worry about the parts further on in the semester.

Thursday morning started with another lecture, this time on colour space. This is the process of recording colour for use in documents. I found that this clarified some issues that I have not understood from using Photoshop, like what the Pantone palette is, and what specialist palettes such as Hexachrome were for. I am only really familiar with using RGB myself, so my knowledge was certainly expanded into new and interesting areas with the morning’s work.

During the afternoon, I continued to work on my A4 project. I now feel that I am starting to learn the process of generating work, rather than just doing bits here and there. Having a clear plan definitely helps, and is keeping me focused and stopping me from worrying about if I can fit in the work or not.

In self study over the past week I have done a couple of creative projects. Firstly, I took up Rob’s challenge to create a Designer Republic-esque piece of design/art. I say design/art, as I believe it is impossible to say if each one is totally independent. This has been the subject of much debate in the classroom, as well as in the Designers Republic essay which we have been doing for the A4 assignment. Anyway, my piece of work can be seen below.


After doing this piece, I now have a better appreciation of how much depth the Designers Republic pieces have. Although I pretty much let my creativity run along on its own with my design, I now understand that the Designers Republic work takes a lot of experience with Photoshop to create a high quality result. I have only been using Photoshop for around 5 months, so I think it is justified if my interpretation is not up to the same high quality as the professionals at the Designers Republic. Irrelevant of the outcome, I still enjoyed the creative learning enlightenment.

In relation to next weeks lecture on image compression, I have been using different movie codecs to create a small video by using Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. Although not directly related to web or print designs, this taught me a lot about the importance of file size, and how a balance has to be struck between this and quality. I found that some formats were better than others, and that only a small change in bit rate could make a big difference to the file size.

Some codecs looked very good, while others produced huge amounts of ghosting, and usually this created colour blur as well. I finally settled for an .avi format converted to .mp4 format using an excellent free Ipod movie converter called Jodix. The file size difference between 34-bit sound and 32-bit was as much as 15%, even though there was not much difference in fidelity. I believe that grasping this balancing act will become relevant for creating images suitable for web use. Anyway, my video (should) be posted below.

One Trick Pony

After a half term where the workload mimicked the first half semester, in the way that the production of work greatly increased towards the end, it was time to return to college and proceed on the next assignments.

On Wednesday morning I arrived at my usual early morning time to a room which would be filled with anxiety as the anticipation of results grew. Within only a couple of minutes, I had already been told by Steve that my sketchbook was difficult to read. This did nothing to enrich my confidence, which was quickly ebbing away.

Steve outlined some of the problems that had been occurring throughout some people’s assignments, and as he reeled off error after error the tension in the room increased.

We left the room for a break at 10 o’clock, a break that could not last long enough.

When we returned, our grades had been stuck on the wall. Everybody gathered around and tried to find their grades on the sheet. To my amazement, I had somehow dodged the grammatical, academic and artistic minefield, and passed both modules. I even had to go back and double check, in case from my crowded, off axis viewing angle I had somehow read another person's results.

After a momentary release of pressure from completing and passing the first assignment, it was only a matter of minutes before the pressure was building again, as we read through the next assignment. I felt a certain amount of frustration that I had just finished one web plan, only to go straight into another which would need twice as much work. We had also been told to try and get the next level up grades, which only quadrupled the work, as well as the margin for error.

Wednesday afternoon was spent on time planning for the next few weeks work. I hoped to create a better time plan, and to actually stick to it this time. I know that if I have to achieve the next grades up, I will have to be working flat out over the next few weeks.

On Wednesday night, I decided to relax with some music and Photoshop. I decided to combine both elements into a piece of Photoshop art. I found a tutorial on how to turn a picture into a Roy Lichtenstein style piece of Popart. I scanned a picture of Eliza Carthy, as I found that a lot of elements of the picture, particulaly the hair and the violin, added some interesting textures and features to the composition. You can see the image I created below.
I was very impressed with the result, especially the way the yellow on the violin appears around the bridge area. I email this image to the owner of the website, Melissa Clifton, and she replied saying that she was impressed with my work, and that I was, in her words, “obviously talented”. I enjoyed this piece of critisism, but it certainly will not make me complacent with future pieces of work. This goes for using other programs too, as I do not want to become a “one trick pony”.

Thursday started with a lecture on bitmap and vector graphics (of which there is an excellent Photosho based tutorial here). Although I was familiar with some of the practical issues with using both of these, I was not aware of the more technical aspects. I found the lecture very informative, and I believe it will only improve my Photoshop skills. I found the information on print documents very relevent, as I am currently creating a tutorial for my Netkar Pro skins using InDesign CS2.

