Ben Waller

2008-05-13T17:53:00.004+01:00

Summative Blog Entry – As one door closes…

Looking back to the first week of the course in September 2006 I wrote a post entitled “Formative Statement”. In this post I discussed where I was at the time but more importantly where I saw myself in 2 years time. As the 2 years is now up I feel it is now an appropriate time to evaluate just how far I have come over the duration of the course.

In the “Formative Statement” I wrote:

"My aims are to complete the course to the best of my ability and gain a good grade. After completion of the course I would ideally like to go to a local University for one year and hopefully achieve a degree"

Going to University was always something that I was determined to pursue as I felt that having a degree would allow me to obtain a good job. I felt this way for the majority of the course but towards the end of the second year I began to have second thoughts. The first thing that changed my thinking was when I visited an open day for a local university. I spent the day there to see what they did, how the courses were taught and how much support students were given. After the open day I couldn’t help but feel that it just wasn’t for me and I began thinking do I really need to top my qualification up to a degree?

After mulling things over I was happy to hear that we were being visited by recruitment agency Orchard Suits to give us advice on gaining employment. I found this to be a really interesting visit and helped to clarify certain issues that I had. One thing that stuck in my mind was that the majority of potential employers see little difference between a degree and a HND. My mind was made up and I immediately started looking to find a job and amending my CV to give me the best chance possible.

Another important blog post I wrote was at the end of the first year of the course. This post was entitled “First Year Review” where I set myself several targets for the coming year and beyond.

In the “First Year Review” post I wrote several goals including:

“Gain merit grades for 3 assignments. It may be difficult to achieve merit grades right away as the criteria will change making it harder to achieve these grades, hopefully though I will be able to achieve these later on in the second year.”

I am delighted at the fact that I have been able to achieve Merit grades in every assignment that I have done so far in the second year. I have pushed to achieve Distinction grades in all these assignments and I don’t think that I am too far away. I am optimistic that I will be able to sign off in style and achieve a Distinction for my last assignment “A14 So Limitless and Free”.

Another goal I set myself in the “First Year Review” was to:

“Build a site completely using CSS as this is a vital skill to have judging by the reports that we have had from previous students who are now in employment”

As CSS was something I had very limited experience with I am pleased that I am now comfortable and confident using it. Learning different technologies is something that I have really enjoyed during the second year and I never imagined that I would be able to learn as much as I have. Throughout the second year I have experienced PHP, JavaScript and XHMTL along with CSS. As these are all industry standard technologies I think that this illustrates perfectly just how effective this course is at preparing you for employment in the trade.

This past year has been by far the most challenging period of my life so far but I think that the experience I have gained is invaluable. I am now looking forward to my future in the industry and this is due to the numerous things I have learnt over the two years of the course. I would urge anybody with an interest in making a career for themselves in web design to seriously consider taking this course.

2008-02-27T16:02:00.006Z

Portfolio Design - Final Design with sizes

Following on from my last post here is my final portfolio design. I have decided to keep the reflective text in the banner but have made it much more subtle by altering the opacity on the reflection.

2008-02-20T17:10:00.003Z

Porfolio Screen Design - Second Iteration

Following on from my last post here is the updated version of my portfolio screen design. I have taken into consideration the previous feedback received and made various changes. I would however welcome any additional feedback you wish to give.

2008-02-14T15:31:00.003Z

First Draft Portfolio Screen Design

Below is the first iteration of my screen design for the portfolio assignment. I would welcome any feedback you wish to give.

2008-02-11T11:43:00.000Z

Competitive Analysis

Site One – Freelance Professional (http://www.mark-till-online.co.uk/)

The first site that I will analyse is Mark Till Online. I chose this website as he is a freelance web designer based in Castleford, West Yorkshire which is fairly local to me.

The first thing that strikes me about the site is that it has a clean and simple layout which helps to make it look more professional. The site contains three pages (Home, Portfolio and Contact) which only contain the most vital pieces of information that Mark needs to provide. This is an effective way of structuring the site as users would primarily want to know what he can do and how to contact him. This would be a big advantage to the end users as they would be able to locate all the information they require quickly and easily.

The site also makes excellent use of visual cues to help the user to click on the most important information. To the right hand side of the homepage there are two large buttons which stand out straight away as they are in a different colour to the rest of the page. By giving these buttons more emphasis the aim is to attract the user’s attention which will hopefully lead to them clicking on the link. This is a really effective method of getting a user to visit something which you feel is important and is something I will definitely take into consideration when I am designing my site.

Another benefit to the site is that the “Portfolio” section of the website only contains a brief collection of Mark’s work. By only showing a small selection of work he is able show only his best work and not simply every piece of work he has ever produced. This would be advantageous because if he included some of his earlier work it may not be as professional looking as his more recent work which may lead to potential clients going elsewhere.

One disadvantage I did find with the site is that it only includes one method of contact which is via on online form. Some users may not be comfortable with this and may prefer contact via telephone or email. I think that the main reason for this is because Mark only performs freelance work on the side and is currently employed elsewhere. If this were to be his primary focus I would expect at least one more method of communication whether this was simply an email address or telephone number.

Overall I think that the site has a clean and fresh feel which makes navigating around the site relatively easy. The structure of the website is also effective with only the most important pieces of information included. I think that the site could be improved by simply including more methods of contact but as this is not his full time occupation it is understandable that he has chosen not to do so.

Site Two – Interactive Media Student (http://www.katpalmer.co.uk/)

The second site that I am going to analyse is Kat Palmer’s online portfolio. I decided to analyse this portfolio as Kat is currently at the same stage as me as she is studying web design at the University of Teeside in Middlesbrough.

The first thing I noticed about the site is that all of the text uses a centred layout. This is quite a negative aspect because centering text makes readability much more difficult which may put off some users. This could easily be corrected by simply using a more standard left aligned layout. The site also does not use a consistent layout with some pages having text to the left of the page and some having text to the right of the page. This may be quite confusing to some users so I would certainly try to use the same layout for each page of the site for my portfolio.

This site is quite similar to the Mark Till portfolio as they both contain very few links which makes navigation around the site relatively easy. The major difference however is that the Kat Palmer portfolio does not have a contact page. She does include a reference to her email address on the homepage but I feel that the portfolio would be much more effective if she included a page with all of her contact information on. The major aspect that impressed me with Mark Till’s portfolio was his use of visual cues to influence the users to click on the most important information. Kat Palmer’s portfolio however doesn’t really make good use of this and I feel that she should give much more emphasis on things such as contact details and accessing her CV. She does mention that if somebody needed a CV they would have to email her. I think it would be much more appropriate to upload this to her site and simply provide a link to it.

The portfolio section of the site contains quite a lot of work ranging from websites through to photographs. This is a real benefit to as it shows that Kat has a wide range of skills and is not simply focused on one area. I do feel however that there is too much work on the page and a few examples of her best work would be far more appropriate. The about me section of the site does contain quite a lot of information such as her interests and skills. Sections such as this would be included in a CV so I think that this page would be much more appropriate if it simply contained an online CV.

Overall I feel that the site is effective at displaying all of the skills and experience that Kat has developed in web design. However there are quite a few problems with the site making it look quite unprofessional such as centering and text and inconsistent layout.

2008-01-30T15:57:00.000Z

Portfolio Delivery Requirements

XHTML 1.0 Strict
This will be used to write the markup of the page. This will also be validated to make sure that the language is correct.

CSS 2.1
This will be used to give a style to the different elements on the page and create the layout for the page. This will also be validated to make sure the language is correct.

FTP
This will be used via Marcromedia Dreamweaver 8 to upload the website to my hosting account.

PHP 4 and MySQL 5.0.22
These will be used to create a simple contact form on the site and also to create the restricted area of the portfolio that will require a password to gain entry.

SMTP
Along with the contact form I will also provide an email address so I will need SMTP for this.

Image Optimization Software
This will be via Adobe Photoshop CS2 where I will optimize any images used to ensure a fair balance between image quality and file size.

2008-01-23T17:12:00.000Z

Portfolio Target Audience

Target Audience #1 - Educationalists
Paula is a 59 year old female working as an External Examiner for Edexcel. She works part time earning approximately £7,000 per year. She is an intermediate web user who goes online every other day and accesses the internet from home. Paula enjoys spending time with her grandchildren and going to the gym to keep fit. She uses Internet Explorer 6 as a web browser and has a 2MB broadband connection. Her monitor is 15inch and has an 800 x 600 screen resolution. She mainly goes online to check her emails and to do online clothes shopping. Her favourite websites are Monsoon and Next where she spends roughly £60 per month on new clothes.

