Julian Dyer's College Blog

End of course evaluation

2008-05-14T14:38:00.001+01:00

I have now almost reached the end of my HND interactive media course which I have been studying for the last 2 years. In my initial blog post I talked about my desire to produce “high quality, professional work in a large range of programs”. I knew that this was a long term goal, as I was unaware of the specific pieces of software I would be learning on the course, or what they were about.

When the design work started towards the halfway point of the first year, I felt a lot more comfortable with how the assignments were marked. This saw my grades getting better with each assignment, as I knew what was expected of me. I think my ability to understand what is required is one of my strongest skills, and is needed when creating websites for clients.

My initial pieces of design work were very tough for me to create, especially when it came to designing web pages. My first and second website design always felt forced and uncomfortable. I felt that because I did not know how to create web pages, that I could not be sure that the designs I had come up with could be made. This changed with the first major project of the first year, when I designed the Ambient World website. As I had only 2 colours, I could order them simply using boxes, to create a strong and simple design.

When creating this website I decided to try making it with XHTML and CSS. This was the first site I had made using this technology, and needed a lot of research and self management for me to get this completed. This was a forerunner to what the second year would hold, and I felt proud that I had got a good finished product to show after putting in a lot of time to creating the website.

Many of my pieces of print work which I created in the first year still look strong even now. I felt that the accurate nature of the programs used to create them gave me a lot of control over how the pieces would look. My ambient music CD box is one of my favourite pieces of work, as there is a lot of depth and thought as to how the product should be made.

At the start of the second year I set myself a goal to get 4 merit grades. So far, every grade I have got has been a merit, and I think I may have overestimated how difficult the second year would be. This is not to say that this year was easy, but it proves that the skills I had learnt in the first year as to providing what was required were well used in the second year.

With the CSS Beauty project I felt that the ideas for the website were not coming to me. None of the themes that we were allowed to use gave me any strong ideas. I then decided to see which idea I could think of the most ideas for, and then work from there. This technique worked well, and I created another solid piece of work.

The team project was a very long and testing assignment. I found that working in a team could be both rewarding and frustrating in equal measure. Our project was very large, and would need a lot of organisation to complete. I felt that as a designer in the team that I did not have much design work to actually do, as a lot of our website had been provided by college. Instead, I took on a more PA based role, where I would help arrange meeting and take minutes, as well as doing other pieces of work such as the usability test preparation. I was relieved to get the assignment over, but on reflection I think that I performed well in the team despite some difficult moments.

The reverse design process assignment was an interesting assignment, which left me with mixed feelings. I felt that my final piece of work was strong, but often felt that my creativity was not particularly deep. I often felt that I was just producing lots of ideas, but none of them were particularly strong or imaginative. When it came to making the website and piece of print work I knew the best direction to go in was simplicity. Even though my product was well made, it was rather simple. I believe that the process of producing work for assessment makes me cautious about what ideas I would pick, and that I needed to do larger project in the future.

The self managed learning plan was by far the most difficult project of the course. I chose PHP because I knew how important it was to job prospects after the course. Setting up the PHP took a large amount of time, and I had a lot of problems getting it working on a local machine. I eventually decided to use a tutorial in a book, and then modify it to what I needed for the project. I feel that this is what I would do in a job situation, because unless developing is your main job, using pre made scripts and modifying them is what is done when creating sites to tight deadlines.

I was proud that I got a good finished product out of the assignment, and it really tested me to the limit. I think the site looked clean and professional, and the function of my upload page was also pretty slick.

The interface design project always felt as though it was in the background as it ran along side the self managed learning plan project. As I felt that the learning plan assignment was more difficult, I needed to put more effort into it to get a good finished product. The designs for the interface project were simple and functional, and again unspectacular. I felt that I managed both projects well, and got merit grades for both.

The portfolio website was one of the most pleasurable sites of the course to make. I believe that this is because it was for me, and that I had a lot more control over how it worked and looked. I used a simple corporate identity, which I used on the website. I also used the Textpattern CMS system so that I could update my site easily.

The final project of the course was easily the largest website of the course. My choice to do a website on a collection of musical instruments and equipment gave me a lot of ideas about what I could do. Again, I created a simple CID which I applied to the website. This gave me practice of both creating a CID, and applying it to a website. I also did a accessibility test of the website, which taught me a lot about how to create websites with the guidelines in mind. It required a lot of analysis to find out how accessible my website was, and I was pleased that I had the opportunity to do this.

My development over the last two years has been much greater than I could have ever expected. Before the course I had a very limited knowledge of a lot of the programs, technologies and issues that the course would teach me. I am now able to manage my own time much better, as well as teach myself new pieces of software or programming languages.

I still feel that there is a lot more development to come. I still understand that I will need to be better at the programming languages, as I think this is going to limit my job opportunities in the future. I believe that I need to create some project for myself to try out new ideas. I also feel that my creativity is still limited, and that I need to find more ideas generation techniques. Again, I will have to create or find new project for me to experiment and develop these skills with.

A14 Learning Journal Posts

2008-04-02T16:23:00.002+01:00

All posts for the A14 assignment are available on www.juliandyer.net for your reading pleasure. Go to my portfolio now and read my articles.

A10: Portfolio Designs - Final

2008-02-27T16:09:00.005Z

My final portfolio designs are available for viewing. I have now made the content fit the full width of the page, and at 500px this should be narrow enough to make text easy to read. On my 'interim' portfolio site I have made a page to see if this works. The character length is around 70 characters, which is between the advised 60 and 80 mark for websites.

Screen designs in include the main page and the displayed articles page .

A site structure diagram for the website has also been done.

Comments appreciated.

Self managed learning plan evaluation

2008-02-27T13:26:00.004Z

At the start of this project I have extremely limited experience of using PHP. I did not know anything about the syntax, and had only modified tiny bits of code when using the Cutenews content management system on a personal website. After asking around at Christmas about what resources to get, I got a couple of books which I was going to use for the project.

When it came to planning the project, I split the process into 5 stages. Firstly, an initial research stage, in which I would find out about PHP and its uses in interactive media. Secondly I would use tutorials and learn about how to create applications with PHP, which I would later apply to stage three, where I would plan my project, and stage 4 where I would build my project. Lastly, an evaluation would be written of the planning and execution of the project.

The project I outlined was to create a content management system for an image gallery. I knew that this would be a lot to try and achieve in 96 hours, but based on how quickly I had picked up using software I felt that it was time to give myself a big challenge.

When evaluating the uses of PHP, I found it amazing as to how many different applications could be made. Automation of tasks has always interested me in interactive media, and I could instantly see the potential that PHP would have for using in the future. I wrote an online journal post about how PHP could be used, and placed in links to my research.

As it came to learning PHP, I used the PHP5, Apache, MySQL web development book. The initial stage of setting up an offline Apache server was difficult and testing, and took nearly 3 hours to get working correctly. This frustration set the tone for the early part of the project, as following the tutorials took a lot more time than I had envisaged. Small mistakes made when copying code out of a book would lead to the code not working at all, and fixing these issues took time. I realise that I could have used online tutorials which I could have copied and pasted, but I thought that in the long term it would be better to practice writing out the code as this may have helped me remember the syntax.

Problems with my offline server only got worse when I tried to connect the PHP to a database. After much frustration, I decided to test the WAMP program, which would set up all of the Apache, MySQL and PHP in one go. I found this program to be invaluable through the project, and as it uses PHPmyAdmin which my server has, I felt that I was going to be able to get to grips with the database side of the project much better.

During the learning part of the project I felt that creating evidence was tough to accomplish. I had written notes in my sketchbook for reference, but as the tutorials took a long time to complete, the quantity was ultimately unsatisfying. I also found that very little of the code was ‘sticking’, as I was just copying code out of the book. Luckily this changed when I started building my project for real.

When it came to building the project, I found that chapter 7 of the PHP5, Apache, MySQL book would give me a good skeleton site for me to work with when building my project. This allowed a user to upload an image, give it a name, and have it displayed in a gallery. Although my initial plan was to use a login system, I decided that I should concentrate on getting a solid finished project instead of being tied down to my plan too much. I would after all have a website which did 90% of the things I wanted it to do in my initial plan.

Creating the skeleton site was relatively easy, as I had set aside a lot of time to really concentrate on getting it made correctly. I think that this large amount of exposure to the code helped cement some of the theories I had learnt about in second stage of the project, which came as some relief. I often find that the most important things to learn are the seemingly trivial things such as getting the project to work online and the correct directories placed into the code.

Once the skeleton was completed, I moved the site to an online environment to check that it would work on my web server. This process was not quick or easy, as many books simply explain how to set up the documents to work on an offline server. Issues such as setting up a user and database were not completely new to me, but connecting to a live database were. The PHPmyAdmin software certainly helped, as I could simply export my tables of data from the offline server and then import them to my online one. After a few user privilege issues, I managed to get the site working online, but only in part.

My tutorial used the greyscale from the GD library. However, my web server only had PHP 4.4.4, and possibly due to changes in the code between versions my greyscale feature would not work. Although this was annoying, I felt that my intentions to use it were valid, and that I had been struck down by an unforeseen circumstance outside of my control. I simply commented out this part of the code, and my page worked again, all be it with a reduction in its functionality.

The next stage was to change my code so that it would look like the design I had posted on my online learning journal. I found it disappointing that I had taken the time to create and prepare the design, only to find that there were no comments left about the design. I do not believe that I should have to pester people to give feedback at this stage of the course. Despite of this, I felt that my design was pretty simple anyway, and that feedback would not have significantly changed it.

Altering my code became a daunting task after placing in the XHTML 1.0 Strict DOCTYPE. There were many errors in my code, as the book did not supply valid XHTML. I had to strip away large parts of the code and replace it, which in itself was a very valid exercise. Again, navigating my way through and altering small parts of the code taught me a lot about how the code worked in a ‘real’ sense.

On my gallery page I tried to alter the code for the tables containing the images. I did however find this task too difficult, as I was repeatedly met with PHP errors. I felt that this part of the site could legitimately be a table, as parts such as the date, name of the poster and title could be classed as tabular data. I decided to style the table appropriately instead, which I think was a good compromise in this situation.

Having gained confidence with using the code, I decided to see if I could alter it so that the images would open with the Lightbox application. After a couple of hours of tweaking the code, I finally got the images to open in this way. This was a big issue for me, because it made me feel as though I had been able to figure out what parts of the PHP code I could manipulate and change; I was now in control of the code, and it was not in control of me as it had been for the first three quarters of the project. I changed the images which made up the Lightbox so that it would match the rest of the website, which I think really adds to the cohesion of the design.

The final part of the project was to create an index page for my site which would link to all the parts which made up the project. This included my initial research and learning journal posts, as well as the finished project. Although many of my colleagues had created a blog to show the development of their projects, I felt it was more appropriate to link to my normal learning journal as it would not cannibalise the visits from other students. This has now created a one stop page to find all the resources which made up my project, and I think this works well.

In conclusion, I am very pleased with the outcome of this project. At some points of the project, I felt that I would not get a finished product of any kind. Although my finished project does not contain elements like the login or the greyscale image feature, it still did 90% of the things I wanted it to. The project has been a good introduction to PHP and MySQL, and I now feel that I can take it further in my own time. Usually it is the formalities which cause the most problems, and now that I have these sussed I can do more work with this coding language.

For future projects such as this I think that I will set smaller targets, as I believe the learning curve for a coding language is substantially larger than that of a software program. I found that the syntax of PHP was quite heavy, and remembering small parts of the code was difficult to do. I think setting smaller goals would also help with motivation when conducting a project, as during this one I did at times feel as though the work was getting on top of me and that I was not creating enough evidence for some parts of the assignment.

One of the problems when learning something completely new is not knowing how well you will ‘pick up’ the knowledge. I believe that constantly evaluating and tweaking the approach can help to move the project along. There were certainly a lot of strategy changes during my project, such as when I decided to switch to the WAMP system or to not do the login system for the site. This did allow me to get a much better finished product, which will be a solid foundation for the future.

Wordcount: 1748

SMLP update 27/02/08

2008-02-27T08:57:00.002Z

I am now entering the final stages of the self managed learning plan project. Over the past week I have been creating the final image gallery website which was the basis of my SMLP project. In my original plan I stated that I would use the knowledge I had gained from the second stage of the project (which was the learning stage) to create my website in the building stage of the project. However, as the project went on I found that I underestimated the amount I would have to learn. This meant that I would have to create my site with tutorials from books, which I would then apply my own design to.

After building the skeleton of the website, I tested the function of the site online. This took a while to get working, as I had to change the MySQL connect setting in my code, and set up the appropriate tables in my online database. I used the export feature of phpMyAdmin so that I could quickly set up the databases on my online server. After uploading my site, I checked the functionality of the code which I had put into the offline version, to make sure that it all worked online.

This is where I met a problem. My online server only used PHP4.4.4, and my site had been created offline in PHP5. The 'black and white' option I had enabled to manipulate my image would not work online. I found that this was frustrating as it was a substantial feature of my website. I decided that I would comment out the code, so that my website will still work. I have also added comments explaining the situation, so that when my work is marked it shows that I had the intention to support other features.

Once I knew that my site worked online, I set about converting the skeleton code to the full working design. Converting the table and cells code into valid XHTML and CSS took up a substantial amount of time, and required a lot of persistence and patience to get it working correctly. I found that this process made me understand how the code worked, as I had to modify parts to get the page to display as I wanted. Applying my website to a real project has helped me understand what the PHP code does to my site, and I created my design I added in some other features. I altered the code so that the images would open using Lightbox, and that the thumbnails would use the caption as an alt tag. This automation is exactly what PHP is created for, and I found it very satisfying that I was able to get this to work.

The project is now entering its final stages. For this project, I decided that I would use this blog to record my progress as the plan came together, rather than creating a new blog to display the SMLP project. This would make it easier for potential employees to find, and for colleagues to comment on as they would not have to search round for my other blog. I will be creating a front page to my online image gallery with links to all the necessary blog posts, resources and my finished website. This will give potential employers a 'one stop' location to find all the information about the project, without having to look through an entire blog. I will also be writing my evaluation for this project, to asses how my learning plan unfolded in practice.

iTunes interface redesign

2008-02-21T11:05:00.006Z

My iTunes redesign is now available for viewing . For my design, I have decided to cut out a lot of the clutter which the currant iTunes store has. I have also used the 'Recommended' box to show users what albums may be of interest to them, in a similar way to the Amazon store. I have used a drop down box so that users can select genres, which is a more compact way of allowing access.

The main feature is the prominence of the search facility, as currently the search box does not look like part of the interface. I have taken YouTube's idea of having the search under the header, as this is in a part of the screen where viewers look when first arriving on a page. I have used this 'F' shaped pattern for the layout of my navigation and search bar. The 'Albums' area of the page would show the display results of any navigation or searches. Constructive criticism of my design is appreciated.

A10: Portfolio design v2

2008-02-20T16:33:00.006Z

After gaining feedback from my first screen design, I have made amendments to improve the look and function of the website. I have had a rethink about how the website will work from a mechanical basis, and from a visual perspective too.

On the 'Web' page, I will show a list of the projects as 'article excerpts' with a thumbnail picture of the project . Textpattern allows you to have an 'excerpt' of the full article, which can then link to the full article on another page. I hope that this system will allow visitors to have an overview of my web work in a more compact space, and can choose to read about the product in detail .

Overall I have cut down the amount of blue lines on the site, to make a much cleaner looking page. I have also rebalanced the content in the header, and specified a few more fonts and colours in my design. As usual, constructive criticism is appreciated. Thanks to all the others who commented last time.

SMLP update and screen designs

2008-02-20T13:54:00.010Z

Over the half term break I have been concentrating on putting together the elements needed for my website. This involved constructing the upload page, image processing page and the gallery which will show the uploaded images.

I have found that a lot of time is spent putting code together and checking for errors, making the production of a 'finished product' relatively slow. I have found that my error detection has improved significantly over the project, and now have a better understanding of what is happening when my PHP code is run. I can now make small changes to effect the outcome of what is generated, for example the file directories the images are placed in, and the variables that I can add in to increase the functionality of the website.

I think that some of the things I have been doing are now beginning to 'stick', certainly much more since my last SMLP post.

One hurdle I will need to overcome this week is finding out how to upload my PHP code to my webspace. In theory, this should be fairly easy as I have created my databases with the PHPMyAdmin software, so tables and the like should be easy to export from offline to online.

Now that I have a working prototype of sorts for my image gallery, I can now focus on how the page will look. A lot of the code I have used has tables and cells for its layout, and this will obviously have to be converted to CSS if possible.

For my screen design I have chosen to use a dark background, as this will allow the pictures to stand out from the page. There will be 2 main parts of the website, one will be the upload section, and one will be the gallery page showing the uploaded images. Between these sections is a page which allows the user to alter the image, by adding a caption, changing it to black and white, or adding a watermark to the picture.

Below are the designs I have done for the site. I have chosen to make the background and the column all the same colour, as using a pattern or repeat background would break if a large image was uploaded to the website. This design should stop this from happening.

Comments are appreciated.

A10: Profile screen design v1

2008-02-13T17:41:00.002Z

The first version of my portfolio screen design is now available for viewing (PDF, 96kb). I have gone for a clean and simple look, which I beleive defines my design 'style'.

After an overwhelming response to my CID post, I have chosen to use the 'Brody' type logo for my personal logo. As well as a font, I have created a CID sheet showing the fonts used for both print and web, and have created a mock up business card. This is available for viewing in PDF format, at 101kb.

A10: CID logo ideas

2008-02-09T12:31:00.000Z

Today I have been putting together some logo ideas for the portfolio website. These will form the basis of my personal corporate identity. I would be grateful for any feedback you have on my initial ideas.

Blockout
This logo uses the letters 'JD' as negative space, and would be used in a variety of colours. It would use the canvas to fill in the negative space, allowing the logo to blend into whatever it was put on to.

Brody type
This logo uses a Neville Brody font. The light pastel blue colour would be used for the main CID colour.

Custom Letters
I have created these letters as vectors, and have tried to keep the balance of size and shape equal between the two initials.

Face
I have taken the concept of a corporate identity one step further, by using features of my face to create the letters.