After our 10 o’clock break, we discussed the difference between being an artist and being a designer. I believe that I am somewhere between the two, as I have a history of art based education, but I think I also have some of the qualities of being a designer. There is common ground between the two, and the skills which we will be learning by using Photoshop with make demands on them both. Creating an asthetically pleasing piece of design, while keeping the user in mind will help to develop both skills.

During the afternoon, I had a rather curious development in my blog. The creator of the http://www.tonybenn.net/ website had contacted me, asking for some constructive critisism for his site.

I was somewhat dumbfounded by this, much to the sadistic delight of Rob who took much merryment from my predicament. I did feel somewhat guilty, for lambasting the website in the way I did. I now realise that I should have edited my blog post and been more constructive. I will get in contact with the creator, and offer him some constructive critisism, and possibly say what I said in my assignment. I want help him in any way I can with my current skills to make his website more pleasing to use, and allowing users to access the vast content within the site.

It will be interesting to see what will come out of this, and I will keep people informed via my blog.

I am currently feeling very enthusiastic about the challenges which are ahead. I know that I can now relax by doing one of Malissa Clifton’s excellent tutorials, and still be making a contribution to my sketch pad by sticking in the results and annotating them. I believe that now I have clarified what can be put into it, that I can easily fill a couple over the coming weeks with inspirational designs and colour schemes.

I have rather a lot of work to do, both course and non-course related, and I hope to keep my avid readers informed as I progress through the forthcoming tasks. Over the next week I will be researching my goals for A3, and writing my comparative analysis of Designers Republic artwork for A4. I’m sure I can squeeze some Photoshop or InDesign in somewhere (all logged in my time plan, of course!).

What We Did on Our Holidays

After 6 weeks of writing, sketching and PageMaker-ing I finally have some time off to think about how it all went. I did enjoy doing the project, even though at times certain elements of it seemed to be against me. I think now that the first assignment is out the way, I can start to gain confidence as the up coming assignments progress. I am still anxious about what mark, if any at all, I will get for my first assignment. I’d like to say that I am cautiously optimistic, but I’d rather say nothing to stop me from looking a complete fool if I fail.

In preparation for the upcoming Photoshop based assignment, I have been familiarising myself (like I needed to familiarise myself with a program I use constantly) with the tools available in this most expansive of programs. I have been experimenting with some of the more artistic elements such as filters to modify pictures with (see below).

I have also been doing some client based work, which gave me a great insight to how the dynamics of working with a client differs from those of working independently. For this task, I was asked to design a car with a cow hide livery. I found this tutorial on the internet on how to make a cowhide pattern, and then moved the elements of what I had created onto the design template (see below).

I found the experience satisfying, yet frustrating at the same time. As the client asked that very few logos had to be put onto the design, but I thought it stopped the car from looking believable. Well, as believable as a car covered in a cow hide pattern could be.

I also had to create a logo for my client, (see below) including the name of the team written in a font they had sent me. I found that I could create the logo design almost completely on the fly, and I believe this is due to the creative elements of my Art education, and the new professional elements which I have learn on this course.
In conclusion, my half term has been a time for reflection, and a time for learning, a balance which I think will be beneficial through the next two assignments. Please feel free to ask any questions about my work on the comments page.

Panic over, Party Started

Over the past week I have been finishing off the last few bits of my first assignment. This included writing my evaluation, which I found to be a good way of collecting my thought about the progress of the assignment. I identified areas where I had done well, such as my academic writing and working with colleagues to discuss work matters, and areas where I needed to improve. These included technical aspects such as choosing screen dimensions, as well as time planning which I felt could have been better.

On Wednesday I had to print off all my work and check through to see that I had not made any silly mistakes. Printing off my colour pages was the most costly part of all my assignment, and I kept noticing mistakes with each one I had done. After several costly drafts I finally managed to get my pages up to the correct standard. There was a slight moment of panic when the colour printer in the library ran out of ink, but luckily the library staff quickly and efficiently changed the cartridge and the panic was over. I realised that this was one of the unforeseen events that Steve mentioned which I would have to have a contingency plan for.

In the afternoon on Wednesday I had finished all my work, including my merit reference page. I now only had to burn my CD and I was finished. Thankfully, Steve approved my CD label so that I could have everything except my folder label finished before the morning. After my CD had been burnt and labelled, I decided to try it in the computer I was sat at. I placed the CD into the drive and pressed the button. Once I checked that my files could be read, I again pressed to button to eject the CD. To my complete and utter horror, the CD drive did not open. I decided that I should shut down the machine and try the drive again. Thankfully, the drive did open, and I then put my CD safely into my folder before another event sent my heart rate through the roof.