Target Audience #2 - Industry Professionals
Patrick is a 42 year old male who works as a Technical Operations Manager for a Web Design company based in Doncaster. He earns £40,000 per year and has a company car. He is an advanced web user who accesses the internet every day except weekends for approximately 8 hours. He enjoys keeping up to date with the latest technologies in the interactive media industry and regularly attends courses to further his knowledge. He is a keen sports fan and has been a season ticket holder at Doncaster Rovers F.C. for over 20 years. He enjoys spending time with his wife and children and regularly takes them on days out. Patrick mainly accesses the internet from work and uses Firefox 2.0 as a web browser. He has an 8mb wireless connection and uses a 17inch widescreen monitor with screen resolution set at 1024 x 768. Patrick accesses the internet to catch up with the news headlines on BBC, sport headlines on Sky Sports and to order books and DVDs online at HMV. He regularly spends around £100 per month shopping online.

Target Audience #3 - Potential Clients
Julie is a 32 year old female who is a self employed mobile Beauty Therapist. She has just started up her business and requires a website to market the services and prices of her company. As her business is in its infancy she does not have a set wage and simply takes home whatever profit is left after paying her overheads. She is a novice web user who has recently bought a PC and is beginning to learn the basics to enable her to go online and check her emails. Once she has gained more experience she will go online once a week. Julie enjoys going shopping on a weekend and meeting her friends for a drink on a Saturday night. She will access the internet from home using Internet Explorer 7 as a web browser and will have a 2MB broadband connection. She will use a 17inch monitor set to a 1024 x 768 screen resolution. She currently doesn’t shop online but when she becomes confident in using the internet she will spend around £50 per month on cosmetics at Boots.

2008-01-16T19:31:00.000Z

Website Goals - Portfolio Site

To validate the website using XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1
I will validate the site because if the coding is not valid the browser that the site is being viewed in will correct any errors itself. The correction of the errors varies quite a lot between browsers so to achieve better consistency between browsers I will ensure that they are validated.

This could be measured by using the HTML and CSS validators on the W3C website.

To meet priority 1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
I want to meet priority 1 of the checklist because this enables a wider range of users to access the information. Features such as “providing a text equivalent for every non-text element” and “organising documents so they may be read without style sheets” make the site much more accessible.

I would be able to measure this goal by simply checking if I had managed to meet each checkpoint.

To have the site usability tested by 5 of my peers and 5 people outside of college
This will enable me to gather vital information on the functionality and the overall impression of the site. I feel that it is important to have it tested to have it tested by both groups of people to reach as wide range of people as possible.

This will be measured by collecting the results from each person tested.

To display my technical expertise by using a variety of technologies
I would like to use XHTML, CSS and PHP in the creation of the website. In addition to the work on the portfolio site this should also help to showcase the skills that I have learnt over the duration of the course. This will also provide a chance to gather further experience with PHP which will be advantageous for the future.

This will be measured by effectively using XHTML, CSS and PHP in the portfolio.

2007-12-12T15:52:00.000Z

Evaluation of second half semester

The second half semester has been quite hectic, we have been continuing with our A11 On the Job assignment along with working on our other assignment A12 Culture Vulture.

For the first part of the Culture Vulture assignment we had the task of performing a five minute presentation on a 20th/21st century design icon, I chose the London Underground Map. I was quite looking forward to this because I felt that it would be a good experience in preparation for our final presentation at the end of the course. After making sure that I had rehearsed and prepared for the presentation I made sure that I arrived 10 minutes early so that I didn’t miss my slot. Unfortunately instead of knocking on the door I waited outside the room for 20 minutes thinking that somebody was still inside. This resulted in me missing my slot and having to come back at the end. I did eventually perform the presentation and I was quite pleased that this ran pretty smoothly and I managed to get all of my main points across. If I were to do this exercise again I would definitely knock on the door straight away as missing my slot highlighted to me just how important punctuality is.

The remainder of the Culture Vulture assignment specified that we had to undertake the design process in reverse. I was quite nervous about this as it was the most creative task we have done so far on the course. Due to the fact that the design process was in reverse we did not know what we were designing for so our ideas were not influenced in any way. I found this quite difficult to get my head round at first and I struggled to come up with a variety of “diverse” ideas. In order to achieve more variety in my designs I decided to look at graphic design books and magazines for some inspiration. I feel that this was really beneficial because I ended up exploring ideas and themes that I would not have considered otherwise.

After I had created a sufficient number of designs we were given our product to apply a design to, this was the M5 Coca Cola bottle. I was quite eager to get started with this as there was very little time left before the deadline. I wanted to choose an appropriate design as soon as possible as I felt that creating the digital artwork was going to be the hardest part of the assignment. After spending quite a lot of time on this in my self study I began to feel much more confident that I had made the right choice with my rock star idea. I feel that creating the digital artwork has been a really beneficial exercise for me because I now feel much more capable in vector drawing applications such as Freehand. If I were to do this task again however I would definitely try to use another application such as Adobe Illustrator as it is an application I have never used before.

The other assignment we have been working on is On the Job which has been going since the beginning of the second year. This has proved to be quite a frustrating assignment at times in terms of communicating with clients, arranging meetings, getting content etc. I do feel that it has been a great experience though because this is the sort of thing we are going to have to do after the course so being able to deal with clients effectively is a key skill to have. I also feel that the two clients we have dealt with have been completely different. I feel this was advantageous because we learnt that you cannot expect every client to be the same and they all have separate demands and expectations.

I think that we have worked quite well as a team for the On the Job assignment and both clients seem to be happy with the end product. The assignment has seemed to drag on quite a bit over the last few months but I feel that the experience gained in dealing with clients will be invaluable for the future.

Overall I feel that this has been a really productive half semester. I have been forced to move out of my comfort zone by undertaking a design process in reverse and worked on two professional projects. I am looking forward to seeing what awaits after Christmas in what I find hard to believe will be the final quarter of the course!

2007-12-05T17:24:00.000Z

BTEC/Skillset or both?

BTEC are an examination board who fall under the Edexcel brand. Edexcel are a learning organisation who offer many vocational and general qualifications. The BTEC syllabus for Interactive Media is quite a vast document containing the required outcomes and content for each unit of study. They also provide advice on how to deliver each skill and give further guidance such as helpful websites and further reading exercises.

Skillset on the other hand are a Skills Council for the Audio Visual Industry. They are jointly funded by both the industry and the government and aim to make sure the industry has the right people with the right skills. From my point of view as a student they provide a helpful set of National Occupational Standards which state what skills you will need to work in the industry. This is quite wide ranging from Core Skills that are needed in each sector of the industry through to more specific areas such as “Manage Intellectual Property Rights” and “Design Electronic Games”.

The obvious difference between the two is that BTEC is an educational authority whereas Skillset is directly linked to the industry. This means that they both have quite different aims which both need to be taken into consideration by students leaning Interactive Media. The main aim of BTEC is to educate and train students to enable them to pass the course by meeting a selection of learning outcomes. The main aim for Skillset however as stated previously is to make sure the industry contains the right people with the right skills.

The BTEC syllabus contains learning outcomes for each unit with the aim of providing students with certain skills. The outcomes are quite broad however so can be interpreted in a number of ways. A good example of this is in Unit 22: New Technologies in Interactive Media. One of the learning outcomes for this unit was “Using new technology, produce a proposal for an interactive media product”.

The Skillset Standards are much more focused however. A good example of this is on Unit IM7: Code Scripts To Provide Functionality For Interactive Media Products. This section states “Some industry-standard languages you might use are Flash ActionScript, JavaScript, VBScript, Lingo for Director, Perl and PHP”. BTEC do attempt to do this by stating “At the time of publication, the following programming languages would be suggested for use CH, JAVA, Visual Basic, JAVA Script”. This is not a must however and the new technology learnt depends on the discretion of the course leader.

Another main difference between the two is that unlike BTEC the Skillset Standards do not state how you would learn skills or provide additional support. The BTEC syllabus provides instructions on how each unit would be passed and provides support materials such as helpful books. One problem with this however is that the BTEC syllabus has not been updated since March 2005. This may mean that the support materials given are no longer appropriate. Due to the fast moving nature of the Interactive Media industry I feel that more regular updates are essential in order to maintain relevance with the industry.

I feel that relevance with the industry is a key concept when comparing BTEC with Skillset. The main aim of BTEC is to give students the appropriate qualifications to gain employment. The main aim of Skillset however is to make sure the industry remains competitive by containing people with the right skills. I think that they both compliment each other very well and both need to be taken into consideration by Interactive Media Students.

