Time to knuckle down!!!

I can’t believe just how quickly this Easter break has flown by and going back into college tomorrow there is now very little time left before the deadline, it is certainly time to knuckle down and get things done!

I have always thought that this assignment was the largest and possibly most difficult that we have had to do so far, I do feel that this is really advantageous though because Steve has never hidden the fact that there is going to be quite a step up next year so the experience of doing an assignment this large can only be to our benefit. I am under no illusions however that the work will be more difficult and the grades will be much harder to achieve in our second year.

As the assignment is so large I had hoped to have got the majority of the work out of the way over this holiday period and to a certain degree I am quite happy with what I have been able to do. I had planned to have completed the style guide website by tomorrow but I have found that my efforts over this holiday have focused more on actually creating the elements that will eventually go into this e.g. letterhead, business card etc. I have been able to create several ideas for each of these elements which all follow a certain theme to achieve the consistency between each of them. I was able to do this by deciding on my corporate colours, fonts and sizes before I started any creative work which I feel has really helped and stopped me just designing things “off the cuff”. If I were to do this again I would definitely use this method.

Even though I haven’t finished my style guide website I have managed to create the template file from which every page will be created. Due to the problems I had with my last site where I had to start afresh as the deadline was not far away I feel that doing a template will certainly enable me to create the site in a relatively short space of time when I have all the content ready. Hopefully this will be completely finished by this time next week so that I can concentrate solely on the CD design in the final weeks before the deadline.

I feel that throughout this break I have spent quite a large chunk of time researching into several elements of the style guide as in some areas I had limited knowledge or no knowledge at all. This was particularly relevant to the press release and the HTML email template. I do feel that I have really benefited from this though as I did not really know what a press release even was several weeks ago never mind how to create one!

One big worry of mine over the break was that I would still not be able to find anything of any relevance for the “Cultural Contexts” part of out SketchBlog assignment. Before we left for the break we discussed in our group feedback sessions just what could qualify for this criterion. One of the areas we discussed was how accessibility is influenced by different cultures and whilst researching into this I found the book Designing Across Cultures by Ronnie Lipton, I feel that this is extremely relevant to us as this contains several useful quotes and examples. One example was that an image of a rice bowl with upright chopsticks has been used before and in some Asian culture this means death!

One useful quote was also:
“You can't assume what's culturally relevant to an ethnic group (or subset of that group) that you don't belong to -- and, that it's not even safe to assume it for a group you do belong to”

I also found a review of the book and found it available to buy on Amazon.