A13: Interface design analysis

2008-02-07T08:56:00.004Z

Ministry of Sound – Download

The Ministry of Sound download website essentially consists of two columns, the left being for the navigation and the right being for the content of the website. The top of the website uses the Ministry of Sound logo, plus the secondary ‘Download’ logo to identify what the website is. The orange accent colour used is used throughout the website to identify parts of the website of significance, such as the navigation button and tabs. This visual cue indicates what can be clicked on.

Other visual cues include the use of an underline when the cursor is hovered over the album name in the main content area. This indicates that this can be clicked, and it also changes the cursor to the hand icon which also helps the user to identify the links.

When the cursor is placed over the top of an album picture, a block appears with information about the album. Although this information is useful, it does take up a lot of space on the screen which can make it difficult to read at lower resolutions. I think that this system could have been altered so that only a brief description of the album appeared, so that it would not interfere with the viewing of the page.

Login information appears under the header at the top end of the page. The use of a grey background differentiates this element of the page, and is positioned in an area of the page where users spend a lot of their time looking when they initially look at the page. The search box uses a lighter grey background, which provides greater contrast to the black background than the grey used for the login box. As this part of the page will probably be used by a greater number of users, it is emphasised with the greatest contrast.
When accessing one of the ‘Channels’ from the navigation, the site moves to an area where music from different genres is displayed. The header image on the page changes depending on which channel is clicked. This visual clue indicates which genre the user has accessed, while keeping the navigation of the rest of the site the same. This continuation of the layout and colour scheme aims not to alienate the user, regardless of which genre they are looking at.
In conclusion, this website is simple to use due to its consistency of colour and layout, and uses the small but significant differences such as the header images to differentiate alternate parts of the website. The key design principle of this site is the predictability – almost every part of the website does what it is expected to do, with the possible exception of the album roll over description.

Mbop
The Mbop Megastore website’s most prominent feature on first appearance is the ‘Featured Releases’ section in the centre of the page. This is highlighted with a graphical image border, which houses the album covers of the featured albums. This is the densest use of colour on the page, and draws the viewer’s eye in this direction.
On the left of the page the search box appears at the top of the left column. This is interesting because the navigation is secondary to the search box, as it is positioned below it. This could be because many users simply do a search instead of using the navigation features of the page. Due to the high amount of content on the website, this would make much more sense rather than going through endless pages searching for the right album.

The top sellers section appears immediately below the navigation. I think that the pictures of the album covers are too small, and many of the song titles or album names are cut off because they do not fit into the box. The images look badly optimised and pixelated and I question weather an album could be easily identified from an image so small.A scroll box at the bottom of the left column contains information about the website. I think that this information is far too long, and could be condensed down into a more succinct section. Having to scroll through the box is also difficult, especially when using the mouse wheel which does not always pick up the scroll bar for this section of the site.

In the central section of the site, a range of albums from different categories is displayed into a series of blocks. The text under the album names on this part of the site change to purple when the cursor is placed over them. This visual clue indicates a link, but I think that the colour is not strong enough, and that additional emphasis with an underline or highlight would have made it more obvious.

The right hand column features the login box, which uses the grey colour to emphasise itself, much in the same way the Featured Releases and search sections do. This is done to differentiate them from the other parts of the site. This is a familiar place for login and basket information to be stored, as it is only required as a reference and is not the main focus of the page.
The only animated icons on the website are the roll over colour changes which occur on the logo in the top left corner, the ’Go to Checkout’ button and the buttons in the footer. These again highlight in purple, to indicate that they are interactive. This is again also signified with the appearance of the hand icon.

Nokia Music store

The top banner of the website contains the name of the store, sign in section as well as a search box. Within a relatively small amount of space the website displays all of the main controls for accessing content on the website. The search boxes assume that the viewer understands what they are for – they do not specifically say that this is what they do. This may because the web savvy target audience understands what input boxes at this part of the page are for. The use of a small image instead of the traditional ‘Search’ button may also confuse some users.

Below the header, there is a large Flash based section, which contains a number of vertical tabs to view different features of the website. A simple animation moves across the page to reveal the next slide. I found it difficult to read the vertical text, as it not very legible to see on a screen when it is rotated 90 degrees.

Graphical icons are used throughout the website, and the “Learn to” box acts as a key to explain these. This is given the prime location at the top of the left column, with the text description using an underline when hovered over with the cursor.
Overall this website is substantially more graphical than the other websites, but this does effect how the interface works. If the cursor is left over an album picture a box appears with graphical buttons for buying or trying the music. This box does take a couple of seconds to load, which can make the website feel clunky. I believe that using text instead of pictures may have allowed them to create a system similar to the Ministry of Sound website, and it would also have loaded quicker.
Overall the majority of the site is easy to use. I do think however that less experienced users would find it hard to understand how to navigate the Flash banner, as the vertical buttons are not easy to read. Personally, I think this could have been made simpler with the use of XHTML/CSS, and it would have been quicker to load. Understanding what page you are looking at is simple, as there is a sub heading which uses a darker grey to attract attention.

The colour Orange is used to on smaller buttons, and this colour stands out from the pale grey and white background colours. All of the buttons indicate some form of interactivity, such as purchasing or previewing tracks. This continued use of a colour to activate certain types of content allows the user to see where they can access key controls. This in effect makes it easier for people to buy music, as many of the orange buttons are for the ‘buy’ function.

Itunes Store

The front of the Itunes store essentially consists of 3 columns. The left contains navigation to the genres, the centre is where the body of content is displayed, and the right is where top songs and albums are displayed. The top of the page is dominated with adverts, which change while the viewer is using the page.

On first impression the page looks cluttered, as the size of the text used in the columns is all the same size. A simple underline is used when the cursor is placed over the navigation elements, to indicate which links are clickable. I found that when looking for other mediums, such as TV programs and podcasts, that the navigation elements for these were not entirely obvious. I have the feeling that the Itunes store has been added to over a number of years, and has outgrown the amount of content that it could comfortable hold.

The search box for the Itunes store is located in the itunes interface in the top right of the page. I can remember that when I first used the itunes store that I was unaware of this search feature. I believe this is because it is placed so far away from the main body of content, and I believe that users expect that search bars will be in the centre of the screen, or in the top right area of the header.

Much of the login information is held in the program, rather than in the interface. I have found it difficult to find how to log into the site when buying product from the website, as there is no indication of where the user can log in. As other websites have areas where the user can see their basket and login information, users coming to the Itunes site may not understand how these features are used.

The general look of the page is simple and consistent. The headers are highlighted by using a dark background colour with a white font. This visual device is used throughout the page to inform users of which content block contains what information. There is, however, no logo for Itunes on the front page. I believe this visual device has been removed because it is contained within a program, but if the store was simply a website it would be added to give a greater feeling of identity.

In conclusion I feel that the front page of Itunes is too cluttered, and has grown beyond what the website can hold. Despite the colour scheme and typography creating a consistent look, the function of the page has been compromised by it being placed into the Itunes program rather than being used as a website in it’s own right. I think that my own design will remove a lot of the content, and condense down the information viewable on the main page. Integrating the search into the main page will also aid in the usability of the site, much in the same way that YouTube has a search as a prominent feature of the website.

Sound in interface design – Windows XP

Windows XP uses a variety of sounds for different actions which the user conducts. For example, when the user empties the recycle bin, a sound of scrunching paper is played. This is reinforced with the image changing from a full waste paper bin to an empty waste paper bin. This feedback cycle is repeated with other functions, such as beeping noises when devices are plugged into the computer, or when files are moved around within the operating system.

On the web, sounds are not usually part of the user interface. This could be due to a number of factors. Firstly, there are no standard sounds which all computers have installed on them which could be used. This means that the user would have to download sounds when they are used, which would increase the amount of data which would have to be transferred. Secondly, the more commonplace sounds are the less effective they are. Constant use of different sounds would become confusing, and the visual and audible feedback process would be damaged.

Portfolio: Competitive analysis

2008-02-06T17:15:00.000Z

Design studio - Frontmedia

The homepage of the Frontmedia website looks very simple and clean on from an initial impression. The logo is small and is placed in the top left of the screen. This links back to the home page, and is the only piece of the navigation which does so. Below this, a javascript based nested list navigation is used, which expands and contracts depending which category is clicked on.

After clicking on web, a large list of websites appears. I think that this list is too long, as the rest of the navigation moves a substantial amount down the page. Also, as several topics can be extended at once, the navigation can run off the bottom of the viewable page at some resolutions. I would have wanted the amount of content reduced, and only the best pieces of work shown if I was a prospective client visiting this portfolio.

At the top of the main body of the page is a Flash based banner which displays various statistics. This uses typography and colour to display various pieces of statistical information, the colour being used to highlight the key point. I liked the use of the dark red, as it provided enough contrast to the light gray, without being too intense for the design of the website.

Below the banner on the main section of the page, the primary information appears. Currently on this page are two pictures, followed by a block of text. I think this text was a little too small, and may be difficult to read. However, the generous leading makes this easier, and has just enough contrast to stop it slipping into the white background. A ‘read more’ tab also appears, and uses the red accent colour used in the Flash banner. I like the way this one simple colour was used throughout the website, as it provides a feeling of consistency.

At the bottom of the page a footer appears under a dotted grey border line, which contains a secondary navigation and the copyright information. A button for increasing and decreasing the font size are included, but only makes a marginal increase in each direction. A dark grey rollover is also used on these buttons, which complements the rest of the website. Again, I like the simple and consistent look, which creates an efficient and clear presence on the page.

This page does validate, but only in XHTML 1.0 Transitional, with 1 warning error. I believe that I will still aim for a strict validation when I make my website.

Overall I think that this website uses a simple and clean layout, which allows the work on the site to be looked at without being tainted by the portfolio design. Even though there are a few small usability problems with the navigation, the site uses features familiar to most web users, such as the nested list. I think that some of the Flash parts of the site are a little unnecessary, and could have been simplified by using images and a random image loader.

Student Portfolio - Harry Roberts

The first thing I notice about this site is how dark the page looks. The background patters is almost indistinguishable from the main body of the page. The part which says “Web : Print : identity” looked to me as though it was a piece of navigation, and not just an image. I do like the strong lime green colour which the site uses as its accent, but I think this may have usability problems. Also, the top of the site is quite a distance from the edge of the page, which leaves an awkward amount of space. If this moved up slightly, I think the whole page would have a more cohesive look, and would show a greater amount of content to entice the user to read the page.

The large navigation buttons look bold and are easy to find, and are well spaced for the size of web page. The green and white colours are used in the article titles, and also in the Javascript buttons which show and hide the article content.

I found that these buttons could make the browser slow and unresponsive. Although I realise the importance of showing technical skill on a portfolio such as this, I question weather that is worth sacrificing usability for in an ever more usability conscious world. Simply organising the file structure better would have allowed for links to other articles, and would have limited the amount of scrolling needed on this page.

In the bottom right of the screen there is a return to top button which slowly scrolls the page upwards. Again, although this is an impressive features, a simple link to the top of the page would have been a simpler and more elegant idea.

When the cursor is placed over the top of an image on the website, a small description of the project appears. This is one part of the site really liked, as it looked very clean and functioned well. It was quick enough to load and allowed me to find out about projects without having to ‘open’ the article to see the content which was hidden away.

The information given about the project is also succinctly shown. The ‘breif’ part simply states what the website or piece of print work was for, and allows the work to speak for itself. I however believe that on my portfolio that I will want a small piece of prose which will sum up the project, but I will consider using this format myself.

In conclusion I think that this website provides a strong corporate identity with its use of colours, shapes and interesting fonts. I do think however that it is slightly too reliant on technologies such as Javascript which I think could have been left out of the design. The site provides a reasonable insight to the work done by the student, and a good representation of the skills which they have.

SMLP: Progress report 1

2008-02-06T13:36:00.000Z

After 2 weeks of working through my self managed learning plan I have been finding out about PHP, and have been going through my PHP, Apache, MySQL web development book.

I was aware that PHP could be used to construct CMS systems, as I have used the Textpattern system to make websites in the past. I was however unaware of how diverse the uses of PHP could be, from creating and manipulating images to creating mailing lists.

Over the first week of conducting my PHP work, I had many problems wetting up an offline server to test my PHP work on. After much trial and error I managed to get the system working, which enabled me to start working. This loss of time due to trying to fix operational problems is something which I did not consider when making my learning plan. I have been surprised at how difficult it has been to get set up and running, and is something I would have to investigate the next time I plan to learn something new for the first time.

My initial pieces included making a simple login system (Login is Joe, PW 12345), which could then arrange a list of information. I learnt about features of PHP, including variables, constants, if/else arguments and includes. Although I have used these in my examples, I am finding it hard for the information I have learn to ‘stick’. This is one of the unknowns when undertaking planned learning, and the problem is compounded by knowing that you must create a finished piece of work within a set amount of time.

Over the past week I have started using PHP in conjunction with MySQL. This again was difficult to get working correctly, which lead to me removing the apache server I had been using and instead decided to use the excellent WAMP program. This allows me to set up all of my Apache, MySQL and PHP in one package, and even uses the PHPMyAdmin for use with databases. Once this was working I could continue my SMLP. Again, it was frustrating to lose precious time out of the 96 hours allotted to completing this part of the assignment, and I can see a lot of hard work being required to create any kind of end product.

My work with databases has also been frustrating in places. Often, a whole script of code will not function because of simple mistakes. Once space or bracket out of place will sometimes stop the code being processed, and again more time is lost through finding errors and fixing mistakes.

Over the next week I may have to try other means of learning PHP. I have ordered the Visual Quickstart guide which will look at over Easter. Although not on my original list of resources, I feel that I must try a new tactic to try and learn what is proving to be a difficult coding language.

As I have followed the early part of my learning plan, I feel that more initial research would have given me a better start. This is something I will implement in the future, by looking on forums and asking other people what resources are the best to use.

Overall a frustrating couple of weeks with the learning plan, but I aim to continue getting what I can out of the time allowed for this part of the unit.

Portfolio Delivery Requirements

2008-01-30T16:03:00.000Z

This is a list of the technologies I will use for my portfolio webpage, with an explanation of how they will be used.

XHTML 1.0 Strict

This coding language will be used for displaying the content of the webpage, and will generate links and other interactive content such as navigation on the website. The XHTML code will also be validated, as this is the best practice when creating websites. It will also ensure that my website remains future proof, ensuring that users will be able to view the website in the coming years.

CSS2.1

Cascading Style Sheets version 2.1 will be used to alter the presentation of the website. This information is kept separate from the content, which will make it easier for me to update. This will also be validated to ensure that it is future proof, and will enable browsers to display the website to give a near identical end user experience for the user regardless of which browser they use.

Textpattern v.4.0.5

Textpattern is a content management system (CMS) which will allow me to alter the content of my website quickly and easily. I will create a page template of XHTML and CSS which I will copy into the system, before setting up the CMS to allow me to input different content into different areas of the site. I have chosen this system because it will allow me to update my website with new projects, so that a potential employer will be able to see the quality of my latest work.

Textpattern also allows me to input a range of plugins, which can enhance various features of the application. This should allow me to continually develop the portfolio after I have finished the course.

Smd_smimbox (Textpattern plugin)

This plugin for Textpattern will allow me to use the popular ‘lightbox’ application. This will allow me to show pictures of my projects and development work in an interesting way. Using Lightbox will reduce the amount of pages needed to display images, and will also give the user the option of downloading a higher quality image. This should reduce the bandwidth usage of the end user, giving them control of what content they decide to access.

This plugin also requires smd_lib to allow it to work, which contains a library of functions which various Textpattern plugins utilise.

Fire FTP v0.97

I will be using the Fire FTP plugin to upload my web information to the internet. This FTP client is free and simple to use, and works within the Firefox 2.0 browser.

MySQL 5.0

I will have to set up a MySQL database on my web hosting so that I can install the Textpattern software. This will keep all of the data I input into Textpattern organised into a relational database, which the software can then use to display information.

POP 3
I will be using the POP3 email system to allow viewers to contact me. This will be done through Textpattern, which will be able to build a tag which I can insert into my site. It also allows for a newsletter system to be set up, so interested users could be informed of new developments on the portfolio.

Portfolio website profiles

2008-01-23T17:03:00.000Z

Primary - Educationalists
This part of my target audience is aged between 30 and 55 and has high computer experience, and has access to high speed internet connection at work and at home with a connection speed greater than 1mbps. The user has also used sever e-commerce websites to order products and services, and uses the internet to research while at work. They use both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 for Windows XP and Mac OSX to use the internet. These users are also highly educated and read several magazines and books each week.

Secondary - Potential employees
These users are aged between 30 and 45 and work in the interactive media design industry. They are very experienced internet users, and use the latest browsers (IE7, Firefox 2.0, Opera V9, Safari 2.0), and use both Mac OSX and Windows XP systems. They have a substantial knowledge of XHTML, CSS, as well as CMS systems. These users are also experienced designers, with interests in bitmap, vector artwork as well as typography. These people are frequently online, and have experienced many online shops, which they use frequently to buy products.

Secondary - Potential Clients
The typical user owns a small business and would like to increase it’s exposure to their client base. They have limited internet experience, and use the internet in the evening at home for an hour every day. They use Internet Explorer 6 for Windows and have occasionally bought products from online shops. They mainly use search engines to find the websites which they would like to browse, and have an internet connection speed of 512kbps. This user also uses the internet to contact friends by email and instant messaging systems.

PHP & it's capabilities in Interactive Media

2008-01-23T14:48:00.000Z

PHP stands for Hypertext Pre-processor, and is a coding language which generates HTML content for use in web pages. The server side scripting language allows web developers to write scripts or small programs which can read and write to databases to record information. It can also be used to edit documents remotely, and can even alter graphic content, such as adding watermarks for photographs or reducing the canvas size.

Common uses for PHP in products can include content management systems, such as Textpattern. These interfaces use PHP to allow users to input content which is then displayed through the front end of the website. These systems are usually connected to a MySQL database which will then house either the content itself, or links to folders which contain the content. Using a CMS system makes it much easier to update the content of a website and also has a large appeal to clients wanting to look after their own websites.

E-commerce websites can also make use of PHP systems. This can help to store and manage information on customers, products, personal information as well as adding search features to aid the usability of a website. Due to the large volume of data stored, MySQL databases have to be managed to remain efficient. Knowledge of MySQL and PHP go hand in hand when creating and managing large amounts of information, and the architecture of these databases is crucial the function of the end product.