2007-11-22T18:56:00.000Z

CD Playlist

1. Graffiti - Maximo Park
2. Paint It Black - Rolling Stones
3. We Are Your Friends - Justice Vs Simian
4. Whiskey In The Jar - Thin Lizzy
5. Welcome to Jamrock - Damian Marley
6. Boys Dont Cry - The Cure
7. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - Daft Punk
8. Thirteen - Forward Russia
9. Buffalo Soldier - Bob Marley
10. Town Called Malice - The Jam
11. Happy Alone - Kings Of Leon
12. Thou Shalt Always Kill - Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobious Pip
13. Can't Stand Me Now - The Libertines
14. Fix Up Look Sharp - Dizzy Rascal
15. Sally Cinnamon - The Stone Roses
16. Put You In Your Place - The Sunshine Underground

2007-11-15T19:52:00.001Z

How about a purple and yellow colour combination?

The best colour combination is purple and yellow. Due to the fact that the colours are opposite to each other in the colour wheel it creates maximum contrast when they are used together. (see image below Copyright © http://www.marlborough.oxon.sch.uk/)

When the two colours are used effectively the results can be quite impressive. One of the most extraordinary uses of this colour combination is in purple and yellow tulips (see image below Copyright © 2003 Katinka Matson). The contrast between the two colours makes the flowers really stand out.

Purple combined with yellow can also create some really eye-catching designs. There are several commercial uses of this colour scheme one of which is Galaxy FM (see image below Copyright © http://www.galaxyyorkshire.co.uk)

The two colours also have a more practical benefit which is shown with the Nike Total 90 Premier League Football (see image below Copyright © http://www.kitbag.com). This ball is used in games where there are low visibility conditions. The purple combined with they yellow makes the ball much easier to see compared to a white ball.

So purple and yellow are the best combination of colours. The colours are used to create some really striking commercial designs. Along with this they are also present in nature with the purple and yellow tulips.

2007-11-07T18:58:00.000Z

Yorkshire Sculpture Park Visit

Today we visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, Wakefield. I was not entirely sure of what to expect before the trip as I have never been to a sculpture park before. I felt that this was a really beneficial exercise however as there were many different exhibitions and projects to see.

When we arrived at the park we all split up into little groups and made our own way around. I was with Drew and Rich and after looking at a map we decided to take the long route around the park as we wanted to see the Winter/Hörbelt “Basket #7.Oxley Bank” and the Longside Gallery. After walking for quite a while we eventually reached “Basket #7.Oxley Bank”. I felt really inspired by this piece and I felt that it was helpful to be able to interact and explore it which was not possible with some of the other pieces. I did like some of the pieces in the Longside gallery but I without doubt preferred the “Basket #7.Oxley Bank” (see image below).

After visiting the Longside Gallery I was thinking that there was not a very large selection of pieces to look at. I soon realised however when looking at the map I had collected that the majority of the sculptures were in fact on the other side of the park. I liked many of the pieces that we came across on the other side (see image below) but I particularly enjoyed the Leaf Stalk Room in the Underground Gallery by Andy Goldsworthy. After talking to the guide in the gallery I was amazed to find out that this consisted of more than 10,000 twigs. You could tell looking at this piece that the artist had put a huge amount of time and effort into it and I was staggered at how the whole thing stayed together.

I also enjoyed the pieces by Henry Moore in the Country Park. I think that he created some really fascinating sculptures (see image below) and I enjoyed looking around his work. I was surprised to see that he was born in Castleford which is local to me and that he states that the West Yorkshire landscape really influenced him as a young artist. His work is also on display in The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and this is certainly somewhere I would consider visiting in the future.

Overall I am really glad that we made the trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I felt that there was quite a lot of inspiring pieces on display and I would definitely recommend it to everybody.

2007-11-01T16:54:00.000Z

Design Feedback - Crazy Firehouse

For part of the A11 On the Job assignment I have recently created 3 rough digitised designs. We will shortly be presenting these to the client so that she can choose the most appropriate one. Before we do this however I would like to get as much feedback as possible. I would appreciate any comments you wish to make. Thank you.

2007-10-31T16:50:00.000Z

3 Personal Tracks

Piccadilly Palare – Morrissey
In the summer I went on holiday to Bulgaria, before I went I bought the book “Morrissey: Scandal and Passion”. I usually buy new books before a holiday but hardly ever actually read them! This was different though because I picked up the book on the first day of the holiday and hardly ever put it down until I finished it. Now whenever I hear a Morrissey or Smiths song I immediately think back to being sat on the beach back in Bulgaria.

I Wanna Be Adored – Stone Roses
This summer me and my friends finally went on a lad’s holiday after planning to do so for the last few years. As this was our first time we were recommended to go to Magaluf. Magaluf is dominated by quite a lot of dance clubs and there are only a few places that offer something different. Because of this we spent quite a lot of time in Mulligan’s Indie Club. When we were in here it seemed that this song was played all the time so brings back some good memories!

Milk – Kings Of Leon
This is one of my favourites because it is by a band that I have been listening to quite a lot recently. When I went to Leeds Festival in the summer they were definitely the best band I saw over the weekend. I wasn’t really a big fan of them before but thought that they were really good live. When I got back from Leeds one of the first things I did was to buy their album and I have since bought all of their albums. As with the other two song selections this song also brings back good memories. This reminds me of being at Leeds Festival with all my friends in the middle of summer.

2007-10-24T16:17:00.000+01:00

Evaluation of first half semester

The assignments that we have been working on in the first half semester have been A9 Box Clever and A11 On the Job. Along with this we have also been working on our Personal Development Profile’s (PDP) for assignment A10 iMe.

The assignment A9 Box Clever involved creating a standards-compliant CSS webpage (CSS Beauty). I really enjoyed creating the webpage as I felt that it allowed me to experiment with different methods and techniques using CSS. I was then able to build the page using the method that I preferred the most. This also helped as I was able to find solutions to problems that I was facing much easier as I had a better understanding of where I was going wrong.

The project also proved to be incredibly frustrating at times especially when it came to make the page render in all specified browsers. When I had completed the website and began to test it even though it was standards compliant it only rendered properly in IE7 and Firefox 2. This was quite worrying at first but after researching further into this and consulting the book Web Standards Solutions I decided to use a hack. This was something that I had never heard of before but I found it to be an extremely important tool. After using the hack in my page I was quite happy that the page now rendered well in the majority of browsers. If I were to do the project again I would definitely use a hack again. I would however try to use an alternative hack so that it doesn’t have to be applied to a large amount of the code which would make it much more efficient.

The other assignment that we have been working on is A11 On the Job. This has involved working as a team on a professional project. We didn’t get off to the best start in this assignment as we failed to win any of the 2 projects that were on offer. After discussing this in our team we decided that restructuring the team may be beneficial. Shortly after doing this we were able to find 2 suitable clients who needed a website doing so things started to move forward. I took on the role of Designer in the team but although we have our set roles everybody is helping each other with their tasks. I feel has brought the team much closer and everything seems to be going well so far.

Along with the other two assignments we have also been writing our PDP’s as part of assignment A10 iMe. The online journals have changed quite a lot from the reflective entries of last year because now we are given more direction on what we should be writing. This has been beneficial however as we have been doing activities such as locating and applying for an Interactive Media position. By doing entries such as this we are able to have more of an insight onto what to expect after leaving the course. One area that I have definitely let slip so far is commenting on other peoples entries. This is something that I am determined to improve on however and I plan to dedicate myself an hour each week to reading my peers entries and posting suitable comments.

2007-10-17T20:38:00.000+01:00

Email notification on comments

Following on from today’s talk about receiving an email when somebody posts a comment on your blog, I have just found out how to do this if anybody would find this useful. On the Blogger “Dashboard” which appears when you sign in click “Settings”, then click the “Comments” tab at the top of the screen. When on this section the last option is “Comment Notification Address”, if you enter your email address in here and then click the “Save Settings” button at the bottom of the page this should allow for emails to be sent whenever a comment is made on your blog. I have just tested this now and it seemed to work.

2007-10-10T19:13:00.000+01:00

Interview: Part 2

Describe yourself in three words.
Friendly, Organised, Perfectionist

How would you measure the effectiveness of your interactive media product?
I would use two ways of measuring the effectiveness of an interactive media product which would depend on who I was doing it for. If I was doing a project for a client I would measure the success on if they were happy with it and if they had any complaints. I would also take into account how effective the site has been e.g. have they been receiving more custom since having the website.

If I was doing an interactive media product as part of a college assignment I would make sure that I have met all of the pass criteria. I would also make sure that the site is standards complaint and that I have met any goals that I may have set myself.

How do you handle criticism?
I think that I can handle criticism pretty well and this is something that I have definitely improved on over the last 18 months. I now know that whatever feedback I receive whether it is good or bad is with the intention of helping me to improve what I have done.

