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.
6 comments:
How can someone say they don't know if they have got what it takes to complete the course, then say they are getting an article printed in a national magazine, all in the same blog entry.
Underestimating yourself is the biggest hurdle you have, the rest you will find a breeze.
Congratulations by the way on the article, what next appearances in TV shows?
Agree with Dean. Don't underestimate yourself. Think positive and you'll do alot better.
As for the mag, congrats. It's good just to do things on a 'long shot basis' and not dismiss them immediately, as you proved sometimes it works out.
Before starting the course I emailed some local newspapers regarding jobs/training there (as a long shot) and got a few yes's to training which I never expected. I'm hoping to take the opportunity up in the summer, which will hopefully improve my writing skills for the second year of the course.
I think you're being a bit hard on yourself Julian. How many hours do you spend browsing the Internet a week? How many years have you been browsing for? Thousands of hours in total, no doubt. That's a lot of web-savviness! The trick is to unlock the knowledge. Try LOOKING at websites, rather than just looking at them. See the underlying structures. Try looking at this for some help:
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/
tutorials/box_lesson/boxes.html
Although these are CSS layouts, they can also be applied to the table/cell method we'll be using for our first build after Christmas.
In his excellent book 'The Art & Science of Web Design', Jeff Veen states that website visitors have three basic needs. These are manifested as questions, thus:
1. Where am I?
2. What's here?
3. Where can I go?
Relate the fulfilment of these three needs to the web structures you identify, and you'll see patterns emerging.
A lot of web design is boxy - just look at the BBC site. Master the boxy approach first!
Thanks Steve, I've finally got something which I think is going in the right direction. I found that looking at the "Don’t make me think" book helped a lot, it basically said have titles big, menus functional, and the main elements in proportion to each other.
An excellent book. Unbelievably good value at £12.49 [Amazon].
I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself too Julian.
We've all got to start somewhere, and considering we're only coming up to the end of the first semester there is a considerably long learning curve left to go.
Don't let it get you down.
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