Graphical content can also be generated and edited by using PHP. Information such as stock exchange prices can be rendered on the fly into a graph, which will display when the source information changes. This dynamic ability is useful for keeping content relevant and up to date, and will therefore continually bring end users back to a website.

Further manipulation of images can be achieved with using PHP, to does automated tasks such as resizing images and adding watermarking to photographs. These automated systems can greatly reduce the amount of work files need to be prepared for the internet, making the end user experience much simpler.

The end user experience has the potential to be substantially better when using PHP. A website where the content changes will entice users to return for additional information, which will help client to keep their business exposed to customers. This is of course reliant on the system being easy to use and manage, so that the minimum amount of technical knowledge is needed to use the application.

Many job vacancies ask for knowledge of MySQL and PHP. As this language is firmly embedded into the makeup of the internet, it is a very valuable skill to learn. Knowing how to manipulate the language of PHP will be of great interest to employers who are looking for skilled employees, and also for clients who will want easy to use CMS applications for their projects.

Portfolio website goals

2008-01-16T17:11:00.000Z

XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1 valid

To measure this goal I will use the w3 validation service on both my XHTML and CSS documents. The reason for doing this is because it is good practice to validate code in this way, and will therefore appeal to potential employees. Validation can help to future proof the website, and is an essential skill required in many job adverts which I have seen.

Use a CMS system to make all the content of the website updatable

Using a CMS system to update the website will allow me to keep the site up to date, and will also show that I can use these types of systems when creating interactive media products. Again, I have seen that this appears on many job adverts, and will therefore appeal to potential employers. Te evaluate this, I will to write a report explaining how each section of the website is accessible, and will asses how each one has been set up to supply the content needed in this area of the website.

Website should comply with W3 accessibility guidelines 1.0 level A conformity

For my portfolio website I will want to make it accessible. This will be done by using the W3 accessibility guidelines to assess if my website meets level A conformity. This will be done in an accessibility evaluation, where I will go through each point and assess if my website meets these guidelines.

Accessibility is a very important issue, and again is a skill which many employers advertise in their job adverts. This will produce a number of design challenges which I will have to consider both in the design and construction of my portfolio site.

Create a professional looking website which will appeal to potential clients

This goal is aimed at making my website appeal to potential clients. I will want to do some user testing for the website, and I will create a questionnaire which will contain a number of questions for potential clients to answer. These will ultimately indicate if my website is seen by them as being professional – ie if they would consider in contacting me with a request to produce some work.

I will assess this using an evaluation of the questionnaire results. This will assess if my website appeals to part of my target audience, and will highlight any changes needed to improve the website.

M5 Coke bottle feedback

2007-12-12T16:12:00.001Z

For my A12 assignment I have come up with 3 designs for the M5 Coke bottle product. I would like some feedback on which idea I should make my final product.

Arrows This design originally started as a oil pastel drawing on red paper. I have modified the shape of the canvas to fit the bottle, and made the arrows different weights to promote a feeling of moving.

Party On

This idea initially started as a scrape of ink on a page. I thought that this looked like a little person, and then developed it into a party scene.

Hand Print

This started with my painting my hand red, adding blue stripes down the centre of my fingers and then printing it onto a page.

Please give comments on which design you think is most appropriate for the M5 coke bottle. Cheers in advance.

Reflection of the last half semester

2007-12-12T14:38:00.000Z

The past half semester has been a mix of diverse creativity on a Wednesday, and continual frustration on a Thursday. I have found the Culture Vulture assignment tough to concentrate on because of the pressure coming from the team project, as we have recently had an influx of content to sort out, which should really have been delivered earlier.

As my role in the team has developed into a design/PA position, I have had a lot of administration work to do. Recently I have been sorting out a final checklist for the folder, which will be used this week to make sure that we each present the correct work for each of the learning outcomes.

In the Culture Vulture assignment I experimented with a range of different materials, but found it difficult to continually come up with new ideas. I would have liked to have had more work which would have possibly given me greater choice over the final design, but having to juggle this with an increasingly heavy workload in the team assignment has not been easy.

I feel very annoyed that the grades for our team in both assignments could be jeopardised through no fault of our own. I also think that the project itself has been hard because we are effectively working as an intermediary between our client and the college system. My target of getting 4 merits in the second year could be in jeopardy, and will put me under pressure to gain these results in the last assignments of the year.

I am looking forward to some elements of the next semester, such as creating the portfolio page. For this I think I will create a corporate identity, and also creating a profile page which will use the Textpattern content management system. I have explored using this system in my own time over the past half semester, firstly by creating a personal blog, and secondly by redoing my Shark Racing website with the system. I have found it easy to use once I had got my head around it, and should be an efficient way of keeping my profile page up to date. If I do end up not having a job straight away, I will at least be able to show personal project on the site which will appeal to potential employers.

Having a backup plan for the possibility of not going straight into work will be something to think about. I would want to expand on my weaker skills, as well as learn new coding languages and techniques which will hopefully make me more employable.

The project I am least looking forward to is the User Interface assignment, which will use Flash. It is well documented on Das Forum that I am not a Flash fan – it’s just not the program for me. I’ve never found Macromedia programs easy to use, and Flash is one of the most complex ones. I will be hoping to find a way in which I can keep the assignment relevant to other skills I want to develop, such as accessibility and product demonstrations.

In my sessions on Monday with John we have been looking at jobs, CVs and other employment angles. I am feeling more and more confident of being able to apply for job once the course is finished. I will want to put a lot of work into the portfolio and CV as these are the most important elements when looking for job, as ex-students have told us. Tailoring both to the employer target audience will be a vital exercise in the next semester.

Over the next week I will be completing the On the Job and Culture Vulture assignments, which still have loose ends to tie up. The priority for tomorrow will be to get our site packaged up for the college web administrator, and get our feedback form off our client, which will not be easy if the last semester is anything to go by.

BTEC and Skillset standards comparison

2007-12-05T17:10:00.000Z

Skillset: http://www.skillset.org/uploads/pdf/asset_11296.pdf?1
BTEC: http://www.edexcel.org.uk/VirtualContent/72130/BH015809_HNCD_Interactive_Media_L5_specification.pdf

BTEC and Skillset both aim to provide a set of specifications which outline the requirements needed to become proficient in interactive media. BTEC is constructed by academic individuals, with the aim to provide students with an education over a two year course. Skillset has a much different aim, which is to provide a set of skills which people should have to be employed in the interactive media industry.

Both BTEC and Skillset understand the need for skills such as time planning, organisation and self managed learning. This is the first unit of Skillset, and unit 29 of the BTEC syllabus. I think these skills are very important for people in the interactive industry, and both specifications realise this.

However, the Skillset unit contains far more elements in its specification, while the BTEC syllabus separates out many of the skills over a number of units. I feel that the Skillset specifications are designed for a much longer timescale, where as the BTEC skills are arranged to be taught over a two year course. Due to these time limitations, the BTEC specifications cannot contain the same amount of detail as the Skillset specifications.

This could create problems when applying for jobs, as potential employers may want to see a larger range of organisational skills which may not be applicable to a two year course. This can include learning over long periods of time, as many projects in a real job could last over the amount of time the longest unit on the BTEC course.

I feel the BTEC course tries to balance traditional academic study with industry professional practice. This could be acceptable, but as the syllabus has not been updated for a considerable amount of time it has quickly become outdated. In an industry which changes frequently, this can become damaging to the relevance of the syllabus.

This can be seen most clearly with the ‘New technologies in Interactive media’ (unit 22) part of the course, which does not contain any CSS as part of its specification. However, the tutor’s interpretation of this did allow us to create a CSS project as part of the A8 assignment, which is more in line with the specifications outlined in Skillset (IM19). This shows how out of date the syllabus is, as CSS is now widely used but does not appear explicitly as part of the course.

The arrangement of the Skillset specifications is also more relevant to the industry as it has been arranged into different job roles in some sections. This is useful for showing how the skills of one job are transferable from one to another. It can also highlight what new skills may have to be learnt if a career change was being planned. BTEC does not separate out its content into job roles, suggesting that it is to be learnt as a whole, rather than to be constantly referenced to highlight which skills need to be developed for career changes.

In conclusion I think that the BTEC syllabus has the correct structure to create a good grounding in 2 year for potential interactive media designers, but due to the very infrequent updates it soon becomes outdated and, in the case of some units, irrelevant. This leads to a dependence on course tutors to interpret the syllabus in a way which explores the skills outlined in the Skillset specifications. If executed correctly, this is a sound way of making the best of a bad situation.

In an ideal situation, the course syllabus would be updated regularly, with many of the Skillset recommendations taken into account. Obviously, with the syllabus being written for a two year course, not all of the specifications could fit into syllabus. If Skillset could prioritise the skills in their own specifications, then it would make organisation for both BTEC and the individual easier if they wanted to follow the industry recommendations.

CD Selection tracklist

2007-11-21T18:30:00.000Z

Below is the track listing for my inspirational music CD.

1. Accordion Song (Accidental Saturday Night Kitchen Mix) - Red - Eliza Carthy

2. Sexual Harassment In The Workplace - Guitar - Frank Zappa

3. String Quartet: Assez vif. Tres rythme - Ravel: String Quartet in F, Introduction and Allegro - Maurice Ravel

4. Charlie Big Potato - Post Orgasmic Chill - Skunk Anansie

5. Maid On The Shore - Rough Music - Eliza Carthy

6. Comin' On - Buddy Guy & Friends - Buddy Guy

7. How Long Will You Stick Around? - Tales - Mouse

8. Come All Ye - Liege and Lief - Fairport Convention

9. Journey To The End Of The East Bay - And out come the wolves - Rancid

10. How Does Your Garden Grow? - Front Parlour Ballads - Richard Thompson

11. Face to Face - Discovery - Daft Punk

12. Blackbird - Rolling - Martha Tilston

13. Highway Jones - Brother - Cry of Love

14. Jack Frost - Holy Heathens And The Old Green Man - Waterson Carthy

The best colour combination: Black & White

2007-11-15T21:29:00.000Z

Black and white: the most elegant, powerful and engaging colour combination. Black and white come from each end of the colour spectrum, and therefore has maximum contrast. This can be used to draw the viewer’s attention, giving your piece of work full authority on the page. Below we see the Apple logo, in essence just a collection of simple shapes, in practise, a strong, resounding and instantly recognisable black and white logo.

Black and white can also give elegance; smart and uncompromising, it can instantly set a sophisticated and fashionable tone. Some colour combinations drift in and out of fashion. Not black and white. It’s always there, it’s always being used and gives brands a timeless basis on which to establish themselves. Below, the Hugo Boss logo exudes connotations of class, quality and power when combined with a strong, well balanced typographical logo.

Black and white is understood in every culture, can be clearly seen by everyone, and is simple to use effectively. It can represent confidence, power, quality and class without losing its effectiveness in different types of media. It is simply beauty from simplicity. Choose black and white as the colour combination of the sophisticated interactive media designer.

Presentation, Pie, and the Sculpture Park

2007-11-07T17:27:00.000Z

The day of the presentations had arrived, after a 2 weeks of holiday and self study. I did not feel awfully well this morning, but soldiered on regardless. I felt less nervous about this presentation, and I feel that as I do more my confidence grows.

This confidence came from having reliable research which I gained from getting the The Stratocaster Chronicles: Celebrating 50 Years of the Fender Strat book, which contained a lot of detail about how the Strat became so popular. I focused on how the product itself became an icon through its design, and I’ve now become aware about how much the small details count – something which I hope to emulate on the course.

My presentation was pretty well timed – I went with the principle of making 1 slide for every 30 seconds, plus a start and end slide which would only be on screen for a couple of seconds. I think I covered all the bases, as I talked about how the Stratocaster has affected our culture, as well as foreign cultures and what features set it apart from the competition.

In the afternoon we went on a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is one of my favourite places to visit, not only because they sell Samuel Smiths and Ossett Brewery’s finest ales, but because of the rich natural environment.

After a lovely steak and potato pie (made with Ossett Brewery’s Treacle Stout) Chris T and I wandered around the park looking at the exhibits and taking many pictures of anything which caught our eyes. I found that at this time of year there were many beautiful colours in the trees, and many textures on the bark. I’m hoping that these will come in useful when putting together creative work for the new assignment, and I will continue to use photography as part of the process. Some pictures from today are posted below.
For my creative process for this assignment I am going to use many other different types of media, including collage materials, paints, pastels (oil and chalk) as well as pencils and paper. This should give me plenty of ideas to work from, but I am expecting that turning my creative work into a commercial product will be very tough. I would think that the reverse creative process may be a good way to work with artistic clients, as they could produce documents such as ideas boards which could then be converted into a final product.

After returning from our trip out, we were told our grades for the CSS Beauty assignment. I have received a merit for this assignment, which means I have already filled half my quota for my goal of getting 4 merits in this final year. Apparently I just missed out on a distinction which is a bit disappointing, but I was only aiming for a merit anyway. I think having the dreaded man flu the day before hand in may have had an effect, but that’s life. My official assignment feedback will be next week, which I am looking forward to.

I recently purchased a book called Fingerprint: The art of using handmade elements in graphic design. This book has shown me that you can combine graphic design with traditional print techniques. OpenType fonts look very interesting, as you can randomise characters within a font library to generate hand written looking type.

I have also purchased Caffine for the Creative Mind which I am hoping will give me some ideas on how to get my creative juices flowing for this assignment. It is yet to arrive, but the synopsis looks promising.

Inspirational CD choices

2007-10-31T17:59:00.000Z

Choice 1: Sexual Harassment in the Workplace – Frank Zappa - Guitar

This is one of the very few pieces of Frank Zappa’s music which I have been able to find which I could stand to listen to. Frank Zappa was a very experimental musician, who usually blended orchestral scores with stand up comedy – a very odd mix by anyone’s standards.

Sexual Harassment in the Workplace however is much more simple. It is a 12 bar blues song with Zappa sensitively playing his guitar in his typical quick fingered manor. I find this inspirational because you can hear from the recording (which is at a live gig) that the volume is incredibly loud, yet Zappa manages to play so delicately and with so much feel.

Choice 2: Ravel: String Quartet in F – Assez vif. Tres rhytme - Debussy / Ravel string Quartets

Maurice Ravel was part of the impressionist movement in classical music at the turn of the last centaury. This basically means the music was about setting an atmosphere, and this piece of music contains a lot of this.

Although I’ve not heard a large amount of classical music, I do like the smaller groups of instruments, such as a string quartet. What I like about this type of music is the images it paints in my head, as you think of all sorts of settings and colours. I often find that this can help the creative process when I am thinking of ideas.

This piece of music has many different tempos, and constantly changes its depth as different instruments come into and go out of the composition. There is a strong feeling of movement as the stringed instruments swoop in and out, constantly giving quite an intimidating edge to the music.

Choice 3: How Long Will You Stick Around? - Mouse - Tales

Mouse were a duet consisting of Martha Tilston and Nick Marshall who had an acclaimed reputation on the folk scene a few years back. Martha Tilston would go on to become a solo artist, with an even stronger reputation than she did when performing in Mouse.

After being turned down by several record labels, she decided to set up her own label. She raised the funds by auctioning paintings which would be used on her first album cover, which I think is highly commendable and very industrious.

This song is very delicate, with Marshall’s guitar and Tilston’s voice being the only two elements in the song – but nothing else is needed. This song always reminds me of summer, and the rich, natural colours associated with it.

The first half-semester review

2007-10-24T16:47:00.001+01:00

The past seven weeks seem to have flown by, and we’re now half way through the first semester. There was a definite change in the feel of the group compared to last year, probably because there were less people around than before.

I found that the first week was probably the hardest so far on the course, as there was a lot to take in with the new assignments. The pitch for one of the team project clients was a struggle to put together, as our team didn’t really know how to approach pitching for such generic briefs. We persevered, however, and managed to get the in college project to design a website for the athlete development program.

The team project seems to have been like swimming through treacle right from the start, as we have top juggle the needs of our client with what can be done with the college system. I guess this is what a lot of projects in the industry are like, as some clients have specific requirements which need to be carried out in specific ways.

The perseverance and endurance needed to do a project is one of the things I’ve learnt most while doing it, and keeping momentum in the project can only be done by doing hard work. As designer/PA I’ve also had to look after the documents which the team produce, which I have enjoyed quite a lot.

Doing the minutes has been something which I have got use to doing, and some weeks there can be as many as 3 or 4 meetings to do minutes for. This is quite a monotonous task, and the only way to do it is to get on with it straight away. Again, taking the rough with the smooth is all part of working in the industry, and I think I have learnt this during the team project.

The CSS beauty project was an interesting project, and has filled a lot of the gaps in my knowledge of CSS. I now understand how things like selectors work, where as before I was just using them without knowing what they did.

I did find that the ideas generation was quite a hard part for this project, as I didn’t find any of the themes particularly exciting. To combat this, I used spider diagrams to outline what ideas I had for each, and then selected the one which I had the most ideas for. I will use this process again if I am stuck for ideas, as it helped me to find an appropriate theme to generate my site with.

In some ways I still feel that I am bumbling my way through with the CSS. I can create a site, fix a lot of the problems in it, and test it in a lot of browsers. The thing is, I don’t always understand why the changes I have made have worked. The question is, do I really need to? Or should I just be content with the fact that it is working? I’m not really sure just yet.

The PDP part of the iMe assignment has been a nice change to do on Wednesday afternoons. I’ve found the prospect of thinking about applying for jobs and going for interviews quite horrifying, as I don’t feel anywhere near ready to do that just yet. I don’t think my answers to the interview questions have been wonderful either, especially after ‘the passive debacle’ in my previous post.

I’m not even sure what the ‘describe yourself in 3 words’ question is all about, what does it matter what I think of myself? Surely it should be what they think of me and my abilities, as they are the ones who are going to be handing over the cash.

I think my answers have been far too wooden. I think that talking to a person would generate a different set of answers as you can get some kind of reaction or feedback to what answers you are giving. I don’t even think a faux interview would change that, as it would still feel forced, and nothing would be riding on giving the right answers. I think I’ll just have to sort in my own mind answers to potential interview questions.