Describe a difficult problem you’ve had and how you’ve solved it.
One difficult problem I faced was learning CSS and creating a single page standards compliant website over the summer with minimal reference to staff and peers. I feel that this was a great exercise as it forced me to improve on my problem solving skills. As I was unable to simply ask other people for help I had to perform tutorials and research into books which gave me a much better understanding of where I was going wrong compared to simply asking somebody else for the answer.

Describe how you fit into a team.
I feel that I am quite comfortable with working in a team as I am easy to get along with and enjoy meeting new people. I also like to have the opportunity of bouncing ideas of different people and getting their opinion on things instead of doing everything by myself.

I have had quite a lot of experience of team working as I worked in a team of Claims Handlers for a firm of solicitors. Being able to work effectively in a team was vital as there were quite strict deadlines to meet so everybody had to pull together.

Do you have any questions?
What are your working hours?
Is there the opportunity to progress within your company?

2007-10-06T18:04:00.000+01:00

Job Hunter: Revisited

I really enjoyed the exercise of having to answer a series of interview questions. Even though face-to-face interviews would be extremely different I still feel that this was a great experience for when the course is over.

I was quite unsure on what approach to take for the section “Why I want the job”, I eventually decided to show that I really want to work for that company and have thoroughly researched into them. I feel that this was beneficial as it shows commitment and desire for the job. I think that I could have taken another approach by matching up what they require in an employee with the skills that I feel I have. This is an approach that I may take if I were to do this task again.

One area that I had to put quite a lot of thought into was “Greatest weakness”. I didn’t want to put a totally negative answer to this as although it shows honesty I felt it could hinder my chances of getting the job. Because of this I decided to put a positive spin onto my weakness which I think was much more suitable.

One area of the exercise that I was not entirely happy with was my answer to the
“Hero” section. I didn’t really know how to answer this and was torn on whether to state an actual hero which would give a better insight into my personality or state somebody in the industry. I felt that if I chose the latter it would again show my commitment to work in the industry. I originally stated that my hero was Benito Carbone (ex Bradford City player) but later amended this to Dan Cederholm. I think this was partly due to the fact that I have recently been reading his book and partly down to the lack of time. Looking back I feel that it would have been much more appropriate to have stuck with my actual hero. I would certainly do this if I were to perform the task again.

2007-10-03T17:32:00.000+01:00

Job Hunter

Interactive Media position
Junior to mid-level web designer
Digital/creative qualification
http://www.graduatesyorkshire.co.uk/job/32285/vacancy/?_ts=27344
Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Why I want the job
I see this as an excellent opportunity to join an exciting company working on some really important accounts. Looking on your website it is encouraging to see that your company has done projects for some huge companies such as Bella Italia and Twinings. I have also been extremely impressed with the approach that you take towards web design with “customer needs at the centre of things”.

Greatest strength
I feel that my biggest strength is being able to work under pressure and meet strict deadlines. From the experience that I have had from my previous job and also the last few years in education I have been faced with many deadlines and have not missed one. I feel that I strive under pressure and find that it is easy to motivate yourself for the task in hand if you have got something to aim for.

Greatest weakness
I feel that my greatest weakness is that I tend to spend quite a lot of time trying to improve work that I have done when it is already to a suitable standard. I have often found myself spending several hours on something that should only really take an hour or so. I feel however that this is due to being in a college environment for the last few years and having the opportunity to experiment with different ideas. I fully understand however that moving into the workplace I will not have this time to experiment with ideas so will need to be prepared to work to much stricter timescales.

Doing in 5 years time
In 5 years time I see myself working in a successful design company working on large projects. I would ideally have been working with the same company for several years and gained at least one promotion. I will have gained quite a large portfolio of work and worked on some really exciting projects along the way.

Current innovation that excites me most
The innovation of CSS level 3 excites me the most as this would give designers greater creativity in their designs. Having originally worked with tables and cells I feel that working with CSS gives designers much more flexibility in their designs and can lead to some really effective designs.

Hero/heroin and why
My hero is Dan Cederholm. I have been a huge fan of his since I read the book Web Standards Solutions. I feel that he was a huge help when starting to learn CSS and he helped make quite complex features seem more understandable.

2007-09-28T11:00:00.000+01:00

On The Job - Rough Designs

This week we are intending to display 2 digitised designs for our client for approval. The client owns a haidressers in Pontefract. I would welcome any feedback that you wish to give!

This was our first design. The general consensus with this design was a bit to structured and didn't quite flow...

The design was then amended to this...

The second design was where the curve to the right originated. I originally planned for links at the top...

However following feedback from Steve and Rich we decided to put the links below the image...

So at present the ideas we plan to show the client are the second and fourth design.

2007-09-26T17:46:00.000+01:00

Design Mechanics Presentation

Dave Pannell sees the Design Mechanics as a finishing school. Employees have opportunity to gain experience in industry staying for around 12 months before moving on to larger companies.

Research should be undertaken and CV’s chased underlining commitment, if not chased applicants won’t be contacted. Portfolio must look professional showing skills in web and print design, emphasis on commercial standard work. Impressive portfolios precede qualifications. Interviews focus on personality and ability to integrate. Need to detach from work and design for client not yourself. Employees should not think they know everything. They must have willingness to learn.

2007-09-19T17:58:00.000+01:00

Time to reflect

After having such a long break over summer coupled with the summer assignment “A8 Monkey Business” I was quite looking forward to returning to college and working in the college environment again. I do feel however that it was a beneficial task to complete a whole assignment with hardly any reference to both tutors and my peers as it taught me to be much more independent and work through problems myself.

During the first week back we were handed out the new assignments “A9 Box Clever”, “A10 iMe” and “A11 On the Job”. My first thought as we started looking through the assignments was how much the standard of the work has increased now we have moved into the second year. Even though we had been told previously that the work was going to get much harder and that we were going to need much more stamina this year I feel that it really hit home during the first week. This is something that I am relishing however as I feel that you need to be constantly challenging yourself if you want to improve.

The sessions that we are having with John throughout the first semester are working on assignment “A9 Box Clever”. I was quite eager to start with this assignment as it involves creating a CSS page which I feel is going to be one of the most useful skills to have when it comes to gaining employment. Over the last 3 weeks we have been going through several tutorials to supplement the lectures that we have had. I feel has been really advantageous as I am already starting to feel much more comfortable using CSS than I was before the assignment started.

Along with the tutorials we have also been working on the first essay of the assignment which was to “Evaluate the impact that CSS has had on web design to date”. I have been quite happy with the progress that I have made on this essay as I have completed several drafts to the point where it is now almost complete. I feel that I have really benefited from John being able to look through the essay and suggest ways in which I could improve as I have been looking much closer at what I’m doing. I now feel quite confident that after a few alterations in my self study this week the essay will be finished to the correct standard.

I have also learnt that I have passed assignment “A8 Monkey Business” since I returning back to college. I had mixed emotions about this because on the one hand I was quite relieved that I had passed but on the other was disappointed that I couldn’t achieve a Merit. I think that this was a good experience for me as it has stopped any complacency which may have been creeping in and I am now focused on achieving higher grades for the present assignments. If I were to do the assignment again I would spend much more time evidencing my research as I feel that this was the major factor on missing out on the higher grades this time around. Evidencing my research is something that I am going to be much more aware of for future assignments.

The assignment that we have been focusing on with Steve since we returned is “A11 On the Job”. This assignment involves undertaking a live project as a member of a team. One of the first tasks that we had to do was to decide which member of the team would be the most appropriate for the roles of Project Manager, Designer and Developer. After a brief meeting we decided that I would take the role of Project Manager, Marc would take the role of Designer and Rich would take the role of Developer. One of our first tasks was to give a presentation including designs for a generic Nursery and Sports team. This was an extremely challenging task as we were only given a minimal amount of lesson time accompanied by our self study to get prepared for this. However I do feel that we communicated well for this and were quite prepared for presentation given the circumstances.

After actually giving the presentation I was not confident that we would be given any of the projects and felt that the dynamics of the team weren’t quite right. A short time later we were told that we would not be doing any of the projects and that we would need to find our own clients which I felt proved that something needed to change. I decided to hold a team meeting to discuss how we felt everything went and how we were going to progress as a team from here. After quite a constructive meeting we decided that the team would benefit from a restructuring of our roles and it was decided that Rich would take the role of Project Manager, I would take the role of Designer and Marc would take the role of Developer.

In the last week we have advanced quite a lot with the assignment and we have now got one client with the possibility of another also. It is not really possible to judge how the team has changed since deciding to swap roles but it is very encouraging that we have been able to find a client so quickly and get the ball rolling.

