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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Iused 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