Over the next half semester I will be looking forward to completing the team project, as well as doing the Culture Vulture assignment. For this assignment, I will be looking to do a large range of experiments with a variety of media, including collages, photography, drawing and other methods. I think this approach should give me plenty of options for the production of whatever product is revealed in the assignment.

Interview questions: Part 2

2007-10-10T17:06:00.000+01:00

Describe yourself in 3 words.

Calculated, observant, passive.

How would you describe the effectiveness of your interactive media products?

To test the effectiveness of my products I would conduct a survey with a sample of the target audience, as well as record statistics for a website if this was applicable. The questions would be based around the goals of the project, which would be stipulated in the initial processes. This would include a selection of measurable and subjective goals, which would be evaluated after the survey had been completed. Amendments would then be planned, if needed, to suit the target audience better if any issues arose from the survey.

How do you handle criticism?

Initially, I accept that this criticism is only offered to help me find the right solution for the project. I will defend the decision which I have made when I am challenged on it, as this can show the reasoning behind the decision that I have made. If I know in myself that I have made an error of judgement, I will accept it and then focus on finding and applying a solution. Being caught up in the disappointment of having to alter something serves no purpose, and is only a waste of time. Getting on with the task in hand and finding a new solution must be the priority rather than ‘crying over spilt milk’.

Describe a difficult problem and how you solved it.

When creating my second website for the course I had to learn how to use CSS and XHTML. As I had only produced one site using tables and cells, I found that this was a very daunting prospect. I outlined a plan which involved looking through online tutorials and books to find the resources I needed to make the site. I also planned a set of mini goals so that I could focus on different areas of the site, such as the navigation and preparation of images.

As I started to put the site together I kept a record of how the code had changed for future reference. By the end of the project, I had learnt a solid base of CSS knowledge, much of which I had learn myself. My strategy of planning and my persistence to get the site working were just a couple of essential soft skills which I learnt. I gained a very good grade for the assignment, and produced a classy site which cemented my basic CSS knowledge.

Describe how you fit into a team.

In a team situation, I take my responsibilities very seriously. I believe that being reliable is the most essential part of working in a team, as a project can fail if there are any team members who do not pull their weight. In a team I like to be involved with the heart of the project, as I believe that I can constantly analyse the changing situation. I know that getting on with colleagues is crucial as it removes any awkwardness when it comes to criticising each others work. Colleagues who cannot accept criticism frustrates me greatly, but I have an ability to remain passive and unflustered whatever the situation.

Do you have any questions?

What support do you offer in terms of additional training for staff members?

What is your policy on overtime?

How would you describe the working environment in the company?

Where do you see the company in 5 years time?

What team bonding activities do you have at this company?

Job prospects review

2007-10-08T20:27:00.000+01:00

For the first question, I thought that talking about issues such as accessibility would be a good direction to go in, and that I had some business awareness. I think that my answer was a bit vague, and I should have directed it firmly at the company I was applying to. Having only a few minutes to find a vacancy, this was not a possibility in this situation, but when applying for real I think that looking at the work the company has done and doing research into them is needed before going to the interview. This would help me construct more direct and relevant answers.

I said that my greatest strength was applying an appropriate strategy to suit each client. I think this answer was correct, but I believe I should have looked at it from a more creative point of view. I should have focused on my ideas generation techniques from the start of the answer, and not at the end. An ‘appropriate strategy’ sounds too formal, and would not suit the target audience of a creative director at a company.

For my greatest weakness, I talked about my limited technical knowledge. However, I put a positive spin on things by saying that I constantly look to build on my abilities and am willing to try new techniques. I believe this was the correct way to approach this, as it shows that I want to improve and that I can identify that this is an area which needs some work.

The ‘5 years from now’ was by far the hardest question to answer. Again, I identified that my skills would change considerably over the next 5 years, and that I would like to be managing other people to complete project. However I did not mention this company in particular, and this lack of loyalty would probably be a big negative for the employer. Next time I think that I should again focus this more on the company that I am applying for rather than generalising. I should have said that strong working relationships both with clients and colleagues at work was essential for being productive, and that jumping from one company to another would not be in the interests of my own personal development.

For the current innovation part, I said that video was something which excited my about the future. I believe this answer showed that I had a good knowledge of the future of the internet, where video will become more and more commonplace as bandwidth increases. I also mentioned that accessibility was also an important part of the future, and that the two combined created many challenges. I think for this answer I should have talked more about what clients needs would be for this, as working at this company would mean creating products for clients on a daily basis.

For the hero question I chose to a mature answer to this by naming Richard Thompson as my idol. I think that choosing someone from the industry such as Jakob Neilsen would have sounded very predictable and could have raised a few eyebrows as to if I was just saying what wanted to be heard, rather than what I actually thought. I tried to link the career of my idol with what I wanted my own to be, in general terms. I think this answer was ‘right’ because it shows that I have interests other than design, and having an interesting personality can help when working with colleagues.

Job Prospects

2007-10-03T17:24:00.000+01:00

http://www.graduatesyorkshire.co.uk/job/32285/vacancy/?_ts=25186

Employer: Magnitude Ltd

Job Details (from source) - “Junior to mid-level web designer with good understanding of HTML, CSS and web accessibility, and basic Flash skills - to work on exciting accounts including global, consumer brands.”

Degree: Digital / creative qualification.

Location: Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Salary: £15,000 p.a.

Why do you want this job?

I would like to take up this position because I have an enthusiastic interest in creating high quality, accessible websites. I understand that all users have the right to be able to access the web, irrespective of if they have an old computer system, a slow connection or a disability. I also have a good understanding of marketing and business strategy, and have helped clients to create interactive media projects which can promote their products.

My own working practices revolve around planning and preparation. I believe that this greatly boosts confidence with both clients and colleagues. I feel that with this job position I could accommodate several different projects at once, which the modern interactive media environment demands.

What is your greatest strength?

My greatest strength is my ability to find an appropriate strategy to create a product which shows the clients products or services at their best. This comes from analysing what the target audience for the product demands. When this is combined with my more artistic abilities, strong and suitable designs are easy for me to create. The strategies which I use to find suitable designs use a range of skills, including sketches, photography and collecting other pieces of design. This has proven to be effective, as I can compare my work to that of an industry professional and constantly evaluate, adapt and improve the quality of my own work.

What is your greatest weakness?

I feel that my greatest weakness is that I limit my designs to the technical skills which I know and am comfortable with. I think that over time this will improve as my technical knowledge becomes greater, which will only come from trying out new techniques either in the workplace, or outside of work in my own time. I do find it frustrating that I do not yet have this technical knowledge, and this gives me more drive to overcome this. To do this, I employ a strategy of doing small tasks to try out new techniques to improve the palette of skills and build on my technical abilities.

Where will you be 5 years from now?

In 5 years I hope to be in a position where I am doing both print and web design, as I enjoy both of these areas. I would also like to be in a position where I am managing others to complete projects, as my ability to plan and prepare will be of great use to an interactive media team. With my evaluative abilities, I think that I would be good judge of other peoples working strategies and design ideas.

By this time, I will have learnt a lot of new technical skills which will have vastly improved the quality of my work. This will be achieved by on the job experience and by undertaking exercises as mentioned previously. As the industry will change greatly over this time, I know that my skills will have to change considerably, and over the next 5 years I will be looking to invest my own skills from tackling the challenges of the future.

What current innovation excites you most?

I am currently very excited about the use of video on the internet. I believe that as internet connections get faster more and more people will want to have video media on their website. This is a totally different type of media in comparison to a static or flash page, and provides challenges in regards to accessibility. Implementing this technology into websites will change vastly over the next 5 years, and the design of video is a challenge which I have already started to experiment with in my own time with a lot of success.

Who is your hero and why?

My hero is the guitarist Richard Thompson. He has constantly been an innovator throughout his career, and has both amazing technical skill as well as a vast imagination. I would hope that in my own career I could be as innovative and have the such an endless well of creativity.

Design Mechanics visit

2007-09-26T21:37:00.001+01:00

I learnt to design for the client, not yourself. CVs sent to prospective employers should be followed up with a phone call, as this shows enthusiasm. Dave Pannell believed the portfolio should include commercial pieces of work. Web and print pieces are needed to show a range of abilities.

Technical skills form part of the requirements, and a willingness to learn. Finding information clients helps create designs which they like. Getting them to commit to work reduces the chances of a redesign later. Print and web design are valued equally in the industry.

Back on track

2007-09-19T17:40:00.000+01:00

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.

Soft Skills

2007-09-12T17:20:00.000+01:00

Personal Development Planning
This is a skill which I have been using over the last year of the course. On several occasions I identified that certain parts needed improvement (e.g. time planning, sketchpad work). I then formed an action plan on how to improve these skills, and then evaluated my progress at the end of the allotted time. In the industry, this is an essential skill, as I may have to learn new languages or new techniques to improve my skills. Now that I know how to form a suitable plan and set goals, I am capable of doing this comfortably.

Attending Lectures
I have always made an issue of being punctual and on time for lectures and tutorials. I find that this gives a good impression, and allows you some time to prepare to take notes and get in the correct frame of mind for learning. This will be important when I get a job, as there will be many meetings with clients or other members of staff who may have to rely on me being there on time and being prepared.

Lectures
In lectures I have developed my listening skills, and have taken more notes than I did before coming onto the course. I also highlight important parts which I know I will have to refer to later, for example references for essays which I may note down. This preparation will be useful in the design industry, as meeting with clients will mean that I would have to record many specific facts, and not recording them could cause problems. This is something I always try to avoid, as it gives an unprofessional impression.

Oral Presentations
This is one area which I have found hard to do on the course. I usually find myself feeling nervous before hand, even when I know there is nothing to get nervous about. I believe that I have improved my skills in this area, and this is down to me being more prepared before hand. I find that this gives me an extra confidence boost, and now I must concentrate on improving my verbal delivery. Again, this skill will be helpful when presenting ideas to potential clients, as well as being able to do the end of year presentation.

Write Essays
As I have an academic history of writing essays, I found that this was one of the easier parts of the course for me. I have improved how I plan out these essays now, which has made them even easier. This usually involves using a bullet pointed list to set out what points I need to make, and linking them to the references which I collect during research. This ability to plan ahead and bring a project together will be valuable to potential employers, as this is a progressive and professional way to put together large tasks.

Maths & Statistics
On the course I have used maths and statistics to analyse which browsers are most used, as well as putting data into bar charts and pie charts to illustrate certain points. This ability to analyse will help with my own development, as well as when finding out information which will be used in a project.

Observations
During my time at college I have collected and analysed many pieces of both web and print design. These observations have vastly improved my ability to design, and I feel that I have gained a greater attention to detail. This is an essential skill to have to be able to do professional work, as small mistakes can detract from the quality of the finished product. Observations of other peoples work has also allowed me to offer feedback, and this is a skill which will help in a team situation to produce a quality product.

Research
This is an area I feel I have improved on the course. I use many more resources than I have used in the past, and I find that this actually makes it easier to put the projects together. This is because I can pick the best elements and bring them together to make a good finished result. In the design industry, this will help me to make the most appropriate product for the target audience, and therefore best creative solution.

Exams & Revision
As I have done many exams in the past I know the pressure that comes with them, and the preparation needed to do well in them. This has taught me to prepare in advance and to get a lot of practice in, as on the day you need the confidence that you know what you have to do in the exam. On the course the learning outcomes are essential to getting a good grade. In the industry, I will have to deal with this kind of pressure on a regular basis, as deadlines are much shorter, and projects are much bigger.

The Future
For the future, I feel that I need to work on my presentations skills. In terms of preparation I think I do well, and in terms of ordering information on the slides. However, when I am actually stood there I usually become nervous, and this will only improve with more practice. This is why I volunteered to talk to the first years earlier this year, and I found that I coped better with the anxiety better than I have done in the past.

Development plan for the short term

2007-09-05T17:17:00.000+01:00

Over the next 6 months of the course I hope to start to make progress at becoming a more rounded, more professional person. To do this I will be required to make changes to how I work outside of college, as this has been an area which I have struggled with so far on the course.
Firstly, I will want to get into a better working routine, as this will be an important skill to learn for the future.

This will include having more self discipline, so going to bed early and getting up earlier on a regular basis is something I will be implementing over the next few months. Secondly, I will continue to improve my time planning, and have already designed a new system of planning and recording my time over the summer. This includes colour coding the time which I am in college, doing self study, and also my free time so that I can create a better balance between all 3.

I will also be creating a checklist of the tasks needed to complete the assignments, so that I can constantly keep perspective on what has to be finished when. This will include building up my folder right form the start of the assignment, as I can feel more confidence from seeing the project take shape.

Finally I will be making more effort to find a larger range of sources when it comes to the written parts of the course. I have found that collecting more resources can actually make writing the essays easier, as I can take the best elements and focus on them to maximise my understanding of the various topics covered.

Over the next 6 months I want to be well on my way to reaching my goal of having 4 merits for this year. As I now have a greater understanding of the criteria required to do this, I can again focus my efforts on providing evidence to reach these important levels. After feedback from the A7 assignment last year, I feel that I should improve the depth at which I experiment when doing ideas generation for the assignments. To aid this, I will be using a Flickr account to upload photographs to. This will provide a place to collect images I could use in my projects, which will hopefully improve my inspiration. This will be used in conjunction with the more general improvements I will be implementing.

Over the medium term (3 years) I have 2 ideas in mind. In one instance, I could do a third year so that I can obtain a degree. This may prove to be better in the long term if I decide at a later stage in my career that I want to go into teaching. I find helping people to improve their skills is a very satisfying task, and something which I have done with various projects in the past.

Alternatively, I could finish the second year of the course and get a job as a web and print designer. I would ideally like to do both, as I find print exhilarating, and web design a satisfying challenge to master. Currently, I do not know which route I will take, as I will want to see how the second year of the course develops, and how my skills improve with the changes I am putting in place to help me work.

Self Study Stunner

2007-05-26T20:37:00.001+01:00

For a substantial amount of time I’ve been yapping on about how important the summer will be for undertaking some self study. As there is a generous 3 and a half months off college, it is simply too big an opportunity to miss doing some interesting new projects, without feeling under the cosh of impending deadlines.

Since college ended a couple of weeks ago, I have been doing some projects to try and keep my skills sharp, while adding some new abilities to my web designing toolbox. After the last website I made for the A7 assignment, I have wanted to gain more experience with CSS, as I could see its potential.

My chosen project was to create a website for my online racing team (geeky, I know) which would use some of the techniques I didn’t have chance to use on my Ambient World website. I initially started with a few basic sketches (which I have tried to do a bit neater!), just so I could get my head around what pieces of the site needed to be where.

To be totally honest, I didn’t do all that much designing. I wanted to find out how I would cope with designing “on the fly”, much like the ex-students do in their real jobs. My initial roughs can be seen above.

My design consisted of a header, horizontal navigation, and 2 columns – one for the content, and one for any links that were relevant to the content of each page. I knew from the start I would be using the ‘faux columns’ method, as this is a technique which I did not get chance to use on my Ambient World site.

Faux columns are basically a horizontal background image split into blocks for your columns, and then it is tiled vertically down the page. It still amazes me how Heath-Robinson this technique is, and how it is the only effective way to do column designs easily.

Once my background was in place, setting up my divs was fairly straight forward, as I could use similar code to what I had used in my Ambient World site. This time however, I decided to float them rather than use absolute positioning. This method is supposed to be better, and it worked a treat once all of the sizes had been set up correctly.

For my navigation, I looked for a tutorial, and found out that this was also very similar to my Ambient World website. This time however, I found that showing the active page could be done in a more streamlined way, as the ID part of the CSS could just be called active, and could be added via the class=”active” command of the button which would be highlighted.
For my text I had decided to use classes, as styling text in the divs would override the h1 and h2 tag’s size attribute. This worked well, and I used Arial for a simple, clean and uncluttered look.

As I wanted a news page for my website, I needed to search for a simple method where I could add news to the page without having to mess about uploading pages. My research lead me to a program called CuteNews. This uses PHP to draw information from a file on the server, and place it into your webpage. I had to install this feature into a folder in my hosting, and then put a reference to it in my HTML. This was easily achieved, and adding news was simple. However, this was not styled into the correct texts, so I had to add some HTML to the templates which the software provided. After a little bit of playing about, I managed to get my text to style in the correct way, and it now matched the styling of the rest of the website.
Now that all the structural elements were in place, it was just a case of putting content and pictures into my website. For the ‘Teams’ page I put a faded border onto the pictures, which was the same colour as the column. This subtle effect makes the images blend into the page, creating a more cohesive, and in my opinion, more attractive look. For the gallery, I made the thumbs so that they showed an oblong section of the full size shot, and again used the faded edges (or selection > border 10px > then fill in PS). I then put all the images together by just using HTML. This creates a simple but effective looking gallery, without having any complex CSS or Javascript.
My website was, on the whole, pretty much complete. All I needed now was a domain for it, which I had bought on my hosting company’s site. It was pretty simple to get it pointing in the right place, but I still find all the hosting and Cpanel side of things a bit perplexing. I think it’s something I’ll just have to dive into and get my head around, as I’ll be using it more and more in the second year.

There were now just a few small elements to implement. I wanted to find out how websites got the little icon to appear in the favourites list, and found this tutorial, and this Photoshop plug in which would allow me to do this.

One of the last things to do was also one of the most important: validation. I did this by using the link in the web developer’s toolbar, and thankfully there were only a few small things to fixed, like unclosed tags and pieces of CSS without closing brackets. I chose to use the blue w3c logo on my site to complement the design, and they are proudly displayed on the front page. If you click them, it will take you to the validation page and will (hopefully!) say that the website is validated.

My website is now complete, and is available to view here. I think it is a big step up from the website which I only created a few weeks ago, and goes to show just how quickly you can pick stuff up if you apply yourself to it. Validating my site is also an important milestone, and should set me up well for the summer assignment. I’d be most grateful for any constructive criticism which you have.

Over the next week I am planning on doing some small pieces of print design, and also making a start on the summer assignment. I am hoping to create some simple postcards, as a trip to the Sculpture Park the other day highlighted the amount of design which goes into making a postcard in terms of positioning of the picture, using bleed on the front picture, and where the various elements on the rear are situated. I’ll keep you posted on them as I make progress with these designs.

It's flown by...