2007-09-12T18:48:00.000+01:00

Skills gained and usefulness to employment

Personal Development Planning
I feel that my evaluative skills have vastly improved as a result of my personal development planning throughout the course along with my organisation and planning skills. This would benefit me for going into employment as I feel that I would be much more capable of writing an effective CV along with showing any potential employers how I have improved over the last couple of years.

Attending lectures, seminars, tutorials etc
I think that I have become much more prepared for lectures as the course has progressed by making sure that I always have the right equipment ready. I have also improved by undertaking further research to supplement lectures and improve my knowledge. I feel that I can now concentrate for much longer periods of time compared to when I started the course which would be a huge benefit for when I aim to gain employment, this is because I will be much more focused on the job in hand and be much less likely to lose concentration.

Seminars, group work, team projects
Working in groups and obtaining and supplying feedback has given me several vital skills in terms of employability. I can now show designs to my peers and be much more prepared to respond to either positive or negative feedback which is a huge bonus. I can also give feedback to other people in a much more constructive manner. I feel that this would be beneficial for employment as I will know not to take any negative feedback to any of my designs to heart and also give productive feedback to other people’s designs. I think that this will be very common in the industry so is a key skill to have.

Oral presentation
I feel that this is the area that I have improved on the most since the start of the course. I had very limited experience with presentations before the course so the fact that we have undertaken several presentations has given me good communication skills and also more confidence. The interactive media industry involves presenting your ideas and designs so being able to give an effective presentation is a vital skill to have looking forward to employment.

Writing essays and other forms of academic writing
I feel that my evaluative skills have certainly improved from having to write essays throughout the course. I also feel that my referencing skills have improved greatly with each essay that I have written. I feel that this will be beneficial for gaining employment as I will be able to accurately evaluate each design that I do which would be effective when having to present ideas to either work colleagues or clients. I would also be much more capable of referencing where I have gathered material which would make me much less susceptible to breaking copyright law.

Maths and statistics
I have used maths and statistics several times throughout the course which have definitely improved my skills. The majority of the time that I spend using this is when I am creating screen designs and implementing the designs. Due to the fact that everything has to be 100% correct and measured accurately it is key that I can calculate everything properly. I have also used maths and statistics when having to undertake research throughout the course and summarising it in the form of a graph or table. I feel that this will be beneficial for when I move into employment as I will be able to evidence any quantitative research that I have undertaken for any project much easier than I would have been able to before the course.

Observation
I have used my observation skills several times throughout the course but mainly when I am undertaking a competitive analysis. By doing this task I have had to research into how many competitors are in the local area and the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor. This could be useful when I gain employment as if I decided to go into freelance web design I would be able to monitor who I would be competing with and how it would be possible to gain an advantage over them in any way.

My observational skills have also been tested when it comes to making sure that all my work is accurate and that my work is of a suitable standard before I hand any assignment in. If my observational skills were not to a good standard I would be making silly mistakes, this is something that I have managed to eradicate from my work compared to the early part of the course. This would be vital for going into employment because if I was constantly handing in work with errors it would look extremely unprofessional.

Research
This is a key element of the course and I am often spending many hours a week researching into different areas before I start any given task or project. I think that research skills are essential as they enable to you to gain a much more in-depth understanding of what you are doing which should allow you to create much more effective work. This would be beneficial when gaining employment as I am undoubtedly going to encounter many problems when I enter the workplace and may not have sufficient knowledge in certain areas, being able to effectively research and gain that knowledge would be extremely advantageous.

Exams and revision
The only way that the grades are handed out on this course is by creating portfolio work. This is different to sitting an essay but I feel that it is much more accurate reflection of your ability. The skills that I have learnt from having to create assignments are working to deadlines and being able to create time plans organising how I am going to complete each part of the project. I feel that with the industry being based heavily on time management it is extremely beneficial to be able to plan and complete work to a set deadline.

2007-09-11T09:04:00.000+01:00

Being a Project Manager

Last Thursday we were working on our new assignment “A11 on the Job”, we needed to decide which team member would be suitable for each role in the project. After discussing the different roles that would go into a three person team and what would be the main responsibilities of each role it was decided that I would take up the role of Project Manager. I was quite pleased to be given this role as I think one of my key skills is that I am very organised, this is one of the main aspects of the role as it is the Project Manager’s responsibility to make sure that everybody knows what they are doing and how long they have to do it at any given date.

I am sure that the role is going to be very challenging but I feel that the experience of managing a team will be extremely advantageous for the future. As it is my role to liaise with the client along with the rest of the team my communication skills will improve as the project progresses and this would certainly benefit me when I try to gain employment after the course.

Even though it is early days I feel that we have the makings of an effective team where each member is suited to their role. I feel that this is because we decided who should be given each role from the personal skills profiles which we all created. Another promising aspect to the team is that we have been communicating effectively and everybody has been meeting the deadlines we have set ourselves. A good example of this was that Marc was able to get his screen designs for the Nursery and Sports Team online before Sunday night as we had all agreed, this then allowed the team to give relevant feedback and kept everybody on course to give the presentation on Thursday.

2007-09-05T17:36:00.000+01:00

Aims and Ambitions

Over the next 6 months I have set myself several targets that I would like to achieve. One of my main aims is to become much more fluent with CSS and start to feel comfortable using it, this is the common method used for creating websites in the Interactive Media industry so I feel that it would be of great benefit to me in the future if I have a good knowledge of CSS.

I am quite eager to get started on our new assignment “A9 Box Clever” as this involves creating a page in standards compliant CSS. I feel quite confident going into the assignment due to my experience of creating a page solely using CSS in the summer assignment “A8 Monkey Business”. The new assignment will be completely different to this however as I will be back working in the college environment and will be able to gain feedback from my peers on any designs which I was unable to do for the assignment over the summer.

In my last online learning journal entry I stated that I wished to achieve 3 merit grades in the second year of the course and I am still quite confident that I will be able to do this. I am aware that the quality of work will need to be improved compared to last year but I feel that the amendments which have been made to the merit and distinction criteria will be a huge help in trying to achieve such grades. As they now signpost how it may be possible to evidence each different aspect of the criteria I feel this will be a huge advantage compared to last year.

Another aim for the next 6 months is to be able to work well within a group on a professional project which I am going to be doing for assignment “A11 On the Job”. As this will be my first group project I will be happy to achieve a pass grade but I will be aiming for the highest possible grade as I do with all of my assignments.

I have also set myself some longer term goals over the next couple of years. I am still planning to do a third year top up degree whether this be at Thornes Park or elsewhere as I feel that this will enable me to build a better portfolio which should hopefully make me more appealing to potential employers after the course. I will also be able to have more time to build up my skills in certain areas such as CSS which I mentioned earlier.

After I finish education I aim to gain employment in the Interactive Media industry and begin to start working my way up.

2007-05-12T10:56:00.000+01:00

First year review

When I started the course back in early September 2006 after being out of education for over a year I felt like I was stepping into the unknown and this was something that I was quite nervous about. There were several thoughts going through my mind from little things like will I be able to make any friends through to bigger things such as will I be as good as everybody else on the course. Looking back now though and comparing that with the whole feelings of the class as a whole I think that this was synonymous with the feelings of my peers too which helped to set me at ease a little bit.

One thing that I think really helped to gel everybody together was the introduction week where we undertook several different activities which helped to break the ice and get everybody talking to each other. We were also told from the first day just how demanding the course was going to be and what was expected of a student on the course. I felt that this was really beneficial because you knew exactly where you stood right away and I knew that if I were not to put in the required time and effort that I was never going to get anywhere in this course and consequently nowhere in the industry.

One major thing that I had to come to terms with on the course was the fact that sixteen hours self study needed to be done each week. I found this to be quite a struggle at first as I had just left employment where you can finish at the end of the day and then not have to worry about it when you get home. This also doubled with the fact that when I was at college previously I found it difficult to concentrate at home and never seemed to get anything done. One thing that I feel really helped me with this was the introduction of the weekly time plans, I felt that these really helped as It gave you more of a structured environment and you could then plan exactly what you had to do in any given session. I am now at the stage where I can set aside two full days each week to get this done which I feel is really beneficial as I have got into a routine now and it is starting to become second nature. I feel that if I were to start this course over again I would definitely try to use this method again.

The first assignment that we did was “A2 That’s the Plan”. I felt that this assignment really benefited me because even though it wasn’t as large as the ones we have done recently it helped to settle me into the course and get a feel for how deadlines are handled and work is marked. I think that this was always going to be difficult as it was the first assignment and I felt that once this was out of the way I would feel much more comfortable with the course and be able to start enjoying it a bit more. I gained a referral for this assignment which I was quite disappointed with at the time but I feel that this was a good experience as I knew what I had to improve on to pass the assignment.

