Friday, December 22, 2006

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.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

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!

Thursday, December 07, 2006

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.