Picture that…

For this weeks lessons I came prepared with a variety of sources to work through the day with. I had been looking for some stock images for my album cover, and planned to put together some quick sketches for each of the samples I had downloaded. This is just one approach I will be looking into for my album design. An example of this can be seen below.
On Wednesday morning we took part in a crit. session for our logo designs. I found that the feedback was good to obtain, but did not really dictate a clear winner. The feedback was positive about the electronic path which I had taken, which was apparent in all of my designs.

As I had to create a screen design for the following day, I needed to pick a logo design pretty quickly. I finally chose my ‘terminal jacks’ design, as it was the correct ratio, had a unique shape and kept its integrity at small sizes. I did however alter the colour to black, as the inverse colours made the logo look too childish. I did this to give it a stronger, more masculine feel, which would better suit the target market.

For my screen design I chose to keep a simple two column layout. I think that as this site is designed for others to work from, it has to be simple and easy to navigate and provide clear instructions. During our group’s feedback meeting, I found out that my website would be fairly easy to create in CSS, including the layout. Over Easter I will be putting some time aside to experiment with creating this. With a little help from Steve or John I believe this is an achievable goal, and will lead nicely into my self study for over the summer. My screen design is shown below.
Recently I have been working from the w3schools website. It is an excellent resource for all of the web based stuff, and it has easy to follow tutorials for lots of HTML, XHTML, CSS and more. They also have a feature where you can look at the code examples they give you, edit it, and instantly see the effect. You can find this at www.w3schools.com .

On Thursday afternoon I started putting together some ideas for business cards. I will be posting some examples of the designs over the next few days for a ‘public vote’. I believe that producing lots of the logos in Freehand and having lots of exposure with the DTP applications will be beneficial in the long run and also gives lots of evidence for the 1.2 and 1.4 learning outcomes. I find that every time I use InDesign I find some new tool to use, and this week’s was the ‘Align’ window. This allows you to select a group of objects and align them in different ways, much like the tool from Freehand. I’d encourage people to have a play in ID if they haven’t already, as it’s a very powerful tool for the corporate identity elements and is easy to make the transition to from PageMaker.

In Wednesdays lesson we found out our results for the A5 builder unit. I had achieved a pass in this, which I am fairly pleased about. As it was my first website, I wanted to concentrate on getting something that worked and to take in all the new information which I had to learn for the unit. Now that I have some of the basics, I am hoping to continue my web development in this A7 unit. Creating this website using CSS is going to be a big challenge, but I think if I shift a lot of the other stuff over Easter I should have enough time to concentrate on this when we return in a few weeks.

At the end of Thursday lesson we got the results for the Revert to Type unit. In this I received a merit, which I am really happy about. I think this grade came from collecting a lot of different examples of documents and annotating what I though of them, which is part of A2. I also did a lot of ideas generation for my presentation which helped to gain the M3 learning outcome. I also implemented my master time plan sheet, as well as planned all my tasks out, and this is part of the M1 section. It seems ages since we did this unit, and in this time I have already filled one sketch pad with sources and ideas generation, and am well into my second. I’m hoping that another merit will be on the cards for this unit.