The next two assignments that I was given were “A3 Back to Basic” and “A4 Picture This”. I was more confident going into these assignments as I now had the experience of completing the previous assignment and understanding a little better how everything works. I enjoyed both of these assignments as I felt that it allowed me to be a little bit more creative especially assignment A4. I felt quite confident handing these assignments in and I was aiming at achieving the higher level grades. I was delighted to see that I had achieved a merit grade for assignment A3 but this was tinged with disappointment when I found out that I had gained a referral grade for assignment A4. This was due to me making silly mistakes that I had made in the first assignment. The fact that I was making silly mistakes this far into the course was quite a worry for me and I decided that next time around I was going to strive to eliminate these and check my work much more thoroughly before handing anything in.

By this time it was quite apparent to me that the standard of the work was increasing each time but I felt that this was extremely beneficial as it meant that you had to push yourself that much harder. I feel that the only way to improve yourself is to put the time and effort in and this was something that I was determined to do.

The next assignments that were given out were “A5 Builder” and “A6 Revert to Type”. I felt that these were the most beneficial assignments that we had done so far as they involved skills that would be essential in the industry. Assignment A5 involved making the website that I had previously planned and A6 involved work being handed out spontaneously and having strict deadlines to get it finished. This is something that is common within the industry and having spoken to several previous students who have now gained employment this is exactly the environment that they are working in. I feel that by this time in the course I was being much more conscientious about the work that I was doing as I was determined to stamp out on the mistakes that I had made in the previous assignments. Because of this I was delighted to have achieved merit grades for both assignments and this was also quite a relief as I dint want to have to worry about working on referral work during the last big assignment of the year.

This assignment was “A7 The Fax of Life” and this was certainly the biggest assignment that we had done by quite a distance. This assignment though was not running alongside another which meant that I could concentrate solely on it which I found extremely useful. As this involved creating another website I was determined to improve on the one that I had done previously. I think that the course is constantly getting harder so I feel that you have always got to try and improve on the work that you have in the past done in order to better yourself. This will be much more apparent when the work goes up another notch for the second year but I feel that the nature of this assignment really helps to prepare you for that.

Looking ahead to next year I am determined to try and achieve the higher level grades and I am well aware that to do this I must improve the work that I produce. I feel that this will be quite a challenge but certainly one that I will relish. I am still aiming on doing a third year to complete the degree for this course whether that is at Thornes Park or at another university. I feel that this will not only improve my skills but will also allow me to have more time in creating an effective portfolio which I see as vital in gaining employment.

Goals for next year:

Pass assignments first time so that I do not have to worry about referral work interfering with other assignments
Building a site completely using CSS as this is a vital skill to have judging by the reports that we have had from previous students who are now in employment
To be able to time plan everything effectively so that I meet all of my deadlines
To create a portfolio site that contains all of the work that I have done on the course and externally if appropriate
Gain merit grades for 3 assignments. It may be difficult to achieve merit grades right away as the criteria will change making it harder to achieve these grades, hopefully though I will be able to achieve these later on in the second year.

2007-05-04T17:22:00.000+01:00

Going Photoshop mad!!!

This week has been really productive because even though I am not 100% on track with my time plan I am quite confident that I will be able to get everything finished on time.

Due to the fact that this time last week I was still fretting about my style guide website I am quite happy that I have been able to get this finished on Wednesday morning. This was a huge weight of my mind as I was anxious to get this out of the way so that I could finally focus on the CD design. If I were to do this assignment again I would definitely try to get the website finished during our three week break so that I could go straight to working on the CD for the run in to the deadline.

On Wednesday afternoon I was able to develop ideas and create designs for pages 1 and 4 of my CD booklet this week. I was a little apprehensive about this task because I have never done anything like this before and I found it quite a challenge at times to create designs that I was happy with. It was also quite difficult in some instances to find relevant images that accurately matched my ideas and were of a high enough quality to use. This was something which I spent quite a lot of time on but I feel that this was advantageous as I now have a set of images that are suitable for my ideas. If I were to do this again I would definitely spend time researching and gathering accurate images before making any designs because it is all good having a great design but if you cannot find a particular image it will never be made. Below is the design for pages 1 and 4, I have not created any of the text yet but I would welcome any comments you may have.

On Thursday I was again focusing on the design of the CD and after ironing out several problems I had with pages 1 and 4 of the booklet I was able to start designing for the inside of the booklet (pages 2 and 3). I found this to be quite difficult to design as there was only a very minimal amount of text that needed to be fit onto one of the two pages which meant that you had to think of other ways to make a visual impact. After creating several roughs and developing them I decided to stick with a similar theme to what I had used in pages 1 and 4 by using the same background to ensure consistency between designs. I am quite happy with the designs that I have come up with for my booklet because I don’t really have any experience with Photoshop apart from the photo restoration that we did previously in the course. Below is the design for pages 2 and 3, I have not created any of the text yet but I would welcome any comments you may have.

As we are now fast approaching the deadline I am aware that I have still got quite a bit to do but I feel that by this time next week I will have got my CD completely finished which will leave me in quite a good position. The remainder of my time will then be focused on my evaluation and pre-flight documentation which will then result in everything ready to be handed in!

2007-04-27T17:40:00.000+01:00

The pressure is on!!!

This week has been extremely hectic as time is fast running out to get things done. I feel that this has been a reoccurring theme with my blog entries over the past few weeks and this is something that I can see myself still worrying about right up until the deadline! I do hope however that this time next week I will be feeling much more confident about things and will have been able to get quite a lot done.

On Wednesday I was quite disappointed to learn that the corporate colours that I had chosen and that were used in all of my designs were not compatible between all media. This was a huge problem and I spent several hours trying to correct this and find similar colours which would be compatible, because I was doing this it meant that I was unable to crack on with more pressing matters which at this stage of the assignment is quite unfortunate. I feel that this happened because I had not really put much thought into the colours when I chose them in the design process and simply picked colours that I thought looked effective, it did not even enter my mind that they may appear differently in other media and this is something which I will definitely put much more thought into next time around. I will be determined not make the same mistake twice. I do feel however that this was a good experience because I now have a much better knowledge of what will and what won’t readily transfer between different media.

On Thursday we had to bring in all of our sketchbooks so that they could be quickly assessed to see if any improvements could be made between now and the deadline. I was quite confident going into this because I have always tended to evidence anything significant in my sketchbook as we have always been told that if we don’t evidence things properly then it is going to be extremely difficult to prove that you have actually done it. I have also made a conscious effect throughout the whole of the first year not to forget about that assignment even though we were working on several others at the same time. The main area of concern that I did have was the “Cultural Contexts” section which I tended to spend quite a long time researching into but never really got the results that I was entirely happy with. I did however manage to find something of relevance eventually as I stated in my last blog entry. Even though I have tended to worry about this assignment more than I should have I do feel that it has been really advantageous as sketchbook work is going to be even more important next year so will be a key skill to have.

By the time I return to college next Wednesday there will only be two weeks until the deadline so I will be striving to get the style guide and everything finished so that I can fully concentrate on the design of my CD!

2007-04-24T18:07:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-04-19T16:43:00.000+01:00

Approaching the run in!!!

I am quite pleased that I have been able to get quite a lot of work done in this last week and I certainly feel that everything is now starting to come together. After completing the template for my Style Guide a couple of weeks ago I have been able to focus on the content that will be going into it.

As I began to create each of the items it quickly became apparent on how much worked is involved with the “full creative development process” that is stated on the assignment brief. When you consider that this can take around two hours for just one idea then it is easy to see just how large task 2 actually is.

I am quite happy that I have been able to get my email template for Ambient World finished this week as it is something that I have no real experience of. Because of this I decided to research into different types of HTML layouts and more importantly how they are created and used! After spending a couple of hours browsing several different sites I started to design my own template. I feel that if I had not done this research I would not even have known where to start and I feel that I have now got 3 decent ideas which be appropriate for Ambient World. I have posted these ideas on the bottom of this entry and I would welcome any comments that you may wish to give.

I can’t really believe that it has been 3 weeks since we were last in college and it has certainly flown by. I am grateful for the break though and I think that I have managed to get quite a lot done so I now feel enthusiastic about the run up to the deadline and the end of the first year of the course!

2007-04-12T16:36:00.000+01:00

Busy in the break!!!

I have quite enjoyed having the little break from the work so far but after spending the first week relaxing and not really doing much I have decided to dedicate a large chunk of the next two weeks to getting things done.

