Keep pedalling

After returning from a busy and frustrating half term, it was back to the coalface on Wednesday morning. Over half term I had been focusing on my presentation, which became infinitely more difficult when the second Neville Brody book I had bought failed to materialise. I was incandescent with rage about this, and had to alter the focus of my presentation onto the earlier work covered in the first volume of the book. In a way it actually allowed me to explore in more depths Brody’s typography in different contexts, such as product design and article layout. More on the presentation progress later.

On Wednesday we had a visit from Jonny Haynes who talked through some of the work he had been doing at Technophobia. Although a lot of the stuff about CSS went over my head, I could see that the work he had done was to a very high standard, and appealed to me more than the Design Mechanics stuff from several weeks ago. It made me realise how much there is to learn between now and this time next year, and only made me more determined to do some comprehensive self study over the summer. I believe this is the only way I will be satisfied with the work I produce next year.

In the afternoon I continued to make amendments to my website. I altered the colour of the buttons on the pages which they corresponded to, as I had had one or two comments saying that people did not know which part of the site they were on. I chose white, as it highlights the text well and stands out against the darker surrounding colours. I should be uploading this over the weekend, should my shaky internet connection not let me down.

On Thursday afternoon it was our slot for the presentations. My group, consisting of Mirhad, Scott and myself went through our presentations in the order we were going to do them on ‘the big day’. I was of course first, and felt a bit more confident about the presentation than I did with the colour ones. I believe this was because I had a lot to say, having acquired a lot of research. Once I was about 6 slides in, Steve said “that’s 4 minutes” and I had to rush through the remaining slides. I believe this was because I was adding too much to what I was saying, and will have to cut it down slightly for the real thing. There were also a few errors on my slides which I will have to correct before next Thursday.

Overall the feedback I got was good, and Steve said that it was one of the better ones so far. Between now and next week I should learn exactly what I am going to say which is not on the slides, so that I don’t run the risk of going over the time limit of 5 minutes. I will also be making amendments to my handout sheet, as I now know it can be over a page long. I believe I will treat it as another piece of typography work for my folder, just to top up the examples of my typographic skills. Some of my slides can be seen below, along with my handout sheet. No pinching, James!

After we had done our presentations, we talked about our thoughts on the next unit and what our thoughts on next year were. With the next unit being heavily print based, I am really looking forward to it. I believe that finding out how to make document ready for being sent to a printers will be invaluable, and may encourage me to find clients for small pieces of work over the summer. Now that I have made progress with my time planning in A3 and A4, and my sketchpad work in A5 and A6, I think I will bring it all together for this last unit of the year, kind of a ‘swansong’ for the end of year one. If I aim for the higher grades and do well, I believe it will give me a great confidence boost for my self study work over the summer.

As for next year, I believe that it going to be a huge challenge for me. Not only does the quality of the work have to increase, but the learning environment is more focused on us. Again, I think with me planning self study over the summer will allow me to improve on these skills, and could make the second year a little easier to complete. I do feel anxious that I will find the more technical aspects hard to understand, and I know only hard work will get me through these. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

In Jonny’s presentation on Wednesday, he mentioned the importance of creating work outside of the college environment. I’ve always been a believer that this is highly valuable experience, and have always given things a go, like the DR-esque picture I did, as well as various other projects. This week I decided to create a product movie for an acquaintance of mine, Todd Cannon of Cannon Simulation Technologies. This involved demonstrating one of his products, and creating a video to put on YouTube. This website is a great tool for small businesses, as it allows them to demonstrate products cheaply and get them shown to a large audience. Features such as embedding also allow them to be placed on their websites.

I decided to pool together a range of techniques, including my self taught and rather limited video editing skills, Photoshop skills and Typography work to make a “picture in picture” product demonstration. I used a digital camera to record the actions of my feet, and Fraps video capture software to record the action of the simulation. I brought these elements together, and then added the company logo (which I had remade in a larger format) and added captions which could be clear to read for viewers. As per usual, this was a variant of Myriad Pro. I also cut out a picture of the product, and added a glow effect to highlight it. Overall I was impressed with the quality of what I had made, but unfortunately YouTube puts the picture and audio out of sync in its own conversion process, which is rather annoying. Anyway, the video is embedded below. Watch me control 400bhp of simulated American muscle – in my socks.