2007-05-13T21:02:00.001+01:00

The Past

In my original blog post, the Formative Statement, I set out my goals for the future. At the time, my goals for the future were rather vague, as I only mentioned that I wanted to learn “different techniques and procedures” with new pieces of software. Since then, I have learnt substantially more than just software, which I will talk about in this post.

In the first assignment I felt that there was a lot of new information to take in, and that the process absorbing the information was a long and slow procedure. I believe this is because I had entered the course without knowing much about the workings of the internet, or the considerations to be made when designing a page. Looking back at my first website design, it looks awful in every way. Firstly, the design itself does not look pleasant, with its colour gradients and awkward layout. All that I could really take from the first assignment is that my English skills were still adequate, and that I passed it first time round due to the substantial amount of error checking which I did.

The run up to Christmas 2006 was a tough time, as we had two assignments running in parallel. I found that making the content for the web plan was a much more time consuming task than I had anticipated. During these two assignments I started to feel a lot more settled in, having got the first assignment out of the way. My web design skills for this webplan were substantially better than the first as I had put a lot more research into the layout. I believe this will be key for next year when we will be making a website for a real client.

My strategy was to keep the design simple, even if this sacrificed aesthetics somewhat. In some ways I think that I should have challenged myself more as it would have been beneficial in the long run. In the future I think I should make greater challenges for myself, as I think this way I will learn a lot more from overcoming problems, rather than just avoiding them by staying in my ‘comfort zone’.

It was during these units that I decided to use InDesign for an outside college project. This decision would end up paying dividends further on in the year, and I now believe that doing additional projects outside of college is essential for learning new skills. This has been highlighted by visits from previous students, as it allows you to build up a larger portfolio of work. I also taught myself how to use basic video editing software, and this highlighted many parts of the A4 such as image compression. As using codecs is based around similar principles, it expanded my practical knowledge of this subject.

After the Christmas break we again had to do two units at once. As I felt that my sketchpads were not up to the required standard, I focused on improving them over the Typography unit. This involved collecting more examples of design, which I annotated on in my sketchpad. This experience was key to this unit, and I felt that my skills as a designer were improved vastly by doing this. In a way looking at professional work informed my choices of layout and typography, which became evident in the final exam for the unit. As my outside projects had taught me how to put documents together quickly and accurately, I could work under the pressure of the exam time limit and produce a good end result.

During this unit I also improved on my ideas generation, as this was another area which I had identified as needing improvement. Before I had spend a lot of time just coming up with a single design. During this unit I learn that I could jot down several small designs in a short space of time, and this allowed me to supercharge the creative process. My time planning also had to improve, as being set short tasks demanded that I monitored how much time I was taking to produce a finished product. I found that braking the time down into chunks, and setting a series of mini deadlines was a method which worked effectively, and in some instances gave me some time to check for errors and improve on my work.

In the A5 builder unit I had to construct my website. I found the prospect of this rather daunting, as it was the first website I had ever built. I made a strategy of producing the site gradually, which allowed me to monitor how it worked in both browsers, which I knew could cause problems. I feel that this approach should repeated in the future, as learning CSS and Flash will be a new experience for me. I think that not over facing myself with too much too soon helped me to get a finished product from this unit which looked very much like my intended design plan did.

With the last unit of the year I wanted to take a new and more experimental approach to generating my designs. This involved taking pictures of textures and looking at a larger range of sources. I continued to collect pieces of print design which I liked, and expanded this with the research I did into album covers. I believe that if I want to make my work more professional, I need to collect lots of example of design from many more sources. This is something I must do a lot more of next year, as we will be making a website for a client and we must show a variety of designs.

In the last unit I felt that my work looked a lot more professional, especially my logo and CD design. However, the place which I improved on most was my web design and authoring. I decided to take the jump and create my website using CSS. I again took a gradual approach to doing this, as it had worked well previously. Even though I did need some help from the staff with this, I still feel a great sense of achievement at creating this website.

Doing this website has really ignited a desire to be more experimental in the future, which is what I am planning to do over the summer as self study. I think that with every piece of print design I do, or with every website I make I will see more and more improvement in the quality of the work. Throughout this year I have struggled to attain the D3 learning outcome, I now feel that I must continue to work towards this standard and beyond over the next year.

The Future

Now that I have reached the end of the first year, I know that I must not just leave the knowledge behind. As self study I will be revisiting all of the elements we have looked at since September. Now that I have the confidence to go out and try new directions, as well as evaluate my performance, I can effectively increase my experience and knowledge base. In my formative statement I mentioned that I wanted to work freelance. Over the course of the year I have changed my mind on this, as working with other people has taught me that other people’s views are crucial when designing.

As for the learning new software, I have learnt many more programs than I expected both in college and outside of college. In the second year, this will only increase, and I now know that I am fully prepared for the challenge.

For next year I only really have one goal; and it’s a pretty substantial one. This is to become more professional in every way, from ideas generation, time planning and right up to producing the final product, I want to improve them all substantially. These things are not something that someone else can do – I must take full responsibility in achieving them. To do this I will be doing more research into other people produce quality work, as well as finding more sources to work from. I found that in the A7 unit you can find some sort of inspiration from pretty much everything – you just have to go out there and explore.

I have really enjoyed the experience of college this past year. From the times it has been frustrating to the times it has been fulfilling I have found all of it has improved my as a person. Over the summer I have to prepare myself for returning in September, to take on more challenges, with more programs and with greater expectations of myself – it is a challenge which I simply cannot wait for.

As for measurable goals, I have come up with the following ones for the second year of the course:

Build an x-html/CSS website which validates using the w3c validation service.

Reference at least one course related article on my blog each week.
Reference at least one useful tutorial on my blog each week.
Create a time recording sheet and use it for each assignment.
Gain 4 merit grades over the course of the year.

Word count: 1464

Pantone Time

2007-05-04T11:08:00.000+01:00

Production is one of the elements I look forward to most on the course, and this week has had it in spades. During self study this week, I started to put together my CD cover for the ‘Russian Spring’ album. I chose to mix the elements of nature with a hot and cold colour scheme for my CD booklet. Knowing Photoshop well allowed me to select the appropriate method to put together the picture needed.

Firstly, I created several squares of colour and then rasterized them, selected them, and then applied a gradient to them. Once this was done, I used a range of wet media brushes to add depth to the surfaces, before using the eraser tool to break up the edges. Once this was completed, I could start to merge the colours together with the smudge too, set to varying strengths depending on the effect I wanted to create. This made the colours of the skyline flow together, much like the ambient sounds on the album.

To add some sense of scale, I added a silhouette of a hillside and then added tree using one of Photoshop’s brushes. I thought that the tree should be small and that there should only be one, to emphasise the scale of the skyline. My CD cover as it stands can be seen below, as well as the inside of the booklet.
At college on Wednesday I decided to bring a CD case to see how my design looked as it would be presented to a customer or client. I’d recommend everyone to try this; it really brings your design to life and makes it look totally different. It also highlights the design challenges posed by the spines of the CD, where choosing an appropriate font is very difficult. I chose the Tahoma font for my CD, as it looks contemporary and subtle which I think suits the type of music. It also looks good at small sizes, which is handy when creating the copyright text on the rear of the CD. The rear of the CD can be seen below.

I soon discovered that my CD was crying out for a clear inlay, and this gave me the opportunity to continue the hot and cold theme I used inside the CD booklet. I also used the small window in the hinge to display the artist and title of the album vertically, in the same font used on the spine. This part can be seen below.

For the CD label itself I had limited options, as continuous tone would not look good due to the printing process. I also had a limit of 5 pantone colours to use, so I took similar colours to the top inlay (which were mainly blues) and used blocks of colour to create a digital looking skyline. I thought that giving the CD a digital look would complement it well, as the CD itself does contain digital data, and provided a contrast to the surrounding continuous tone. See the picture below for my CD design.

On Wednesday I received my fixed CSS buttons from John (thanks again :) ) so much of Thursday afternoon was spent implanting them back into my pages. I eventually managed to get them working, and much of this weekend will be taken up by the implementation of the content for my corporate identity.

There has been much talk of what the end of year ‘task’ is. I think that it will be some kind of uber feedback session on the year and the course, even though I would much prefer it to be an egg box mk2 challenge. Wishful thinking, methinks.

CSSister

2007-04-27T12:41:00.000+01:00

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.

Easter Update – Digital Planet podcast

2007-04-07T20:08:00.000+01:00

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.

Bussy-ness cards

2007-04-03T23:40:00.000+01:00

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.

Picture that…

2007-03-29T23:29:00.000+01:00

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.

Pen Tool Mule

2007-03-23T19:23:00.000Z

The focus of this week’s activities centred on collecting resources for my album cover, and creating the logo for the record label. For the resources I took some pictures of different areas of the garden, including textures of various surfaces and pictures of interesting objects. After listening to the music I have decided that the album is more ‘Spring’ than it is ‘Russian’. I believe taking influences from nature may be the most constructive way forward.

Another part of my resource collecting included scanning various objects, many of them linked to electronics, music or in some cases both. This proved to be invaluable as my logo design has taken an electronic influence, with me putting electrical symbols and shapes into my rough drawings. On Thursday’s lesson I had a brain wave, and took one of the interesting shapes which I had scanned in and used it to form an Ambient World logo. The object (which was a speaker terminal cross over) was triangular, and had various shapes stamped into it. The object and the development of my logo can be seen below.
After various alterations to the orientation of the shapes, and some chopping and changing of parts, I eventually made an outline which was well within the 1:1 to 2:1 ratio needed for a logo. I also experimented with some colours which I picked from another scan I did. I had inversed the colours, and this gave it a glowing, electrically charged look which I thought was appropriate for an electronic music label.

I found that using Freehand was fairly simple. It has controls that are fairly similar to Photoshop’s pen too, but I certainly missed the convert point tool which allows you to bend the 2 axis on any given point. I am thinking that for my album cover I could combine both a bitmap image and a piece of vector work to go over the top. This is a technique that I have seen many times in pieces of digital artwork, such as the DR posters and in Photoshop magazines. I think doing some ornate foliage based vector work could be something which I could carry through all of the CD, from the cover to the booklet and CD label itself. I will source some pictures for my sketchpad to demonstrate this.

Over the next week I will be creating my 4 logo designs in Freehand, as I think that getting as much experience as possible with this program will be useful – even if some of my logos are discarded. I will also be putting together some initial rough sketches of the website which we have to create to show our style guide. I believe this will take a simple form, as I still have a lot of technical web related stuff to learn before I can create professional looking pages.

Logo Roco

2007-03-16T12:31:00.000Z

After a refreshing few days break from doing assignments, it was back to the coalface on Wednesday of this week. In the morning we had a lecture on generating logos, an area which I didn’t think had so much theory to it. After break we had another ex-student visit us, and this time it was Marc Bowers. He showed us some of the work from the Real Radio website which he creates pages for. Once again, it was emphasised that the pace of work is pretty relentless – always something to keep you on your toes. After the exam at the end of A6 I can imagine how full on it must be to do that day in, day out. I'd like to thank Marc for coming in and sharing his experiences with us.

During the afternoon we received the brief for the new assignment, A7. This unit brings together all of the stuff we have done this year, from using Photoshop to creating web pages.

Firstly, we will have to design a logo for the Ambient World record label, and present it in a vector format. Secondly, we will be developing a corporate identity and style guide to be put into a web site. Thirdly, we will choose a Fax label album, and will be creating a CD booklet, inlay, body and pre-flight document for it. Finally, we will of course be creating an evaluation on our progress through the unit.

For this unit I am aiming to bring together all the elements from previous units. For my sketchpad, I will be continuing to put in lots of examples of both good and bad design, and annotating what I find. On the time planning front, I again have created a master time plan, and will add a recorded time plan to this. This document will allow me to note down how long particular tasks have taken, so that for future reference I can plan better. I will also be adding more research to my blog and sketchpad, as well as using more non-web sources, which I will make notes on in my sketchpad. A picture of one of the album covers and how I have annotated it is shown below:

On Wednesday evening I collected around 28 album covers to stick in my sketchpad and annotate. One observation that I have made is that many of them use uppercase typefaces. I believe this could be because album covers are fairly small, and people need to be able to see the name clearly when hunting through rack upon rack of CDs. I have also notices that many contain photographs as the base of their design. I don’t think using a photograph in my design will really push the envelope much, so I’ll have to create a full range of ideas from vector and bitmap based tryouts.

During Thursday we went over what should be included in the style guide. I like the idea of the style guide, as producing documents from them takes all the heavy lifting out of the design, yet each document you create looks consistent and professional. However, actually making the guide itself and removing any ambiguity from it will be a challenge. As this has to be presented in a web page, I will have to improve my skills for creating this. I am planning on learning some basic CSS, as I think this will make the creation of the page easier. I believe I will stick to a simple, clean and functional design to make the production easier.

On Thursday evening I managed to find some samples of my chosen CD (Pete Namlook & New Composers – Russian Spring) on Itunes – I have to say I really like it, and it is already formulating some ideas in my head. The music sounds quite airy and very listenable. I can’t wait to hear what it sounds like on the ol’ Quad.

Between now and next week I will be continuing to find resources, and may do some experiments with putting different materials onto the scanner and seeing what I can do with them in Photoshop. I will also be taking some photographs for more texture ideas, and probably pictures of the garden which could come in handy for my ‘Russian Spring’ album.

A6 Unit Evaluation

2007-03-11T15:03:00.000Z

In my feedback for the A4 assignment I knew that the typography unit would be essential for my design skills development. As some of the typographical elements of my A4 banner designs were not particularly strong due to a courier font being used. This type of font is usually the default font on a printer when no other font can be found, so it might be conceived as being an error in the printing process. In retrospect I should have used another typewriter font instead of courier.

At the start of the unit it was given Neville Brody as the typographer who I would have to do a presentation on. I initially searched the internet to find out the basic facts, before buying the Neville Brody design book to aid me in the construction of the presentation. I found that this book provided me with a wealth of information, and actually found it very difficult to cut down the information for only 5 minutes of presentation time. I decided to segment the presentation into a cross section of the work Brody had produced.

Firstly I decided to look at what influenced Neville Brody, before moving onto his early work. I discovered that key elements such as economy of design were apparent in the first pieces of work he produced. This was a theme I could keep referring to through out the presentation. I also looked at designs he did for products, as this would allow me to show how Brody used typography in different contexts. I think that this range of media gave the presentation more depth, and I should repeat this process when I do another presentation.

When the first task came I felt anxious about what we would be given. I found that I coped fairly well with the tasks, and doing a small amount of time planning for each one really helped me to set mini deadlines for the completion of each section. This ensured that I had plenty of time to evaluate my own work and make changes to areas which I felt uncomfortable with. As this method proved effective, I continued to use it through the other timed assignments. As everyone else was doing the same task, I found it awkward to ask for feedback, as I felt that I could not disturb them from their own work. I believe this was just a quirk of the format, but at least there were several points during both design and construction where I realised I would need feedback if this was a real life task. There were some feedback comments which I added to my roughs, but they did not match the depth I would want if the task had been real.

With the paint tube task I felt that the lack of knowledge about printing techniques limited how I could design the label. As I did not know the problems from being used with techniques such as using a reverse, my design was initially highly flawed. After these errors had been made clear, I was able to quickly redesign the label into something which worked. I was very impressed with the final design I made, as I used a mixture of sans-serif fonts for the technical data, and a display font for the name of the product. The font I chose (Isabella) gave the oriental flair which the design required, while being set at a size which could be read. I also chose a centre alignment, as the cylindrical shape of the tube would mean that the label would be obscured if the viewing angle was slightly offset to the viewer. I feel that this is one of the places which centre alignment is acceptable, as it easier to read and matches the alignment of the brand logo which we were initially given.

The next task was to create a Vodafone advert for a newspaper. Again, not knowing the limitation of printing on newsprint, I found it a challenge to make a design which would be acceptable. I decided to keep the design basic, which I feel is often the best option when designing under pressure. Once again I implemented some basic time planning, which allowed me to explore possible solutions, produce a document, then evaluate, redesign and reproduce an improved product.

One part of my design was to use symbols to provide a visual feature to the design. After gaining feedback from peers, many people thought that they were not correct. I strongly disagreed with his, as I felt that they added a more eye catching alternative to simply using bullets. My argument was that as it was for a creative job, the advert itself had to show more than just traditional elements, ie bullets, and that I should use symbols instead. I think I was right to stick with them, as at the very least it allowed me to explore the use of them. I believe that I should use them again in the future, but I will remain contextually sensitive and only use them where appropriate.
The last task was to create a grid for a newsletter, and then place some content into it. I designed my grid and header with a 3 column design. I thought that this gave enough flexibility, while giving coherence. I think that if we could have implemented more of a style guide, I could have used a 6 column layout, and then imposed rules such as only allowing text to go across 2 columns. This would have added flexibility, while providing structured guidelines to the project. I also reused the “skyscraper” design from the A4 assignment. I could do this because we were allowed to use stroke lines, which gave the same effect as using vector graphics like I did in the banner adverts. This shows that I took the interpretation of the brief and used it to get the most out of the design.

Again, I was impressed with the deployment of typographical elements. I used a drop cap, pull quote, and Brody influenced stroke lines to bring my design to life. If I was to change any part of the design, it would be the title, as I think it looked too playful for a document of this type. Changing to font to something like Franklin Gothic would have been better, as it would look more formal. I would also change the stroke lines on the folio into a thick/thin arrangement, as 3 separate lines looks to excessive.

On the day of our presentations I felt confident that I would be able to reproduce my presentation to a similar standard as in my practice. However, after my presentation I felt disappointed with myself that I had only done 4:10s, as before my presentation lasted 5:32s. I think that under the pressure I rushed parts of the presentation. Next time I think that I should learn some relaxing techniques so that the same does not happen again. My disappointment was compounded when I was asked a series of typographical questions at the end of my presentation. I knew many of them, but the tone and amount of time it took me to answer them did not make it convincing that I knew the answers. This was all my own fault as I had planned to revise them after my presentation, when I had several hours free before the final exam. I think that with the next units I will continually look at any theoretical terms we use through out the unit, not just when they are required at the end.

I was impressed with the look of the presentation, and I felt that the ideas generation was well done before my presentation. I did rough designs of the layout of the presentation slides, then did many roughs of the custom made titles, side bars and bullets that I would place on the page. This made production quick, as I could put the parts together in Photoshop then place them into the design.

