Starship Trooper

This week has been about getting back into the swing of things. I found self study over the past week difficult, as I was continually putting off Dreamweaver, and was finding it hard to collect information on A6. I know that I have been slow getting back up to speed with the work, as my sorry looking sketchpad shows. I think that to improve it I need a lot more of an experimental approach, more like and art course than a design course.

In my assignment feedback meeting on Wednesday I had a debrief with Steve over the last assignments. I thought that the process of the last was going too well, and soon discovered that I’d made the rather stupid mistake of not putting my name on the assignment sheet. Muuuuuh! [Nel Dyer, 2007].

Steve and I discussed the sketchpad work, which at the moment is holding me back from getting higher grades. I will be doing a couple of sessions with John on ideas generation, which is what I struggle with the most. I am use to creating something from a vision, rather than creating several possible outcomes from a range of initial ideas. As usual, I am probably over complicating the process, as I think that sometimes doing something quick feels like “cheating”, for want of a better word. A bit like doing homework the night before, like you did at school.

In the afternoon our group had a feedback meeting, where we discussed Dreamweaver, A6 handouts and CSS. The general feeling within the group was the Dreamweaver was a bit of a black art, and not as simple as it should be. We all agreed that the best way to work was to create something, test it in both browsers, and then repeat the process again and again. This would allow you to know what elements were creating problems, and thus the design process next time could be tailored to make implementation easier.

Thursday was a chance to research more into our A6 typographers, in my case Neville Brody. Enviously, James had acquired some rather large books on Neville Brody, which are pretty rare and would have been invaluable to my presentation. I think for my slides I will be using a PDF, and will keep the design clean and simple, and will make the presentation easier as I only have to press an arrow key to move between slides.

I bought some books on typography, those books being Get it right with type [Squire] and The complete guide to digital type [Ellison]. Both books were about a tenner, and contained advice on areas such as how to set out type, and also how to create attractive headers. Both books contained information on both print design and web design.

I have already started to plan the kind of things I want to do over the summer holiday, as I think this would be a great time to do some learning, without the stress of deadlines and time limits. I believe I will have to force myself to learn HTML in more depth, as at the moment it’s still a mystery to me. I’m usually bored of the holidays within 5 minutes, so creating a list of things to learn will keep me occupied and provide educational value seems a smart thing to do.

P.S If you’re wondering about the title, it’s a Yes song.