I stated before I went into the break that when I came back into college I wanted to have everything to do with the style guide finished allowing me to focus solely on the design of the CD when I return. This is still something that I would like to have done but bearing in mind just how much work that has to go into this I may not be able to get it as complete as I would like, this is why I have decided to spend quite a lot of time on it during the remainder of the break so I can get as much done as possible.

Over the last couple of days I have spent quite a bit of time creating the rules for my corporate identity such as my corporate font, corporate colours and logo usage. This has then allowed me to make a start on the other things which will go into the style guide by using these rules. At the bottom of this entry are a few rough business cards that I have come up with and I would welcome any comment that you wish to give.

So I can certainly see myself being really busy over this next couple of weeks and hopefully I will be in a good position when we all return on April 25th!

2007-03-29T16:03:00.000+01:00

The results are in!!!

I feel that I have managed to get quite a lot done this week and I feel quite confident that I am well on track as we are to begin our Easter break.

As I arrived on Wednesday morning I was soon told to check the board as the results for our “A5 Builder” assignment had been put up. Even though I was quite confident in my work for this assignment I was also wary of the fact that I have slipped up previously by making silly little mistakes. This was something which I was determined not to do this time and I was very happy with the fact that I had achieved a Merit grade. After experiencing many problems with my website for this assignment and having to start all over again with several weeks to go I am pleased that I have been able to achieve such a good grade.

After speaking to Steve in our group feedback session on Thursday he explained to us how he the assignments are graded. He told us that we get the good marks by completing the learning outcomes for each assignment and not by reading the plain English descriptions. This is something which I am definitely going to have to be more aware of for upcoming assignments and also the SketchBlog assignment which is being handed in soon.

I have been able to get quite a lot done this week and after giving a presentation to the group on Wednesday of our logo’s and receiving feedback I was quickly able to create my finished design. I felt that the opportunity to get feedback from everybody at once was very beneficial as you began to get different opinions and suggestions on how things could be improved. I feel that this is much more efficient than if I were to go round everybody individually with designs from my sketchbook as I think that you are able to display things much easier on screen.

I was also able to finish my screen design for the website along with the site structure diagram which now leaves me with gathering the content and building the site over the Easter break. Ideally I would like to return to college being able to focus my attention on the design for the CD that I have chosen.

I spent the majority of Thursday researching into several elements of the assignment and looking at some examples of other people’s style guides, I feel that this was a good experience as it allowed me to see the good and bad features of each individual guide which I can hopefully take into account for my guide. I then focused on trying to create the CSS for my new site as this is something which I struggled on last time. I did this by creating a test sheet and then creating a style sheet to apply to that sheet to see if everything was working correctly. I feel that this is a good way to do things as it eliminates any chance me getting it messed up half way through as I did last time. This is definitely something that I will try to do when I build future websites.

At the end of Thursday I didn’t even realise that the results for our “A6 Revert to Type” had been put up on the board until I saw several people standing around the sheet. I was extremely nervous about this assignment as I felt that I really did make quite a mess with the final timed assignment. Because of this I was both delighted and surprised that I had achieved a Merit! I am very pleased that after several referrals earlier in the course I am now beginning to get better grades which I must try to maintain. Bearing in mind that the work goes up another notch next year I know that it will take much more to achieve Merit and Distinction grades next year but it is something that I am definitely striving for!

2007-03-23T16:08:00.000Z

Logos, logos, logos!!!

For the majority of this week we have been concentrating on working on our Ambient World logo. I was quite worried about this on Wednesday as I was not entirely happy with the quality of my designs. Despite putting some time aside in my self study to come up with around twenty rough designs I felt that this was nowhere near enough and I did not really feel that any of the designs would be appropriate for Ambient World. I felt that this was because I had focused on stereotypical musical elements such as musical notes and microphones, after having the experience of listening to the type of music that they sell it was quite clear that I needed to take a different approach to my designs altogether. I quite enjoyed coming up with the new designs as I felt that they were of a much higher quality compared to my earlier efforts and would be much more suited to this type of music. For the majority of my designs I tried to incorporate some kind of space/electronica theme and I would welcome any feedback you may have on my designs at the bottom of this entry.

After listening to my album Planetarium this week I was pleasantly surprised that it was not as bad as I thought it would be. It is definitely not something that I would go out and buy but I feel that is the whole point of this assignment. You cannot always expect to be working on something that you like so being able to create designs for something which is not familiar to you or not to your taste is something that we need to learn to do. I am however definitely enjoying this task and quite pleased with some of the ideas I have come up with so far.

One thing that Steve has stressed to us this week is the importance of keeping accurate weekly planning sheets and overall time plans for the whole assignment. After the experience of the first assignment where Steve planned what we should have done by what date I immediately felt at ease knowing where I should be at any stage in the assignment. When on the start of our second and third assignments we had to make our own mini-deadlines I knew that I had to put more time and effort into time management and I feel that it is now something which I am quite comfortable with and really helps when we have larger assignments such as A7 The Fax of Life. I feel that if I didn’t plan as much as I do I would definitely fall behind and not be able to manage the workload effectively as I would like. I think that management of time is probably one of the key skills to have if you were to go on and get a job in this industry so being able to do it well now can only be advantageous for the future.

As we are fast approaching the Easter break I hope to have a completed logo drawn up in Freehand by this time next week and also have full screen designs for my style guide website.

Logo ideas:

2007-03-15T16:50:00.000Z

The big one!!!

This week saw the arrival of the new assignment “A7 The Fax of Life”. I find it very hard to believe that this is our final major project of the year and time has certainly flown by!

It has been quite a relief to start a new assignment and forget about the stresses of last week. My first impressions of the assignment were that it seemed to be quite a lot larger to what we have been accustomed to, however, if you take into consideration the fact that both college days and all of our self study is going to be focused on this project it seems a lot more manageable. I do feel quite prepared for this assignment due to the fact that Steve has spent the majority of the week in college thoroughly going through things and clearing up all the issues. I feel that this has really benefited me and I have been able to compile a lot of notes and highlight the key points which will be good to refer to as the assignment progresses.

I have decided to do quite a bit of research into this assignment before I start any creative work as I want to be able to create better designs when I eventually come round to doing them. I have found the Storm Thorgerson site quite inspiring as he designs anything from CD covers to Logo’s which is extremely relevant to this assignment.

On Wednesday former student Marc Bowers also gave us a visit to let us know how he coped with the course and how he has found work since leaving. I feel that by occasionally having former students visit is a real confidence booster and it lets you see that all the hard work will eventually be worth it. This was something that Marc really wanted to put across in his presentation and he felt that he would have been able to achieve much better grades if he would have put a little more time and effort in. This is something that I will definitely try to be wary of as I want to be able to achieve the best grades possible. Marc has however found himself a good job which he is very happy with, as I have had the experience of having to go to work everyday to a job that I really didn’t like this is something that I will ultimately strive for.

One site that Marc said that he used was Graduate Link and he actually found out about his current job on this website. I was quite surprised to see that the majority of jobs were not really fussed whether you had a HND or a Degree and this would certainly make me think twice about doing a top up year as I had originally planned.

2007-03-09T11:26:00.000Z

A6 Evaluation

When we were first given the A6 Revert to Type assignment my initial fears were geared totally towards the presentation that we had to give at the end of the project. I felt that this would have been the most difficult part of the assignment by far and did not feel that I would struggle too much with the rest of the assignment. However, I soon began to realise that this was not the case.

As I began to do the “as and when” tasks I soon realised just how difficult they actually were. I was quite excited about them at first because I knew that jobs in the industry require you to work at a very fast pace so this would be great experience for the future. The first timed task we did was to produce an article on musician Jonathan Gee using a given set of elements. I was quite happy with the design that I did for this and I felt that I benefited greatly by getting the whole design done with quite a lot of time to spare. This meant that I could spend time thoroughly checking the work and improving it. I could have spent more time on the planning process for this design but this may have left me with little time to spare meaning that I wouldn’t be able to check it as thoroughly as I would have liked. If I were to do this task again I would certainly try to get everything done with time to spare so that I could make the necessary amendments which would lead to a higher quality of work. This was something which I tried to do for every practical task in this unit but unfortunately this was not the case for all of them.

The next task we did was to design a paint tube for a range of oriental paints. Again this task involved working to a set brief which I immediately felt at ease with. I enjoyed this task as I felt that it was quite a challenging brief due to the small amount of space available to put the elements. I felt that this was a good experience because you cannot always expect to be given large amounts of space to create designs so being able to design on a small scale is a key skill to have.

