Back on track

After being back at college after what felt like a 5 minute break over the summer, the course continues at an unabated pace. I found that the first week was the most difficult, as there were new and confusing assignments, and a lot of anxiety over the summer assignment. As we had not been in contact with each other all that much, it was always hard to know if you were on track with the tasks which needed to be completed.

As I had volunteered to come in with the Craigs and talk to the first years, I had to start doing some work before we returned to college. I had to collate the information each of us wanted to put onto each slide, and assemble a simple template to put the content in to. I realised that all we had to put together were the things we wish we had done at the start of the first year. We even produced a handout with lots of useful links, as well as our email addresses if they wanted to get in contact with us.

The actual presentation itself went really well, and I was surprised at the amount of questions the first year students have to ask. I think I should do more of these types of events if the opportunity arises.

In the first week we looked at some of the basic CSS functions. I found this rather hard to understand what they meant without seeing them in action. I have always known that I need to see how things work and experiment with them before I can feel comfortable with using them. As the weeks have progressed I have got back into using the CSS, even after doing the summer assignment.

The team project has already thrown up a lot of challenges. The assigning of roles was very hard, especially in our team where there are 3 very capable people. I did think seriously about becoming the Project Manager, but we decided that Scott had the experience to make the most of this position in the team. I then became the designer, and Chris was best suited out of us to become the developer.

As there were 2 clients and 3 teams, we had to pitch to Steve so that he could decide which teams got these projects. This meant a presentation had to be constructed, and as designer a lot of this was down to me. I spent most of my self study time creating the presentation, which was a lot of work to do in the first week. Our team did manage to get it finished, and did earn us one of the projects. This was to create a site for the College’s sports team.

As part of this year’s ‘goals’ I have to provide some a course related article, as well as a tutorial. I can easily accommodate for both of these, by providing a link to the Boagworld podcast, available at http://www.boagworld.com/ . This podcast provides a wealth of information, and literally everything which we do on the course is mention somewhere on the 90+ episodes of the podcast. I would recommend looking at this in itunes, as you can see a description of what is in each show, and then you can download ones which are appropriate to whatever we are covering at the time. I believe that the episode 91 edition may prove helpful in the future, as it has a section on ‘Dealing with the clients from hell’ which will probably happen to all of us one of these days.

On the show there have been some really eye opening sections, such as show 86 where a recording of a screen reader is played. This exposes how difficult it is on a lot of sites for people with impaired vision, and sounds totally unfathomable. I believe that designing to suit the needs of others should be incorporated into the design process, which will be happening in our team project this year.

All in all I feel that this year has got off to a reasonable start, and I now feel a lot more organised and capable of sitting down in self study time and doing more work. The summer assignment helped alot with this, as I only had myself to rely on to get the work completed to a good standard. Hopefully when I do my next evaluative blog, I will have finished the Box Clever assignment.