Thursday morning was now upon me, and I came in early to hand my work in. I was so early that Steve was not in college yet, but the room had been opened up for us. I bound my folder with string for a second time, as I thought that with my luck the assignment would disobey the laws of physic and escape somewhere between the classroom and reception. I took my work down and handed it in, signing the sheet to confirm that I had done so.

Overall I was very pleased with the assignment that I handed in, but weather it is good enough for a pass or not, only time will tell. I would not want to make any presumptions about my work, as I do not want to look a complete fool if it is not up to scratch.

I am glad that half term is here now, as it will give me a break from the endless printing, reprinting, and wrestling with PageMaker. I am really looking forward to next half term when we start using Photoshop, and I will hopefully recuperate my energy to go into the next two assignments on full steam.

Print, reprint, repeat

This week has all been about constant adjustment. Usually more adjustment is needed in the seconds after pressing the print button.

On Wednesday morning we had a tutorial session with John about our blog entries. This gave us a chance to discuss what a blog was for and what content should be included in it.

I found this to be helpful to an extent, but I believe the time could have been better spent learning how to use some of the controls in the blogger template. As only a few members of the group have the beta account, I think that the other half find it difficult to edit parts of their page.

For next year, I think that the tutors should give a brief tutorial of the basic tools, so that students then have a comprehension of how blogger works. This would provide them with more confidence to use the features of blogger to their advantage in their self study time.

On Wednesday Afternoon I had been concentrating on getting all of my work put into PageMaker, which has again been causing problems for me. On Wednesday, PageMaker would not open my feedback file, and after a lot of unsuccessful attempts to do so I finally conceded defeat. This meant that I had to remake it from the template I had saved earlier. I am glad that I saved the template, and backing up my work is clearly something that I need to continue to do in the future.

On Thursday I continued to make progress on my project. I managed to put all my references in, a process which I was dreading, but I actually found it quite easy. I do get the feeling that you have to put a rather disproportionate amount of effort into proving that you have looked at someone else’s work, rather than putting that effort into producing high quality results. I guess this is just part and parcel of higher education, and I will just have to get use to it.

As the deadline approaches, I am feeling both confident about my work, and apprehensive. I feel that I have made a good effort, but there are so many little issues that could cause me to trip up.

Over the next week I will be organising and neatening up my sketchpad, so that it is ready to hand in on Thursday. I will also have to create my evaluation, and place it into the PageMaker template on Wednesday of next week.

I love/hate Adobe PageMaker – Delete as applicable

This week there was a strong contrast between Wednesday and Thursday. I found Wednesday excruciating, because PageMaker would not do what I wanted to. I kept having trouble with text boxes, pictures, and pretty much every other feature included in the package.

Thursday, however was a totally different experience. I started to put my work into PageMaker through the template that had been created for us. This did work very well, as opposed to Wednesday where I left college in a state of rage, which I stayed in for several hours after. Only a soothing session of Photoshop in the evening could bring me back down to earth, and make Thursday a day to look forward to.

I managed to get all the required work done for Thursday’s feedback meeting, including a total rework of my digital screen designs. I was surprised at how well PageMaker could work if it was done correctly. It definitely has a one track route of doing certain tasks, but once I became familiar with these then I could exploit its features to my advantage.

Thursday’s feedback went well, where we criticised each others work. I made many criticisms of Chris’s lack of dimensions on his screen designs, only for him to pick up on my lack of the same features on my own. We all managed to get enough time to look at each others work, and thankfully everyone is moving in the right direction.

This week has been a contrast of emotions; from anger and frustration, to satisfaction and pride in my own work. I believe that I should be able to move forward and tie up all the loose ends in my project, such as referencing my sources and making adjustments to my screen designs.

I think I need to plan out all the pieces which need finishing off so that I can print a draft of my finished assignment for next weeks feedback session. Next week will be all about editing, re-editing, and editing again. My printer credit will surely take a hammering next Wednesday and Thursday.

Give me back my Amiga 500+

At the start of this week we learnt how to use Adobe PageMaker, a rather basic but useful page editing software. I found this to be rather easy, as many of the controls were similar to the ones found in Adobe Photoshop. I found it reassuring that the Adobe packages all contain the same basic controls, so I am fairly confident that I will be able to use the other packages on the course to a high standard.

PageMaker reminded me of Pagesetter, a word processing program for the Amiga. It reminded me of how software has evolved from the days of 2mb of RAM and entire programs contained on a floppy disk.

