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!).