For the final exam I felt a little better prepared, as I had taken time to learn some of the typographical elements. Again, better preparation in the weeks before would have aided me greatly in this, which I will ensure I do for the next unit. I thought that the brief and the time we were given was very challenging, but as outside projects using InDesign had taught me how to quickly put documents together paid dividends in this task. Again, I kept a simple design so that I could focus on the typographical knowledge.

I managed to get 3 pages done, each one filled with typographical terms. I found that using the layout itself to explain terms, with the aid of captions, quickly name checked many of the terms. I feel that the outside projects using InDesign were most valuable for this, and I pity those who had to do this complex task with any less InDesign experience as myself. I found it extremely difficult, and I was an early adopter of the InDesign program. I will certainly continue outside project to make me more proficient in using the programs on the course

In conclusion, I have thoroughly enjoyed this unit, even if the last day of it was slightly disappointing. I now feel very confident of creating professional desk top published documents. I found that collecting many examples and annotating them in my sketchpad helped me to visualise the real world use of all the theories we learnt, and I will endeavour to improve on this further for the next unit. Improvements for the future will include designing a document where I can record how much time it takes to do tasks, as well as recording when to do them. I will also continue to add more research to my blog and write about it in my sketchpad, as well as offer more feedback when people put their designs on their blog (as I did on Craig Burgess’s post including his newsletter design). For the last unit I want to bring together all the improvements in time planning and sketchpad work to really push for a good result in the final unit. I will be improving my work output so that I am able to do this over the remaining weeks of this year.
Wordcount: 1726

Keep pedalling

2007-03-02T14:17:00.000Z

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.

Steely Don

2007-02-16T20:17:00.000Z

A jazz related title, for a jazzy week and half term to come. First of all, I’ll go over last week’s A6 task, which could not be covered in the themed blog entry. This task involved creating an advert with the dimensions from a rate card, which are measured in Standard Column Centimetres. I decided to go width of 94mm by 160mm, as I felt the dimensions suited the text, and would allow me to split up the page into simple elements. The final design I created is pictured below.

I was very pleased with finished result which also warranted a “s’all right” response from Steve, which is praise indeed. One area which we disagreed on though was the use of symbols at the left of each paragraph. Steve thought that bullets would look more suitable for a document of this type, but I didn’t share his view. I thought with the business being a modern telecommunications company, advertising for a creative job role would look better with some small graphical touches. What would catch your eye more when sifting though job adverts? Boring black bullets or little symbols of a globe, a money bag, and a mouse?

On Wednesday of this week we did our usability tests, which we had to create a form for. I chose to use a “agree strongly/agree/disagree/disagree strongly” arrangement of questions, as well as some more open ended questions. I found it very had to pick these, as I wasn’t really sure what parts of my site needed to be highlighted for change, and I thought a lot of people felt the same.

After about 2 hours of testing we had got through everyone’s website. I would have to pick Drew’s site as my favourite, as it was annoyingly attractive and sickeningly easy to use. I found that looking at everyone else’s website highlighted that I have along way to go to get up to the same standard of design as everyone else. I certainly don’t feel I have the ‘knack’ for web design yet, where as with print I seem to naturally be able to drop things into the right places. This is why I’m implementing a HTML/CSS “boot camp” of self study over the summer, with some of the books which have been recommended to me by others, to improve my capability, and educate myself about what features I can utilise when designing a page.

On Thursday we did 2 tasks which combined together to produce one finished piece of work. This task was to create a newsletter heading and folio, and then as the second task put the content into what we had designed. With the first task I decided to redeploy my “skyscraper” design, as I could make it with heavy stroke lines within a couple of minutes. As we only had an hour to create the header and folio, I thought I would stick to what I know. I also used symbols for a moon, and some speech marks around the title.

I chose a 3 column design, and had the title spread across 2 columns, and the skyscrapers in the third. I also placed some black stroke lines in the folio, which has probably been influenced by the Graphic Language of Neville Brody book which I had been looking though for my presentation.

In the second task I decided to put the picture 2 columns wide, and put in features such as a 4 line drop cap, a pull quote and a by line. Once again, I chose the Myriad Pro font, which I really need to wean myself off before I use it on everything. However, I did find out here that it was good for dyslexics, so in my defence it was considered because of its usability merits. Overall I was pleased with the document, but I think my header and folio could have been done better. Lines should have been used more sparingly, and the arrangements of some of the symbols could have been better. This document is viewable below.

Over half term I will be creating the slides for my presentation, and producing my handout document. I’m looking forward to doing these, as I think I’m going to really push the creativity in the design of the slide headers, which are going to reflect the work of Neville Brody over the years as the presentation progresses. As for my handout form, I think I will be creating a strong black and white header in a similar style to his Arena work. No doubt I’ll find a spare hour one evening to do another blog post, and possible show off some of my slides. As long as James promises not to pinch them.

Team Roles

2007-02-09T14:49:00.001Z

After painstakingly and conscientiously looking through the categories at www.belbin.com, I have decided that I fit into the Completer/finisher category. I think this because once I start a task, I relentlessly aim to complete all the work to a high standard. I also feel that I am rather conscientious about the decisions which I have made, and will always aim to change something I feel uncomfortable with. I believe this attention to detail allows me to find errors of fix problems in the work.

There are however some drawback to this style of workflow. I often do not trust people to do something which I could do to a higher standard myself. I always think that some people may not make as many considerations in their production as I would, and this can degenerate my faith in others. I also feel that sometimes I get very anxious about tough decisions, as there is always the “should I have done the other option?” question.

As for the other types of people I would want to work with, I think that balance is the most important aspect to get right. I believe I would need a “plant” type worker, as they could generate initial ideas, which we could then discuss on a technical and implementation level. This would allow us to make a website which is both technically and aesthetically viable, as opposed to creating a design which is hard to implement and would become contrived during production.

Secondly, I believe I would also work well with a co-ordinator type worker. This person would be able to set deadlines which I could then produce work to, so that the production would stay on schedule, and amendments could be made should difficulties arise. I also think that this person would be able to help me make crunch decisions which I would otherwise cause me to become anxious, and would be a great second opinion on such issues.

Thirdly I think that a Shaper would give our team the drive and determination needed to complete tasks. As we may have to work to tight deadlines, a shaper would be able to complete any task s in a short amount of time. As problems often occur with web design, combining this type of worker and a plant worker would allow us to be flexible should problems arise or clients want things changing on short notice.

In the past I have worked in group situations which have been successful. I think this is because I like to do a lot of the task myself, and I don’t really like relying on other people. I think that I have to become more willing to delegate roles to other people, as there will come a point where I simply cannot do all the tasks which would be set out.

InDesign, out of time

2007-02-02T12:28:00.000Z

I must first apologise to my colleagues for being unable to join them on the trip to London on Wednesday. My ribcage had decided not to cooperate with the rest of my respiratory system, leaving me short of breath and in a lot of pain over the weekend. I felt really annoyed that I could not go, but would have been more annoyed if I had decided to go only to find the Tate Modern to be closed, as it was on Wednesday. I also missed my meeting with John on Tuesday about ideas generation, which only frustrated me more.

Armed with some anti inflammatory pills for Thursday, I managed to make it into college. After a lecture on more typography, it was time to start the first of our timed tasks. First, we had to create an exact copy of Steve’s version of the article which he had put up onto the projector. We had around 20 minutes to do this, which I thought was a little on the tight side, and was confirmed when the last 3 minutes seemed to disappear in 30 seconds. About a quarter of this time was taken looking up things like drop caps which I did not know how to do in InDesign, and are not immediately apparent. Between now and next week I should probably find out how to do some of the paragraph formatting techniques we learnt in the morning, so I am not wasting time cutting through the jungle of help topics should they appear in a new task.

After missing the deadline for handing this first task in, I was determined to complete the first real task. This was to redesign the article, using the same components as Steve used in his. We had a substantially more generous 90 minutes to complete this, which I knew would generate better results. I tried to use the formula we had used for the banner designs, which was to do quick sketches, pick a design, draw a neat sketch and then go into production. This worked well, and the design I created can be seen below.

I was very pleased with my design, and the Myriad Pro font I used is fast becoming a favorate: easy to read at small sizes, conservative proportions, and very effective when used with the standard 120% leading rule. I used grey lines (black set at 30%) to add some feature to the banner, and it was also useful for filling the white space under the picture. I used the same copperplate font from my banner designs for the title, and a 3 character cap drop for the letter “I”. I also used a thick/thin line to separate the text and picture, and the same line for a stroke around the picture.

Overall I think my design looks rather classy, but I think the lines under the picture should have the same gap as between the banner and the top of the picture. I also felt that the ideas generation went really well, as I scribbled down some thumbnails, drew a neat version of the one I had chosen with feedback from my team, then noted down the changes I made when I went digital. What do you think of my design?

The second task was to create a paint tube label. As my method in the morning for ideas generation had worked so well, I decided to repeat it in the afternoon. However, the stoppers were soon put on my chosen design when Steve advised me that some element could cause problems during the print process. I had to do a lot of redesign, but didn’t really know how. I made a note of the changes, but was this the right thing to do? Should I have started the ideas process over again? I’m not entirely sure, but either way I got a design which I was really happy with. This can be seen below.

I used the Isabelle Std font for the oriental style typeface, which I think suggests the correct themes, yet remains readable. I decided to centre my front label font, as this would allow the viewer to see at least some of the type if the tube was rotated on the rack, or in a display box. Again, I used the Myriad Pro font on the back panel for the address, and on the front for the fluid ounce part. I was very happy with this design, and making the leading smaller helped the name of the paint to breathe, allowing more room if a larger name was going to be put onto it. Even Steve said it was “nearly there” when I showed him, which is praise indeed.

Thursday was also the day when my magazine article (for Auto Sim Sport) was finally released, after a couple of weeks delay. The magazine also contains an interview with me about the article (college gets a none-specific mention! [worth the download]). I was also asked to design the cover of the magazine, and a page for a guide. For the front cover, I was given an image from a game which is about 7 years old (DirectX 7 technology, for the gamers out there) and a picture of a Mclaren F1 supercar. There was not really a lot of scope for design here, but I managed to throw something together. Originals and finals can be seen below. The second picture I had to make was from a selection of screenshots, and the brief was simply to create a cover with “atmosphere”. With some careful selection processes and filters, I came up with something which the editor was more than happy with.

It’s hard for me to comprehend that something I have made will be seen by thousands of people from around the world, but I guess that is the power of the internet. Hopefully in the future I can do more work for the magazine, and hopefully try to steer them into a more professionally designed look to their format.

This week also saw the acquisition of a new monitor, as my faithful 21 inch CRT was simply taking up too much room on my desk, stopping me from spreading all my sketchpads out in a creative sprawl. I decided to go for the 24 Inch Dell2407, which can only be described as phenomenal. With compressed images which I created on my old monitor and though “yeah, that’s good, there’s no damage on that” now look dreadful, as the clarity of the display shows up jaggies and blockies.

As I have to run the desktop in a native resolution (as an LCD does not scale as well as a CRT) I am quickly learning that liquid web pages are a really bad idea. I resemble a dog watching traffic when trying to read a page which is being stretched to accommodate a 1920px screen width. I would definitely recommend the monitor to anyone who wants a stiff neck, to become poor quickly or who wants a display without compromise. Pic below.

Starship Trooper

2007-01-25T17:34:00.000Z

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.

FTP = 0wn3d

2007-01-22T16:35:00.000Z

Just a quick update regarding FTP. After a week or so of endless frustration I finally got my FTP working. The problem was that Passive Mode was enabled, and for some reason this was not letting me upload files.

It may be of note that itunes can sometimes stop FTPs from working, so if you are having problems try disabling them in the task manager.

Now I can finally upload things without moving from PC to PC, I can get on with experimenting with Dreamweaver. Woot!

Perpetual Change

2007-01-20T19:10:00.000Z

After a moderately enjoyable Christmas it was back to college to collect new assignments, and pick up results from the last semesters projects. To my surprise, I had gained a merit in the computing fundamentals unit, and a pass for the A4 Picture This assignment. I was pleasantly surprised that I had gained a merit, but I still don’t fully understand why. I felt relieved to have passed these assignments, as I didn’t want to have to re-edit previous work while tackling the new assignments.

During Wednesday afternoon we were given the A5 builder assignment, in which we must make the website which we planned in A3. I cant say that I was looking forward to this, because I really wasn’t. I have never used Dreamweaver before, but I know how difficult it can be for web pages to display correctly. We were shown how to set up Dreamweaver and use the basic controls. This will at least allow me to get started on something, and I guess I’ll have to take it from there. After having a very frustrating experience setting up my web hosting, I really feel that my patience for creating web pages is already pretty short, even before trying to implement a design. I can only see my fuse getting shorter as the assignment goes on, and the pressure starts building.

On Thursday we received the Revert To Type A6 assignment. To me, typography choice seems pretty subjective, and a bit of a dark area. I can’t really look at something and say “that typography is wrong” unless it is something blatant like incorrect leading or some tacky font which clashes at certain sizes. I’m hoping that over the next few weeks we are shown some examples of both good and bad typography so that we can see how to do it right.

Sometimes I feel that we are not shown enough examples of design where we have it explained to us why it is good, or why it is bad. I think on a course with some many visual learners on that this would be the most effective way to show us how to do stuff. I believe we have to be shown how to do things one before we can replicate and apply it to a new scenario.

Out of the two assignments, I really can’t pick which I will be dreading the most. Learning a new program like Dreamweaver and the associated languages, or doing many tightly timed pieces of typography pieces, with a presentation and timed exam at the end. I really won’t be entertaining the “put a positive spin on it” comments which I’m certain to receive. Looks like this semester will be all about attrition than ambition.

The typography lecture threw up some interesting fonts, during which I mentioned the artist Roger Dean. There are some of the Yes album covers which he designed below.

I'm InDesign

2007-01-01T15:20:00.000Z

Within hours of finishing college for this semester, I was back to working on outside projects. Having had to cut back on these due to the approaching deadline day, I had a backlog of movies to create, as well as the Auto Sim Sport article.

I had been creating this article for several reasons. Firstly, I wanted to learn how to use InDesign, so that I could see if it was a marked improvement over PageMaker. I actually found it easy to pick up, as a lot of the controls which we use when putting the assignment into the template were available in the program too. I did actually plan out the article to an extent, by brainstorming what people would want to know about Photoshop, and what problems they were likely to encounter.

Actually writing the tutorial was all done on the fly. This is to say that I made the product, and wrote steps on it as I went. I had to remember that my target audience (which was Photoshop novices) would not have any knowledge of how the program worked. This lead me to creating a step by step guide, telling the user click for click what they had to do, and warning them of simple mistakes they could make.

I found that the photo restoration and banner design tasks which we did in class helped to highlight common problems people would come across, which made me aware of how different people interpret information.

As I enter the final stages of completing this document, I feel that I have created a professional looking piece of work, especially considering that I started it before we had looked at PARC and had the lectures on typography. As with any project, there are areas where improvements could have been made. Most notably, I think that my choice of fonts could have been better. I should have chosen a lighter font for the steps, and maybe highlighted notes in a different font. At least I can say that the choice and use of fonts is consistent through the document, having set up certain styles for certain parts of the document.

As the document is around 103 pages, with a few small areas to finish, I will want to know if my effort has been worth it. I may set up an e-mail account so that people can send me feedback directly related to the article, so that I know which areas could have been better, in case I decide to do another tutorial.

As I look to starting the second semester, I am starting to feel more anxious about the result of my last two assignments. I feel that they went more smoothly than the first assignment, but that does not in any way mean that I will have met all the right criteria to get a pass. I am also not looking forward to actually creating my website, as I have no experience other than this blog in web authoring. I am hoping that the tutorial will outline exactly what I need to do, and that Dreamweaver is relatively intuitive to use. I don’t usually look forward to the process of learning, but I can’t wait to gain the skills. I guess I’ll just have to endure one to be rewarded with the other.

I have recently been toying with the idea of buying a digital SLR camera. I don’t know weather this would be a worthwhile investment, or if I’d just spent my time taking pictures of the cat. I have been looking at the Deviant Art website, which contains a huge archive of peoples work, from a variety of media. This also contains web layouts which people have uploaded pictures of, and would make great inspirational work for sketchpads. I enjoy doing image manipulation, and a digital SLR would open new avenues for graphical work.

A happy new year to all avid readers of my blog, and I hope that 2007 brings as good a fortune as the back end of 2006 did. I will keep you informed of how the magazine article goes, and possible professional work (for real wonga!) which I may be doing in the future.

Semester 1 Review

2006-12-22T14:07:00.000Z

Now that I have completed the first semester of study for the course, I can look back and evaluate how it has gone.

The first couple of weeks were difficult for me, as I struggled in the past to settle into new courses and new routine. I quickly found that Steve had engineered tasks to help us fit in over the first few weeks, and I think this helped everyone a lot. It took only a few weeks for the class to feel like one tight unit, and I feel this has really helped the stability of everybody’s learning.

I think that I learn a lot about working with people from the first few tasks on the course, as it got me talking to people and discussing things in a way I hadn’t done so much on previous courses. When it came to starting the first assignment, I thought that it was going to be a daunting task. Using unfamiliar programs was hard getting use to at first, and the idea of having very strict rules for handing in the assignment formatted in the correct way was also a new challenge for me.

At some points during the first assignment, I felt that with some tasks I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing. I soon discovered from talking to others that these grey areas were being experienced with everyone, and they were also willing to discuss them with colleagues. This reassured me that I wasn’t the only one having to battle with making crucial decisions and then having to justify them.

When it came to handing in the first assignment, I felt fairly relaxed. I had managed either by skill, but more probably luck, to leave myself enough time to get all of my documents together. This left me with only a few small tasks to do on the final day before deadline, which I completed easily within the time limit. Although I had got everything done, I still felt anxious about getting all the technical parts of the assignment correct, something which I still seem obsessive about even now. Knowing that everything has to be right in this before anything else is assessable is still quite a challenge.

I was very pleased to have passed the first assignment, as I had expected that I would have made silly mistakes somewhere, or that I had not mentioned something crucial to pass the assignment. As soon as this assignment was out of the way, I had another two to do over the next few weeks. I found this a bit demoralising, as I knew things such as time management hadn’t been so good in the first assignment. This made me concentrate of getting it right this time round. Creating an overall plan for the run up to Christmas really helped me visualise what I needed to do and when, and started to relieve me of some anxiety.

