This morning a few of us had the opportunity to go to Huddersfield to visit Dave Pannell and his team at the Design Mechanics. Having been there when Dave last visited College, it was good to have the chance to see how they actually work in the studio. The morning involved an introduction of the company and how they work, as well as an opportunity for questions and discussion. And a pretty good cup of tea.
For me, the most valuable part of the trip today was the opportunity to spend a bit of time sat with one of Dave's employees, Oliver, whilst he was working on a piece of work for VideoBooth Systems. This was a valuable, if short, insight into how work takes place in that particular studio. Oliver also had a quick look at some of my work so far, and offered some feedback on it. My jazz banners seemed to go down well with him, which I was pleased about. Another memorable comment was that that colour scheme on my Back to Basic site looks like PC World, with their yellow and purple logo. Great.
This week has been pretty good in terms of getting work done. I'm pleased with my progress with A5- I have the majority of the site completed now to a standard I'm pretty happy with. It's not the most exciting design ever but it gets the job done as it should do. You can have a look at the work so far here. Comments and constructive criticism are appreciated. It took me a while last week to get the contact form sorted but I eventually realised I was just being an idiot and I'd forgotten to make the Perl script readable and executable by the user. It's now working fine.
I'm really enjoying the building of the site so far. I think beginning to build the site has really renewed my enthusiasm for web-building. Over the past months I've not been doing much web orientated stuff whilst focusing on other assignments, but I'm glad to be building a site, and pleased that I'm enjoying doing it.
Having said I'm enjoying A5, the next week will involve the development of a usability questionnaire, which for me doesn't provoke particularly exciting thoughts, but has to be done. I suppose the best way of looking on this is that it is contributing to the final quality of the website, and it's therefore a worthwhile task.
With A6, I feel I'm progressing well with the presentation, I just need to amend certain pieces of information, adding some things and taking some away. Over the next week my concentration will mostly be on developing my handout, for which the information will be much more involved than it is on the slides.
Tuesday 29 January 2008
Tuesday 22 January 2008
The Importance Of Being Early
This week, and more specifically today, has involved a whole array of emotions. This is due to the timed task we had this morning... to design a cover for the FontBook using the corporate colours of the company; black, white, and yellow. Admittedly, this exercise proved quite tough for me. The main issue for me was the control of the white space- something I can identify as a weakness, and hopefully work on in the future. I also missed the 12 noon deadline- by literally seconds. I was stood putting my stuff in the plastic wallet when the clock turned 12. Too late. While I can understand the point Steve was making, I felt slightly annoyed with the situation. I find myself doubting that any client in a real world situation would be quite this strict with a deadline. However, the lesson is now learned. Thankfully, Steve revealed that this exercise was in a fact a 'dry run'. Next time I must be more efficient- maybe even early!
The rest of the week has been quite productive. I feel as though I've got to grips a lot with Dreamweaver, and have even practised a bit of hand coding with some simple XHTML and CSS. Even the simple stuff is so powerful and effective- I'm looking forward to gaining a better knowledge in the future. I spent quite a bit of self-study time last week with Dreamweaver, and I think this should really benefit me over the course of A5.
I also was able to spend a bit of time in InDesign doing a design for a photography voucher my sister asked me to do. I might upload it sometime to get some opinions on it- I'm not overly sure about the typography I used and would appreciate some thoughts.
This week I'm going to concentrate on my A6 presentation. The initial draft needs to be complete for next week's seminar group so it's my priority over the coming week. I have an idea what I'm going to say throughout the 5 minutes but need to refine my ideas, and prepare the slides.
My priority for A5 is to sort out all the images- I had some trouble with a couple of the .gif images yesterday- they appear differently on the college PC than they do on my Mac at home- kind of blotchy. I need to make sure this isn't going to become a problem later in the assignment, so may end up needing to re-do some of the images.
We also had a review of 'A1 - SketchBlog' today. I'm glad this was the case, as it re-focused me on this assignment and clarified some things that were mixed up in my mind. I need to bear this assignment in mind more than I have been doing.
The rest of the week has been quite productive. I feel as though I've got to grips a lot with Dreamweaver, and have even practised a bit of hand coding with some simple XHTML and CSS. Even the simple stuff is so powerful and effective- I'm looking forward to gaining a better knowledge in the future. I spent quite a bit of self-study time last week with Dreamweaver, and I think this should really benefit me over the course of A5.
I also was able to spend a bit of time in InDesign doing a design for a photography voucher my sister asked me to do. I might upload it sometime to get some opinions on it- I'm not overly sure about the typography I used and would appreciate some thoughts.