During self study this week I found it easier to produce creative work on my own than essay work. I think this is because I spent a lot of time on my Art A-level trying out different designs, and doing practical things like making working prototypes of the work I would later create on a larger scale. However, I think that this course requires more planning on the technical side, and this is where I need to improve. I think that this will develop itself, once I have use certain packages and found out what limitations I have to work to.

At the end of the week, I built a PC which I will use for self study for the course. I chose components that would be able to handle large amounts of programs simultaneously, as packages such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver can be very resource heavy, as can running multiple browsers at once. The key components I chose were an Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of GeIL 6400mhz DDR2 RAM and a Gainwald 7900 GS 512mb graphics card.

The dual core processor will allow my computer to run multiple programs at once, such a Dreamweaver and Photoshop. The 2gb of RAM will allow Photoshop to have large amounts of swap file access, which will speed up image processing, and the graphics card will give excellent picture quality through my 21” Dell monitor. I believe that this will make my self study over the next few weeks substantially more enjoyable!

One man's junk...

During this week I have completed some large parts of the first assignment. I enjoyed writing the competitive analysis, as this kind of work was familiar to me. I also enjoyed looking at http://www.tonybenn.net/ as this website is the antithesis of what a good website should be. This provided me with a wealth of material to analyse, and was also rather entertaining to Steve in our group session.

Can anyone beat my record of finding the worst website ever?

In some areas of the assignment I still feel slightly lost, and could do with some issues clearing up. These are mainly formalities, and I am happy that I can construct large parts of the assignment without much help from anyone else. I may have to cut out some of the content so that I do not go over the wordlimit. This is mainly due to the huge amount of criticism of the first Tony Benn website I looked at.

During this weeks lessons I have felt that I can work more independently than I have done in the past. I also feel that in some way the assignment word count stops me from developing analysis further, but I am sure that as the course progresses I will find opportunities use these skills.

My sketchpad is now developing nicely, and already has more content than some of my A-level Art sketchpads. I am slightly concerned about how my sketchpad will look in comparison to others, as my handwriting is not the best. I am considering doing some of my evaluative annotation one the computer and sticking it into my sketchpad, as this will look neater and allow me to reflect on my work in more detail. This is something I will look into over the next few weeks.

At home I have also inherited an ex-CAD 21” Dell Trinitron CRT monitor, which looks fantastic and cost absolutely nothing! My Dad brought it home from work, as it was going to be thrown away. This will be rather useful for the course as the picture quality is excellent. Hopefully over the next few weeks I will be building a new computer to go with it. This will make me feel a lot more comfortable with my self study time, as I have a better equipped working environment.

Week 1

This week our tasks were primarily based around note taking on a variety of topics. These included topics such as 'What makes a good website?’ a web glossary and details about our first assignment.

For this assignment, we must plan a website about a famous Britain. I decided to choose Tony Benn, as I thought that this would give me a large scope of different designs, and could be tailored to suit a variety of audiences. These could include children, GCSE students and adults. We compiled a set of notes to help us understand what is involved in creating the assignment.

At the moment I think that the assignment will be a tough learning process, as it is a large step up from projects I have done in the past. I will also have to learn new skill such a referencing, and researching heavily from a range of resources including books and online sources.

Over the next week, I will be continuing the research I started in college so that I can build up a good knowledge about my great Briton and also about how this knowledge can be used in the design process of my website.

Formative Statement

In my past educational experiences I have learnt many skills which I am looking forward to developing in the future. From my artistic background I have gained an understanding 2 dimensional in the context of colour, texture and proportion to produce creative work. I have also learnt how to keep a progressive record of my ideas development and explain the processes behind them.

In my previous studies in English, I learnt how to produce subjective arguments with an appreciation for audience, values and literary techniques. These included essay writing, persuasive writing and personal reaction to the subject matter.

Processes which I acquired in Business Studies enabled me to identify the relation between business and client, and how each can influence the behaviour of the other. This included business and consumer relations, the ability to produce presentations and evaluate performance. These are all skills which I believe will be useful on the course.

I am currently interested in using Photoshop, as I have done several personal projects using this package. Having learnt these skills on my own, I look forward to learning other aspects of the package to improve my 2D computer generated art skills. As these develop I wish to produce professional work, as I know it will be beneficial for the future.

As there are several pieces of software I have not used before, I am interested in learning the different techniques and procedures these products demand.

For my long term future, I wish to be able to produce high quality, professional work from a large range of programs. I believe that if I could work freelance I would do so, as I think the independence and freedom this would give me would be a great asset. I hope to create a broad portfolio of work from the course to give me the best chance at succeeding as a freelance designer.