Approaching the end of the second assignment, I could look back at how I had progressed from the very start of the course. I found that my design work was many times better than it was only a few weeks before. Any work I have done outside of college has also improved, as I now know to look closely for mistakes, and how to design in a way which is clear to understand. This is a massive improvement over what has only been a couple of months, and I think this will only get better as the course continues. I now have the confidence to try other programs, such as InDesign and Premiere, and apply the skills I have learnt at college when using them.

Looking back at my Formative Statement, which is the very first blog entry, I only really mention being able to use Photoshop. I can now add many other programs to this list, some of which we have used on the course, and other which I have used outside. I also mention that I would want to be a freelance designer. I wouldn’t say that I have completely gone off this idea, but I find working with people on the course adds a lot to the experience. It allows me to see other ideas and hear other opinions, which can improve my work.

If someone had said to me a year ago that I would be doing a course which I would enjoy, make lots of new friends and actually be able to cope with it all, I would have never believed them. A couple of months on this course has taught my infinitely more than I would have learn at university, which now looks farcical in comparison. As for the future, I just hope that everything from the first semester will continue to improve. There isn’t a single element of the course I haven’t enjoyed (except maybe presentations!) and I hope that this is a trend that will continue when we return after Christmas.

Keep on Plowing

2006-12-14T17:56:00.000Z

As the deadline is only a week away, the main objective is to get both A3 and A4 up to submission standard. After last week’s despair at not being able to design a decent website layout, this was one of the main tasks of my self study time. I looked at Steve Krug’s “Don’t make me think” book, which clarified what I needed to do for my design. I went to work in my sketchpad, and made a substantially better design than I had done previously. My design can be seen below.

In Wednesday’s lesson we had a production day, where I churned out substantial parts of my project, including the feedback form and site structure diagram. I feel that these both looked radically different from the first project, and that I’m becoming more of a designer each week. I felt proud that I overcame problems from last week, and created results which were far better than I could have expected. I hope that when it comes to marking my assignment, Steve will also notice the improvement in quality over A2.

Thursday was all about the template. Although most of A3 had been put into it, I still had fiddly parts like bullet points and captions to put in. A4 is currently being put into the template, and I hope to complete it over the weekend. My aim for the current week is to get everything ready to hand in on Wednesday, so that I can spend the day checking my work for any silly mistakes.

I think that my time planning has improved a lot over the A2 assignment, but I still do not feel as though it is coming naturally to me. I believe that with the production unit next semester I will struggle to learn Dreamweaver, as I have absolutely no experience with that program. The only way that I will be able to pick it up is if I put in a lot of time learning the program, and following tutorials on books so that I will feel more comfortable with using the program.

Recently I have been getting into print based design more than the web design side of the course. I enjoy the tangible element of print design, rather than the web design which I feel has less creative scope for me at the moment. As I am currently making a document for print in my own time, and have been collecting print resources, I feel that this is the direction I am currently heading in. This could easily change of course, as we start the web building unit after Christmas. I have enjoyed the A4 assignment task 2, and think I have learnt alot of skills from it by putting PARC into practice. My banners can be seen below.

The feedback groups for after the Christmas break have been decided. I am working with Scott and Mihrad, which I am very pleased about. I feel that Scott can bring an element of professionalism to the group, which will add an interesting new angle. I am excited by working with Mihrad, as he is a fellow Photoshop fan, and after looking at his banner designs I think that I can learn a lot from him.

Due to so much time being dedicated to the project, there isn’t a whole lot of outside work being done. However, avid readers will be interested to know that the Tony Benn website creator did get back to me (after a wait of several weeks). He basically said that he uses the Lycos web design tool, which is rather limited. He asked if I could give him some advice on how to make the website better. I have not got back to him yet, but will aim to do so over the weekend.

My confidence has certainly improved over the past week, and I am now starting to see the improvements in my design skills. I believe my outside projects are allowing me to become more familiar with the considerations which are being made in every piece of design work. I can not only see what decisions other people have made in their designs, but what aspects I can replicate in my own work. I’m hoping that this new level of confidence will show in the quality of my assignments. Roll on deadline day!

The older I get, the better I was

2006-12-07T22:14:00.000Z

This week I seemed to spend more time learning what I couldn’t do, rather than learning how to do things. On Wednesday, I had to create the design of my website on screen. This would have been an effortless piece of work, had my initial design been any good. As I have never made a website before, I really have no Idea where to start. I don’t know the limitations of the programs, what people like/don’t like, or indeed anything to measure the quality of my website.

My design soon changed when nobody liked either the colour scheme or the layout. At this point, I really couldn’t care about designing a decent webpage. It seemed to be pointless for me even attempt to do so, as there was an immense amount I didn’t know, and everything I could think of was quickly resigned to the bin. I simply cannot design something for limitations I don’t know, programs I don’t understand, made out of languages I haven’t ever written.

I really don’t know what I can do to fix this, and to top it all off, I have to be able to replicate it in PageMaker. Having recently converted to the vastly superior InDesign, PageMaker isn’t so much a step down, but a vertical drop of a few thousand metres down. I will need more than Christmas to replace the hair being pulled out using this program.

On Wednesday, we continued with the much more pleasant A4 assignment. Steve made us create thumbnails under timed conditions, so that we would put ideas straight down rather than thinking about what we were going to do. I found that when the time got down to 30 seconds this exercise became pointless, because with so little time to think of something and get it down on paper that it just looked like a incomprehensible scribble, which isn’t really ideal to work from later on. After this was done, we drew up our best designs in neat. I felt that with the 3 minute time limit applied, it was still not enough time to do it to a standard I would be happy with. It almost feels like cheating because it takes so little time.

Doing all this quick design work reminded me that my artistic background was a very different place. In art, you can literally spend hours, days, weeks, even months creating one piece of work. Below I have posted a picture of a picture I drew in the first year of A-level. A picture such as this would have taken any number of false starts, reiterations, and several weeks just to mentally prepare to draw it. Although it’s rather damaged by time and PVA glue, its still one of the better drawing I have done.

This certainly isn’t the kind of detail Steve means when he says “neat”. Although I was never a good technical drawer, as my picture shows, it was always a good lesson in attention to detail. I believe I can spot infinitely more mistakes in it than anyone else, an important skill for any designer. Can I ever reach the same error detection that I learnt in Art?

I left on Wednesday feeling exhausted and frustrated. Everything I seem to be attempting to do is not good enough, but I can’t see any way of making it better. I feel as if what I am naturally good at isn’t being used, and that I am being shoe horned into designing stuff which I have no idea about. The integrity of my work is diminishing quickly, as is the faith in myself that I will at some point be able to design well. Do I really have what it takes to get through the course?

Strangely, this week has not all been about failure and frustration. Over the last weekend, I had some extremely good news, which heralded the first piece of professional /semi-professional piece of work which I will be undertaking. I emailed an online magazine called Auto Sim Sport about a tutorial on skinning which I have been writing in my spare time over the past few months, using InDesign. I though it was a long shot that I would be able to get my piece of work to tag along with this magazine.

I e-mailed the editor of the magazine and showed some screenshots of how the tutorial looked so far (shown below). To my surprise, I received a reply the next day asking to get it ready for the January issue. I still cannot believe that something I have designed will be distributed to thousands of people! It looks like its going to be a busy Christmas for me, as I will have to finish the tutorial which has been neglected for weeks due to assignment work. I believe this marks the first step on a long journey, a journey which will hopefully include passing my HND interactive media course.

Ram raiding Photoshop

2006-11-30T18:20:00.000Z

This week was all about work, work, work. The majority of Wednesday was taken up with creating content for the A3 project. I had grossly underestimated how long it would take for me to do this, so as well as doing it all day; I spent a good part of the evening finishing off content.

As I had forgotten to save my image compression essay onto my flash drive, I now have this to finish off. It was frustrating that I could not finish this off, so I will have to time plan to do this sometime for this week. I still managed to fill up my study time with reading through my sketchpad, and gathering inspirational pieces, so maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

On Wednesday morning we had a lecture on typography. I found this very interesting, as a lot of the terminology I had come across in InDesign and Photoshop. A lot of the conventions, like only using display fonts for titles and headlines were common sense. Aspects such as the different width fonts that could be used were new to me, and I will be using these for the coming projects.

On Thursday we started, at last, to use Photoshop. Our task was to repair a damaged photograph, and Steve gave us some pointers on where to start. Interestingly, he did not recommend using new layers for each part of the picture when it came to colouring. This is not how I would have approached it, because I think that using more layers does allow you to readjust or even delete things if they go wrong. I understand that it reduces the file size, but .psd files are always substantially larger than their output files anyway. That’s just my two cents though, and maybe my opinion will alter as I become better at this new artistic approach to Photoshop. My efforts, as they stand now, can be seen below.
Throughout the day I enjoyed working with Photoshop, but also enjoyed discussing the progress with my colleagues. As I am currently making an unrelated tutorial on using Photoshop, it gave me an insight into what problems people come across when using Photoshop. These are usually simple things such as trying to edit something when the marquee box is still present on screen, or having the wrong layer selected.

For self study this week, I will be finishing off my compression essay, and working on my Photoshop picture. I am going to see if using my graphics tablet makes it any easier to use (if I can find any spare USB sockets that is) and I will also try changing the levels setting. I think this is the key to creating a good restoration, as I found mine was too dark and therefore lacked detail. I believe if you get this right, then you restoration will be a lot better.

Hi, my name is Julian; this week’s blog is on…

2006-11-23T22:12:00.000Z

Presentations. On Wednesday morning, we were given a lecture on the correct presentation techniques. I already knew that a conversational presentation style worked best for me, as I have done presentation in English and Business studies in the past. This presentation, however, would have to be a lot more professional than that. At this stage, I was feeing confident that I would be able to produce a presentation, but on what, and to whom I would not find out until later.

We were each given a colour to research, and had a partner to work with. I was given the colour blue, and had to work with Chris Towell. I felt comfortable working with Chris, as I was in his feedback group in the first assignment. I believe that this allowed us to criticise each others work without fear or a negative reaction. This certainly made the process easier, and we collected enough information to give us some food for thought.

Despite blue being one of the primary colours, and one of the most popular as our research showed, there wasn’t a massive amount that could create a relevant presentation. I thought that some of the information was hard to fit into a web design context, but managed to draw out issues such as the symbolism of blue, and what connotations it creates. In my presentation, I made these the key areas which I would talk about, as I thought that the audience would find this most relevant.

Apart from creating our presentation, we also had to make a hand out sheet that was to be distributed at the end of the presentation. I believed that a very simple design covering the key parts of the presentation plus additional reading was the best way to go about this. My sheet was simple, but neatly laid out. However, I think that if I did this again, I would have been more ambitions with my design. We are, after all in a creative, communication industry.

After a quick lunch, Chris and I returned to the room. This gave us ample time to read through each other’s slides and handout sheet. This is something that I have started to do more often with classmates, as other people can pick up on discrepancies you may have missed yourself. Chris found that some of the font sizes on my slides were inconsistent, and these were swiftly put right.

At this point, I was feeling confident that I had everything ready. Although I had found the research quite tough to do, I had enough information on my slides and my handout sheet to give a good presentation.

At one o’clock the whole class went down to the refectory to wait to be called up to the room. I tried my best to rehearse my presentation in my head, and thought that I would easily fill up the time with my slides. Once people started going up to do their presentations and returning, the tension started to rise. It was an awful feeling to see people coming back from the classroom with clear signs of relief on their faces as they had got the presentation out of the way.
Word quickly got round that the only people we were presenting to were Steve and Diane. I felt that this was actually tougher then it would have been if we were told we had to present to the class. I don’t really know why this is, possibly because it felt more like a formal assessment rather than a lecture style presentation.

Chris was the first of the two of us to be called up to do his presentation. I feel that this put more pressure on me because I felt mine had to at least match the quality of his. I was the next one to be sent up to the room. This is when the tension really started to mount. Every step that I got closer to the room, the nervousness increased ten fold.

I could not understand why I was so worried, I thought to myself “this really shouldn’t be worrying me, but it is”. In the past, I have been quite relaxed when doing presentations, as I was in the company of people I had known for years. This was very different.

I entered the room, and said as little as possible, trying to keep the professional feel as high as I could. I do now think maybe if I had been a little more conversational it would have helped me to relax.

Thankfully, my file was still on my data stick, and hadn’t vaporised. I began my presentation and the time flew by. During it, I felt my voice warbling, which is always embarrassing and a confidence destroyer. I also started to stumble over my own words, which I hadn’t experienced before. This clearly marked this presentation as a cut above the rest, even though nothing really important was resting on the outcome.

At the end of the presentation, I was given feedback from Steve and Diane. To my amazement, I had overrun by a whole minute, but Steve had not stopped me because he said he was enjoying my presentation so much. This surprised me, as I thought the stuff I had researched was not of the highest quality. I was also waving my arms around too much, like some kind of traffic warden. This is obviously something I will have to stop doing in the future.

Overall the feedback was good. I do feel in some ways that I needed to control my anxiety more, which would have improved the rapport I could have created with the audience. I also need to learn to understand how time seems to become a lot shorter when you are doing a presentation and I should rehearse it more before I stand up and start presenting.

This was the first piece of presentation I had done since my initial interview with Steve. I felt that because I was in control of the subject matter at the interview, I could attenuate my knowledge because I felt almost an authority on it. With my presentation, however, I was given something which I had to research and present on, and this lack of control made if harder for me to have confidence in what I was saying.

I believe in the future I should learn the ad-lib parts better from the research I gather. This will allow my presentation to be more concrete. I know in myself that I like to go into detail about how things are done, as I like to give people reassurance that they are doing or feeling or thinking the right things. These are certainly considerations I will make for the next presentation.

Manic Compression

2006-11-16T18:51:00.000Z

After a busy week of self study which involved much amended time planning, I was looking forward to coming into college to crack on with my assignments. On Wednesday morning, I arrived to find that my group had been decimated into the singular, so for the mornings lecture on colour I only had myself for company. During the lecture, I came across a lot of familiar terms, most of which was new to me. I found this theory more interesting than last weeks, as it contained lots of pretty colours, and I’m arty like that.

During the afternoon, we continued with our project work. As I had no one to be distracted by, or rather, I had no one to distract, I made progress with the A3 assignment. For this, I planned out exactly what I wanted to say in my comparative analysis. I have learned since the first assignment that you should get all your thoughts together, re-edit them, and then write your piece. This will reduce the stress and swearing associated with editing type while it is in the PageMaker template.

During Wednesday night, I had to design a logo for a project my Mum was doing for her computing Masters course. I had to create some logo designs in Photoshop so that she could show them to the client she was working for. As her course is based around the technical aspects of coding, it was OK for me to create the graphical parts of the project. One of my designs can be seen below. It proved to be a ‘nice little earner’, as my Mum agreed to pay my petrol money from now until Christmas. I think I may suddenly develop a taste for going on long drives.On Thursday morning, we had a lecture on file compression. I was fairly familiar with some terms, such as RLE as I use it for saving my motorsport skins. However, I use a targa (.tga) format, where you can enable or disable the RLE compression. I find that it reduces the file size to about 40% of its uncompressed .tga size. I also save in 32-bit (yes, it does exist, it is a 24-bit true colour image with an 8-bit alpha channel) so file compression is even more important.

Other features of the lecture, such as an explanation of how some compression formats works were very interesting, as I not encountered the technicalities of this before. This will certainly help with the A4 assignment on image compression, as I can now create a hypothesis and test to see if it is correct.

The A4 assignment could commence after we had done the lecture. I was looking forward to this up till this point, but then it slowly dawned on me that it was going to be a logistical nightmare. With so many things to comment on, and so many picture files to assemble, it is going to take a lot of work to get right. However, during our group’s feedback meeting Steve clarified a lot of issues which we were uncertain about and we could make progress in the remaining afternoon.

Over the weekend, I fuelled my latest fascination, which is creating movie in Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. This made the weeks lectures even more relevant, as I had been working with compression programs, uncompressed files, and codecs. For a 4.01 minute video, the uncompressed file was a staggering 794mb file. This was obviously far too bit, so again, using Jodix, I managed to compress the file into .mp4. The resolution of the video was kept the same, but the file size certainly was not. The final file weighed in at a featherweight total of 60.5mb. That is a 92% reduction in file size, with very little loss in quality. This just goes to prove that file compression is the king when it comes to making fast loading websites. The movie can be seen below.

Days in the P.A.R.C

2006-11-09T20:32:00.000Z

Following the excitement of the last week, it was back down to hard graft this week. On Wednesday morning, we had a lecture on Layout Principles. This involved copying down five pieces of information for a business card, before doing some thumbnail designs of layouts. I knew the morning was going to be a bad one when I had written upside down in my sketchpad. And not for the first time, I might add.

This was compounded when it came to creating our own. One of the pieces of information was a phone number, and, with my brain seemingly in a “power saving” mode went into automatic, and told my hand to write my own phone number into the design. These were then put on the wall for others to comment on. Obviously, Steve was the first to notice, but reassured me when he said he had done it before himself. This mistake could have been summed up with a quote from my sister, that quote being “MUUUUUH”. After a categorical yet well deserved humiliation in front of everyone, we continued the lecture.

From the lecture we learned about C.R.A.P, or, for the more politically correct, P.A.R.C. This stands for proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast. These are the key elements of page layout, and must be used in the correct way to create good design. I found the lecture very informative, as I have not learnt about what the correct way to go about design is yet, and I believe it will help me improve my next set of screen designs. This is exactly the kind of lecture I needed, as I can now use some theory to justify future design choices, especially in the A3 assignment.

During Wednesday afternoon I had my feedback session for my first assignment. This explained, among other things, why I had to buy a coffee for John, but more importantly the areas which I had to improve for the next assignment. These included time planning, screen designs and recording influences in my sketchpad. During the evenings study time I took this on board and made my own long term time plan. This really clarified what needed to be done when, and I would recommend everyone else to create one. Now that I can see that I only have a couple of sections to do each week, I can concentrate solely on these knowing that I do not have to worry about the parts further on in the semester.