This week I'm going to concentrate on my A6 presentation. The initial draft needs to be complete for next week's seminar group so it's my priority over the coming week. I have an idea what I'm going to say throughout the 5 minutes but need to refine my ideas, and prepare the slides.
My priority for A5 is to sort out all the images- I had some trouble with a couple of the .gif images yesterday- they appear differently on the college PC than they do on my Mac at home- kind of blotchy. I need to make sure this isn't going to become a problem later in the assignment, so may end up needing to re-do some of the images.
We also had a review of 'A1 - SketchBlog' today. I'm glad this was the case, as it re-focused me on this assignment and clarified some things that were mixed up in my mind. I need to bear this assignment in mind more than I have been doing.
Tuesday 15 January 2008
New Year - New Semester
Sitting to write this blog, I don't really know where to start. It seems like an age since the last blog entry now. Christmas has been a good long break, and I now feel re-energised to get on with some work. I was kind of dreading leaving behind my holiday sleep/play X-box pattern, but now I'm back I'm quite glad to be getting on with stuff! I really should have done more design orientated stuff over the holiday, but it has actually been quite busy for me (I've done a lot more than just play X-box... honestly). The only thing I've done to keep in touch is visit Das Forum and read all the posts, although I haven't posted a single one over the holidays, something I reckon I'll have to change- it's a valuable resource after all.
The new assignments seem to excite me- I'm glad to finally be building a website rather than just planning it, and hope this satisfaction continues into the build and is also there when the build is complete- hopefully it won't be a complete failure! So I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in to A5.
As for A6, I'm also looking forward to this. The presentation obviously holds aspects which make me feel nervous, but overall I think it should be interesting and challenging to investigate my assigned typographer, Morris Fuller Benton, and create an engaging presentation about his work. I'm also looking forward to the timed tasks, as I enjoyed the timed aspect of the Jazz banners last semester, and feel I work well in the pressure this puts me under.
I've had a sly look this afternoon at some of the 2nd years blogs from this time last year, which has hopefully given me some hints about what kind of design briefs we might get from Steve, and I'd recommend that fellow 1st years do the same!
On the whole, I'm looking forward to the next 7/8 weeks and getting stuck into these assignments.
Monday was obviously the first day back after the last deadline, and I'm really happy with my results for A3 and A4. I managed to gain a merit on both of the assignments. This came as a bit of surprise when Steve told me yesterday; over Christmas I'd done the typical stupid thing of mentally persuading myself that I'd not done very well. I'm pleased, though, that I was able to meet all the targets that I'd set for myself and attain the results I did.
Over the next week, I'm hoping to begin to get more familiar with Dreamweaver and using tables and cells to lay out a website- I'm hopefully going to begin reworking the Ya-Yas website, which should hopefully help address any problems that might come up for me during A5. I'm also going to spend some time getting to grips with Adobe InDesign and doing further research into Morris Fuller Benton. I also need to get back into the habit of collecting pieces of design work for my sketchbook- something that became sloppy over the last couple of weeks of the last semester. Any good resources for inspirational work would be appreciated!
The new assignments seem to excite me- I'm glad to finally be building a website rather than just planning it, and hope this satisfaction continues into the build and is also there when the build is complete- hopefully it won't be a complete failure! So I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in to A5.
As for A6, I'm also looking forward to this. The presentation obviously holds aspects which make me feel nervous, but overall I think it should be interesting and challenging to investigate my assigned typographer, Morris Fuller Benton, and create an engaging presentation about his work. I'm also looking forward to the timed tasks, as I enjoyed the timed aspect of the Jazz banners last semester, and feel I work well in the pressure this puts me under.
I've had a sly look this afternoon at some of the 2nd years blogs from this time last year, which has hopefully given me some hints about what kind of design briefs we might get from Steve, and I'd recommend that fellow 1st years do the same!
On the whole, I'm looking forward to the next 7/8 weeks and getting stuck into these assignments.
Monday was obviously the first day back after the last deadline, and I'm really happy with my results for A3 and A4. I managed to gain a merit on both of the assignments. This came as a bit of surprise when Steve told me yesterday; over Christmas I'd done the typical stupid thing of mentally persuading myself that I'd not done very well. I'm pleased, though, that I was able to meet all the targets that I'd set for myself and attain the results I did.
Over the next week, I'm hoping to begin to get more familiar with Dreamweaver and using tables and cells to lay out a website- I'm hopefully going to begin reworking the Ya-Yas website, which should hopefully help address any problems that might come up for me during A5. I'm also going to spend some time getting to grips with Adobe InDesign and doing further research into Morris Fuller Benton. I also need to get back into the habit of collecting pieces of design work for my sketchbook- something that became sloppy over the last couple of weeks of the last semester. Any good resources for inspirational work would be appreciated!
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