Friday, April 27, 2007

CSSister

After a frustrating Easter, it was back to work at usual. Over the three weeks that we had off I managed to learn a lot about CSS, yet did not make a great deal of progress with the assignment in hand. I currently have the basic elements of my website in place, but as I have had to make my buttons in CSS not JS it has made finishing it tough. Hopefully John will be able to help me code the buttons to do what I want.

This week I have been concentrating on getting the final elements of my corporate identity into place, and have started creating the remaining parts of the identity. This includes the letterhead, 4 designs of which I have made which can be seen below. I would like some feedback from colleagues and maybe a choice from “the client” as well. For my album cover I have decided to take some influence from the stock images I found, and I will create my own version of the image using Photoshop, so that I will meet the 1.1 learning outcome. To do this I will be using the gradient tools to create the basic colours, and will erase the sharp lines with the eraser tool, set to wet media brushes. As the image I want to recreate contains an elements subtly linked to the album title Russian Spring. I will also take screenshots of the image as I piece it together, to show how it develops as I manipulate the various layers of the picture. These screenshots will obviously be put into my sketchpad and annotated to describe the process.

On Wednesday afternoon Steve and I discussed the progress of the Sketchblog assignment. So far I think the work produced for this unit has been ok, but as always there is room for improvement. I will need to add in a larger range of sources, especially in terms of links on my blog to sites that I have visited. I believe a good way to keep track of sites it to get a del.icio.us account, so that I can save all my links and then put them into my blog. Craig B also alerted me to the plug in for Firefox which allows you to add them to your account in the toolbar.

One area of the assessment criteria is very difficult to pass; I am of course talking about D3, where work must be “equal to that of an industry professional”. This part of the criteria seems substantially more difficult that the ones which come before it. I feel that I have some way to go before I can think of obtaining this grade, but as we are only approaching half way through the course I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

Over the next week I have many tasks to complete. Firstly, I must create my album cover, as well as the booklet. I think I will scan in some booklets so that I can look at the typography choices, as well as how the albums relate to the front cover of the album. Hopefully I will also be able to fix my CSS buttons and get them working how I would like them to.

Over Easter I got roped into creating a website for my sister, who is an Animation graduate. Working with a client who is able to create parts such as buttons and banners is something very different from working with a client who does not. My job was in essence to create the structure of the website, and put in other elements (such as many lightboxes) and to make the site work on a technical level. I found that making another site helped me to try new methods, and also allowed me to see errors in my style guide website, which I am currently fixing. My sisters site, in its current state (feeding off my monthly bandwidth, and not her’s :rolleyes: ) can be seen here.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Easter Update – Digital Planet podcast

Today I found the BBC’s Digital Planet podcast which had an interview with Brendan Eich, who is the chief technical officer at the Mozilla foundation. In this he talks about what will be coming in the future for Mozilla, and it all sounds very exciting.

He discusses how the internet will take advantage of 3D graphics technology, which they are working on for Firefox in a few generations time. This could have a huge impact not only for the web, but for the whole computing industry. I’d imagine Apple will have to beef up the graphics capability of its Mac computers when these changes come into effect. It looks like we will have to be even more multi skilled in a few years time. Anyway, the show can be downloaded from Itunes (just search for ‘Digital Planet’ in the Itunes Store front) or can be downloaded as an MP3 from here. Happy Easter to all.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Bussy-ness cards

As promised, I have provided some examples of the business cars I have been working on over the weekend. They are available below:
Today I have been trying out some CSS tutorials to create my site. After a lot of sweat and strong language, I have finally managed to get somewhere (sort of) with the website. I have a picture below of how it looks at the moment, in FF and in IE6. I think I’ve done pretty well to get this far with my rather limited web authoring experience, and from having no CSS knowledge at all. Hopefully over the next few days I will start to do the other pages on the website. The site in its current (single page Edit 04/04/07 : now multiple pages and rollovers :) ) state is available to view here:

I am aiming to do the PDF version of my style guide next week, and finish off any album cover research and experimentation in between tasks. Please comments on my website progress and business cards below.