Thursday morning started with another lecture, this time on colour space. This is the process of recording colour for use in documents. I found that this clarified some issues that I have not understood from using Photoshop, like what the Pantone palette is, and what specialist palettes such as Hexachrome were for. I am only really familiar with using RGB myself, so my knowledge was certainly expanded into new and interesting areas with the morning’s work.

During the afternoon, I continued to work on my A4 project. I now feel that I am starting to learn the process of generating work, rather than just doing bits here and there. Having a clear plan definitely helps, and is keeping me focused and stopping me from worrying about if I can fit in the work or not.

In self study over the past week I have done a couple of creative projects. Firstly, I took up Rob’s challenge to create a Designer Republic-esque piece of design/art. I say design/art, as I believe it is impossible to say if each one is totally independent. This has been the subject of much debate in the classroom, as well as in the Designers Republic essay which we have been doing for the A4 assignment. Anyway, my piece of work can be seen below.

After doing this piece, I now have a better appreciation of how much depth the Designers Republic pieces have. Although I pretty much let my creativity run along on its own with my design, I now understand that the Designers Republic work takes a lot of experience with Photoshop to create a high quality result. I have only been using Photoshop for around 5 months, so I think it is justified if my interpretation is not up to the same high quality as the professionals at the Designers Republic. Irrelevant of the outcome, I still enjoyed the creative learning enlightenment.

In relation to next weeks lecture on image compression, I have been using different movie codecs to create a small video by using Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. Although not directly related to web or print designs, this taught me a lot about the importance of file size, and how a balance has to be struck between this and quality. I found that some formats were better than others, and that only a small change in bit rate could make a big difference to the file size.

Some codecs looked very good, while others produced huge amounts of ghosting, and usually this created colour blur as well. I finally settled for an .avi format converted to .mp4 format using an excellent free Ipod movie converter called Jodix. The file size difference between 34-bit sound and 32-bit was as much as 15%, even though there was not much difference in fidelity. I believe that grasping this balancing act will become relevant for creating images suitable for web use. Anyway, my video (should) be posted below.

One Trick Pony

2006-11-02T18:32:00.000Z

After a half term where the workload mimicked the first half semester, in the way that the production of work greatly increased towards the end, it was time to return to college and proceed on the next assignments.

On Wednesday morning I arrived at my usual early morning time to a room which would be filled with anxiety as the anticipation of results grew. Within only a couple of minutes, I had already been told by Steve that my sketchbook was difficult to read. This did nothing to enrich my confidence, which was quickly ebbing away.

Steve outlined some of the problems that had been occurring throughout some people’s assignments, and as he reeled off error after error the tension in the room increased.

We left the room for a break at 10 o’clock, a break that could not last long enough.

When we returned, our grades had been stuck on the wall. Everybody gathered around and tried to find their grades on the sheet. To my amazement, I had somehow dodged the grammatical, academic and artistic minefield, and passed both modules. I even had to go back and double check, in case from my crowded, off axis viewing angle I had somehow read another person's results.

After a momentary release of pressure from completing and passing the first assignment, it was only a matter of minutes before the pressure was building again, as we read through the next assignment. I felt a certain amount of frustration that I had just finished one web plan, only to go straight into another which would need twice as much work. We had also been told to try and get the next level up grades, which only quadrupled the work, as well as the margin for error.

Wednesday afternoon was spent on time planning for the next few weeks work. I hoped to create a better time plan, and to actually stick to it this time. I know that if I have to achieve the next grades up, I will have to be working flat out over the next few weeks.

On Wednesday night, I decided to relax with some music and Photoshop. I decided to combine both elements into a piece of Photoshop art. I found a tutorial on how to turn a picture into a Roy Lichtenstein style piece of Popart. I scanned a picture of Eliza Carthy, as I found that a lot of elements of the picture, particulaly the hair and the violin, added some interesting textures and features to the composition. You can see the image I created below.
I was very impressed with the result, especially the way the yellow on the violin appears around the bridge area. I email this image to the owner of the website, Melissa Clifton, and she replied saying that she was impressed with my work, and that I was, in her words, “obviously talented”. I enjoyed this piece of critisism, but it certainly will not make me complacent with future pieces of work. This goes for using other programs too, as I do not want to become a “one trick pony”.

Thursday started with a lecture on bitmap and vector graphics (of which there is an excellent Photosho based tutorial here). Although I was familiar with some of the practical issues with using both of these, I was not aware of the more technical aspects. I found the lecture very informative, and I believe it will only improve my Photoshop skills. I found the information on print documents very relevent, as I am currently creating a tutorial for my Netkar Pro skins using InDesign CS2.

After our 10 o’clock break, we discussed the difference between being an artist and being a designer. I believe that I am somewhere between the two, as I have a history of art based education, but I think I also have some of the qualities of being a designer. There is common ground between the two, and the skills which we will be learning by using Photoshop with make demands on them both. Creating an asthetically pleasing piece of design, while keeping the user in mind will help to develop both skills.

During the afternoon, I had a rather curious development in my blog. The creator of the http://www.tonybenn.net/ website had contacted me, asking for some constructive critisism for his site.

I was somewhat dumbfounded by this, much to the sadistic delight of Rob who took much merryment from my predicament. I did feel somewhat guilty, for lambasting the website in the way I did. I now realise that I should have edited my blog post and been more constructive. I will get in contact with the creator, and offer him some constructive critisism, and possibly say what I said in my assignment. I want help him in any way I can with my current skills to make his website more pleasing to use, and allowing users to access the vast content within the site.

It will be interesting to see what will come out of this, and I will keep people informed via my blog.

I am currently feeling very enthusiastic about the challenges which are ahead. I know that I can now relax by doing one of Malissa Clifton’s excellent tutorials, and still be making a contribution to my sketch pad by sticking in the results and annotating them. I believe that now I have clarified what can be put into it, that I can easily fill a couple over the coming weeks with inspirational designs and colour schemes.

I have rather a lot of work to do, both course and non-course related, and I hope to keep my avid readers informed as I progress through the forthcoming tasks. Over the next week I will be researching my goals for A3, and writing my comparative analysis of Designers Republic artwork for A4. I’m sure I can squeeze some Photoshop or InDesign in somewhere (all logged in my time plan, of course!).

What We Did on Our Holidays

2006-10-27T11:46:00.000+01:00

After 6 weeks of writing, sketching and PageMaker-ing I finally have some time off to think about how it all went. I did enjoy doing the project, even though at times certain elements of it seemed to be against me. I think now that the first assignment is out the way, I can start to gain confidence as the up coming assignments progress. I am still anxious about what mark, if any at all, I will get for my first assignment. I’d like to say that I am cautiously optimistic, but I’d rather say nothing to stop me from looking a complete fool if I fail.

In preparation for the upcoming Photoshop based assignment, I have been familiarising myself (like I needed to familiarise myself with a program I use constantly) with the tools available in this most expansive of programs. I have been experimenting with some of the more artistic elements such as filters to modify pictures with (see below).

I have also been doing some client based work, which gave me a great insight to how the dynamics of working with a client differs from those of working independently. For this task, I was asked to design a car with a cow hide livery. I found this tutorial on the internet on how to make a cowhide pattern, and then moved the elements of what I had created onto the design template (see below).

I found the experience satisfying, yet frustrating at the same time. As the client asked that very few logos had to be put onto the design, but I thought it stopped the car from looking believable. Well, as believable as a car covered in a cow hide pattern could be.

I also had to create a logo for my client, (see below) including the name of the team written in a font they had sent me. I found that I could create the logo design almost completely on the fly, and I believe this is due to the creative elements of my Art education, and the new professional elements which I have learn on this course.
In conclusion, my half term has been a time for reflection, and a time for learning, a balance which I think will be beneficial through the next two assignments. Please feel free to ask any questions about my work on the comments page.

Panic over, Party Started

2006-10-20T16:35:00.000+01:00

Over the past week I have been finishing off the last few bits of my first assignment. This included writing my evaluation, which I found to be a good way of collecting my thought about the progress of the assignment. I identified areas where I had done well, such as my academic writing and working with colleagues to discuss work matters, and areas where I needed to improve. These included technical aspects such as choosing screen dimensions, as well as time planning which I felt could have been better.

On Wednesday I had to print off all my work and check through to see that I had not made any silly mistakes. Printing off my colour pages was the most costly part of all my assignment, and I kept noticing mistakes with each one I had done. After several costly drafts I finally managed to get my pages up to the correct standard. There was a slight moment of panic when the colour printer in the library ran out of ink, but luckily the library staff quickly and efficiently changed the cartridge and the panic was over. I realised that this was one of the unforeseen events that Steve mentioned which I would have to have a contingency plan for.

In the afternoon on Wednesday I had finished all my work, including my merit reference page. I now only had to burn my CD and I was finished. Thankfully, Steve approved my CD label so that I could have everything except my folder label finished before the morning. After my CD had been burnt and labelled, I decided to try it in the computer I was sat at. I placed the CD into the drive and pressed the button. Once I checked that my files could be read, I again pressed to button to eject the CD. To my complete and utter horror, the CD drive did not open. I decided that I should shut down the machine and try the drive again. Thankfully, the drive did open, and I then put my CD safely into my folder before another event sent my heart rate through the roof.

Thursday morning was now upon me, and I came in early to hand my work in. I was so early that Steve was not in college yet, but the room had been opened up for us. I bound my folder with string for a second time, as I thought that with my luck the assignment would disobey the laws of physic and escape somewhere between the classroom and reception. I took my work down and handed it in, signing the sheet to confirm that I had done so.

Overall I was very pleased with the assignment that I handed in, but weather it is good enough for a pass or not, only time will tell. I would not want to make any presumptions about my work, as I do not want to look a complete fool if it is not up to scratch.

I am glad that half term is here now, as it will give me a break from the endless printing, reprinting, and wrestling with PageMaker. I am really looking forward to next half term when we start using Photoshop, and I will hopefully recuperate my energy to go into the next two assignments on full steam.

Print, reprint, repeat

2006-10-13T19:52:00.000+01:00

This week has all been about constant adjustment. Usually more adjustment is needed in the seconds after pressing the print button.

On Wednesday morning we had a tutorial session with John about our blog entries. This gave us a chance to discuss what a blog was for and what content should be included in it.

I found this to be helpful to an extent, but I believe the time could have been better spent learning how to use some of the controls in the blogger template. As only a few members of the group have the beta account, I think that the other half find it difficult to edit parts of their page.

For next year, I think that the tutors should give a brief tutorial of the basic tools, so that students then have a comprehension of how blogger works. This would provide them with more confidence to use the features of blogger to their advantage in their self study time.

On Wednesday Afternoon I had been concentrating on getting all of my work put into PageMaker, which has again been causing problems for me. On Wednesday, PageMaker would not open my feedback file, and after a lot of unsuccessful attempts to do so I finally conceded defeat. This meant that I had to remake it from the template I had saved earlier. I am glad that I saved the template, and backing up my work is clearly something that I need to continue to do in the future.

On Thursday I continued to make progress on my project. I managed to put all my references in, a process which I was dreading, but I actually found it quite easy. I do get the feeling that you have to put a rather disproportionate amount of effort into proving that you have looked at someone else’s work, rather than putting that effort into producing high quality results. I guess this is just part and parcel of higher education, and I will just have to get use to it.

As the deadline approaches, I am feeling both confident about my work, and apprehensive. I feel that I have made a good effort, but there are so many little issues that could cause me to trip up.

Over the next week I will be organising and neatening up my sketchpad, so that it is ready to hand in on Thursday. I will also have to create my evaluation, and place it into the PageMaker template on Wednesday of next week.

I love/hate Adobe PageMaker – Delete as applicable

2006-10-05T17:46:00.000+01:00

This week there was a strong contrast between Wednesday and Thursday. I found Wednesday excruciating, because PageMaker would not do what I wanted to. I kept having trouble with text boxes, pictures, and pretty much every other feature included in the package.

Thursday, however was a totally different experience. I started to put my work into PageMaker through the template that had been created for us. This did work very well, as opposed to Wednesday where I left college in a state of rage, which I stayed in for several hours after. Only a soothing session of Photoshop in the evening could bring me back down to earth, and make Thursday a day to look forward to.

I managed to get all the required work done for Thursday’s feedback meeting, including a total rework of my digital screen designs. I was surprised at how well PageMaker could work if it was done correctly. It definitely has a one track route of doing certain tasks, but once I became familiar with these then I could exploit its features to my advantage.

Thursday’s feedback went well, where we criticised each others work. I made many criticisms of Chris’s lack of dimensions on his screen designs, only for him to pick up on my lack of the same features on my own. We all managed to get enough time to look at each others work, and thankfully everyone is moving in the right direction.

This week has been a contrast of emotions; from anger and frustration, to satisfaction and pride in my own work. I believe that I should be able to move forward and tie up all the loose ends in my project, such as referencing my sources and making adjustments to my screen designs.

I think I need to plan out all the pieces which need finishing off so that I can print a draft of my finished assignment for next weeks feedback session. Next week will be all about editing, re-editing, and editing again. My printer credit will surely take a hammering next Wednesday and Thursday.

Give me back my Amiga 500+

2006-10-03T12:06:00.000+01:00

At the start of this week we learnt how to use Adobe PageMaker, a rather basic but useful page editing software. I found this to be rather easy, as many of the controls were similar to the ones found in Adobe Photoshop. I found it reassuring that the Adobe packages all contain the same basic controls, so I am fairly confident that I will be able to use the other packages on the course to a high standard.

PageMaker reminded me of Pagesetter, a word processing program for the Amiga. It reminded me of how software has evolved from the days of 2mb of RAM and entire programs contained on a floppy disk.

During self study this week I found it easier to produce creative work on my own than essay work. I think this is because I spent a lot of time on my Art A-level trying out different designs, and doing practical things like making working prototypes of the work I would later create on a larger scale. However, I think that this course requires more planning on the technical side, and this is where I need to improve. I think that this will develop itself, once I have use certain packages and found out what limitations I have to work to.

At the end of the week, I built a PC which I will use for self study for the course. I chose components that would be able to handle large amounts of programs simultaneously, as packages such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver can be very resource heavy, as can running multiple browsers at once. The key components I chose were an Intel E6400 Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of GeIL 6400mhz DDR2 RAM and a Gainwald 7900 GS 512mb graphics card.

The dual core processor will allow my computer to run multiple programs at once, such a Dreamweaver and Photoshop. The 2gb of RAM will allow Photoshop to have large amounts of swap file access, which will speed up image processing, and the graphics card will give excellent picture quality through my 21” Dell monitor. I believe that this will make my self study over the next few weeks substantially more enjoyable!

One man's junk...

2006-09-23T13:00:00.000+01:00

During this week I have completed some large parts of the first assignment. I enjoyed writing the competitive analysis, as this kind of work was familiar to me. I also enjoyed looking at http://www.tonybenn.net/ as this website is the antithesis of what a good website should be. This provided me with a wealth of material to analyse, and was also rather entertaining to Steve in our group session.

Can anyone beat my record of finding the worst website ever?

In some areas of the assignment I still feel slightly lost, and could do with some issues clearing up. These are mainly formalities, and I am happy that I can construct large parts of the assignment without much help from anyone else. I may have to cut out some of the content so that I do not go over the wordlimit. This is mainly due to the huge amount of criticism of the first Tony Benn website I looked at.

During this weeks lessons I have felt that I can work more independently than I have done in the past. I also feel that in some way the assignment word count stops me from developing analysis further, but I am sure that as the course progresses I will find opportunities use these skills.

My sketchpad is now developing nicely, and already has more content than some of my A-level Art sketchpads. I am slightly concerned about how my sketchpad will look in comparison to others, as my handwriting is not the best. I am considering doing some of my evaluative annotation one the computer and sticking it into my sketchpad, as this will look neater and allow me to reflect on my work in more detail. This is something I will look into over the next few weeks.

At home I have also inherited an ex-CAD 21” Dell Trinitron CRT monitor, which looks fantastic and cost absolutely nothing! My Dad brought it home from work, as it was going to be thrown away. This will be rather useful for the course as the picture quality is excellent. Hopefully over the next few weeks I will be building a new computer to go with it. This will make me feel a lot more comfortable with my self study time, as I have a better equipped working environment.

Week 1

2006-09-19T10:36:00.000+01:00

This week our tasks were primarily based around note taking on a variety of topics. These included topics such as 'What makes a good website?’ a web glossary and details about our first assignment.

For this assignment, we must plan a website about a famous Britain. I decided to choose Tony Benn, as I thought that this would give me a large scope of different designs, and could be tailored to suit a variety of audiences. These could include children, GCSE students and adults. We compiled a set of notes to help us understand what is involved in creating the assignment.

At the moment I think that the assignment will be a tough learning process, as it is a large step up from projects I have done in the past. I will also have to learn new skill such a referencing, and researching heavily from a range of resources including books and online sources.

Over the next week, I will be continuing the research I started in college so that I can build up a good knowledge about my great Briton and also about how this knowledge can be used in the design process of my website.

Formative Statement

2006-09-15T21:16:00.000+01:00

In my past educational experiences I have learnt many skills which I am looking forward to developing in the future. From my artistic background I have gained an understanding 2 dimensional in the context of colour, texture and proportion to produce creative work. I have also learnt how to keep a progressive record of my ideas development and explain the processes behind them.

In my previous studies in English, I learnt how to produce subjective arguments with an appreciation for audience, values and literary techniques. These included essay writing, persuasive writing and personal reaction to the subject matter.

Processes which I acquired in Business Studies enabled me to identify the relation between business and client, and how each can influence the behaviour of the other. This included business and consumer relations, the ability to produce presentations and evaluate performance. These are all skills which I believe will be useful on the course.

I am currently interested in using Photoshop, as I have done several personal projects using this package. Having learnt these skills on my own, I look forward to learning other aspects of the package to improve my 2D computer generated art skills. As these develop I wish to produce professional work, as I know it will be beneficial for the future.

As there are several pieces of software I have not used before, I am interested in learning the different techniques and procedures these products demand.

For my long term future, I wish to be able to produce high quality, professional work from a large range of programs. I believe that if I could work freelance I would do so, as I think the independence and freedom this would give me would be a great asset. I hope to create a broad portfolio of work from the course to give me the best chance at succeeding as a freelance designer.