We were then given the task of creating a job advertisement to a given brief and again this was something that I did not really struggle too much with. I felt that this task had a much more commercial feel to it compared to the tasks we had done previously and again I was pleased to see that I had left myself with plenty of time to check the work and make any amendments. I felt that this was possibly my most effective design out of the tasks that we had done and if I were to do the design again I would probably stick to the same design.

The next task we were given was to create a grid for a newsletter article and then design all of the content. As there was much more to do in this task compared to the previous tasks that we had done I knew that I had to try and work a lot faster. This has not really been a strong point of mine in the past as I tend to spend quite a lot of time dwelling on things and changing things. Due to this I tried not to dwell on things too much and just try to get it done as quickly as possible, I was not really entirely happy with this design as I felt that I might have rushed it a bit too much even though I only just managed to meet the deadline with minutes to spare. Due to this I decided not to submit this piece of work as I did not feel that it was designed as well as the others that I had done. If I were to do this design again I would definitely try to speed up the rough design process as I feel that I spent much more time than I need to on this.

The last timed task we did came as a real surprise as we had to design multiple fact sheets and supply all the material. This was the first time that we have had not been given the content for a task and this was something that I really struggled with given the amount of time that we had. I was quite confident that I knew the majority of the content so I decided to write as much down as I could and then save it as a text file ready to be imported into PageMaker when I needed it. I was quite disappointed with my performance in this task as I had planned to make 5 sheets at first and then when I realised just how much time I had left I amended this to 3 sheets. In the end though I only ended up with having just over 1 and a half sheets finished before I ran out of time. I feel that I ran out of time purely because of the way that I had designed the sheets. I had designed the sheet to have roughly 10 definitions on each page and bearing in mind that I had to create the illustrations for each definition I just did not have the amount of time to create them. I felt this was a good experience however as I realise just how important management of time is and I feel that if I were to do this task again I would only put around 5 definitions on a page which would save me a vast amount of time.

One part of the assignment that I am happy with was every aspect of the presentation that we had to do. This involved creating a visual presentation along with an accompanying handout. After spending quite a lot of time on the design of the handout I am very pleased with the end result. I felt that everything that I had learnt from doing the “as and when” tasks really helped me with this design as I had a clearer knowledge of all the different typographic techniques. I was also quite happy with my design of the visual aides as I felt that they contained a good balance of information and images. If I were to do these tasks again though I am sure that I would be able to improve on them due to the experience that I have gained throughout this assignment.

The actual delivery of the presentation at the end of the assignment was something that I was worried about the most. Due to this I wanted to try and know the presentation inside out and also give myself cue cards to remind me of any important pieces of information. I felt that this was a good technique to use as I felt that I did quite a good job with the presentation and my nerves soon disappeared. If I were to do this task again I would certainly use this method as I felt much more confident compared to presentations that I had done in the past.

2007-03-02T18:15:00.000Z

Presentations and Purple Giraffe’s!!!

Even though we were only in college for one full day this week as well as practicing our presentations I feel it has been very productive.

On Wednesday we were visited by former student Jonny Haynes who came in to give us a talk on his experiences with the course and what he is doing now. I was very impressed with what he had to say and it was good to hear from somebody who has done this course and gone on to get a decent job out of it. As he works for Technophobia who are quite a large firm in Sheffield I was eager to see what he had been doing since working for them. As he began to show us what he had been up to since he started there it became apparent that the work he does is very different to that of The Design Mechanics who I visited recently. The main difference really is that Technophobia deal with much larger clients and work on projects for long periods whereas The Design Mechanics need to have a quick turnover in work to attain any profit. He also stated that it took him almost six months to gain employment after finishing the course so that proves just how difficult it may be to get a job in the industry when the course is over.

On Thursday we came in for a short period to practice our presentations. We were able to go through the presentation in front of Steve and the rest of our group and gather any feedback which would make the presentation any better. I was quite happy with how this went and I feel that because of the feedback I received I will be able to deliver a better presentation next week. One regret I have however is that I didn’t really rehearse enough before our practice session. If I were to do again I would definitely rehearse more so that I will feel much more confident about the whole thing. After John helped out by giving us a little exercise on presentations it became apparent that the key element to any presentation is just confidence. If you go into the presentation in a confident mood you are much more likely to do a better job.

With the deadlines coming up next week I am definitely going to dedicate a lot of my time to trying to know my presentation back to front!

2007-02-23T12:39:00.000Z

Time to relax…no chance!!!

I have quite enjoyed the little break from college this week and this has enabled me to get quite a lot done.

One of my aims for this week was to finish everything to do with the upcoming presentation (slides, handouts etc) and apart from rehearsing the actual presentation I have been able to do this. I had been quite worried about the handout for the presentation due to the fact that it will also be marked. Because of this I have tried to take into account all the little typography tasks that we have been doing recently and after spending quite a bit of time on this I am quite happy with the end result (see below).

Another thing that I have spent quite a lot of time on this week is trying to fix the problem with the navigation of my A5 Builder website in Firefox. I was quite disappointed that the site did not render properly in Firefox but despite many attempts to alter the coding the problem still remained. This is something which I will continue to try and fix but at the minute I haven’t had any luck! I think that I had been having the problems with my website because I had created a template and tried to create every page from the template, this seemed a good idea at the time but when any meaningful changes needed to be made it proved to be pretty difficult. I will definitely put more thought into whether to create a template page next time.

I also decided to take advantage of this week by trying to address some areas of the SketchBlog assignment which we were given at the beginning of the course. One area that I felt I needed to address was “Analyse the cultural contexts in which graphic ideas are communicated”. This has proved to be a very difficult task and after what seemed like endless searching I was unable to find anything of any real relevance. This has proved to be quite frustrating as I hoped to get quite a lot of this done during this week. This is something which I am definitely going to revisit at a later date as without this it would be extremely difficult to pass the unit.

I am quite looking forward to next week at college as we have a former student visiting and we are practicing for our upcoming presentations. It will be interesting to see how another student has found leaving the course and going into a job after speaking to former students at the Design Mechanics several weeks ago.

2007-02-15T17:01:00.000Z

The stress of timed tasks!!!

The deadlines are slowly creeping closer and although they are not until another few weeks this will be our last full working week. This is because we are now embarking on a week’s holiday and then when we return one day is dedicated to the practice of our presentations. Because of this it has been quite pleasing to see that things are slowly but surely coming together.

On Wednesday we undertook our usability testing for the A5 Builder assignment. I was looking forward to this as I was eager to see what other people thought of my website and what possible improvements could be made. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about what questions to ask in my questionnaire because I wanted to be able to capture the best quality feedback possible. I think that this was beneficial as during our group feedback sessions with Steve last week it was apparent that we needed to create a blend of both quantitative and qualitative responses.

I was quite happy with how everything went and because of the feedback I received I was able to change several pieces on the site. I feel that I could have improved on this by including a section stating “Any other comments” or something along those lines. This would enable be to receive more qualitative responses and this is definitely something I will consider doing next time. See the latest version of the site.

On Thursday we were greeted by another timed task. The first part of this was to create the grid for a newsletter and the second part of this was to organise the content into the grid previously created. I was looking forward to this task but I soon began to encounter several problems with creating the original grid. As we were only given an hour to plan and create the grid time was certainly of the essence. I feel that I spent too much time doing my roughs and drawing my chosen design out which left me with very little time to actually create it. This resulted in me creating a design which I was not entirely happy with and I would certainly have amended it if I had the time left over. Even though I did struggle with this I still felt it was a beneficial task as it reminded me just how important time in this industry is. If I were to do this task again I would certainly remember this and spend much less time on my rough work leaving me with more time to create my final design.

Even though we are about to start a week’s holiday it is no time to relax as there is plenty to do. With the presentation to master along with the upcoming deadlines I am certainly going to be busy!

2007-02-09T17:26:00.000Z

Team work, where do I fit?

This week’s blog entry is a little bit different from usual, I am going to analyse where I feel my position would be if I were to be put into a team working situation.

I feel that several of my personality traits would fit into the criteria for a selection of the different team-roles stated on the Belbin website (www.belbin.com). One of the positions that I thought I may have fitted into was the “Teamworker” role. I felt this because I think that I am a quite mild person and like to avert friction wherever possible. However one weakness of a “Teamworker” is that they are indecisive in crunch situations, I feel that in the past this may have applied to me a little bit but the recent timed tasks that we have been doing have made me become much more focused. I am now beginning to decide on my design choices much quicker and easier without mulling things over.

Another section which I felt I may fit into was that of an “Implementer”. This is because the traits of an “Implementer” are that they are disciplined, reliable, conservative and efficient. I feel that I have improved on all of these areas since I started on the course due to the fact that amongst other things we have to plan and complete 16 hours of self study each week. This has forced me to be much more disciplined and reliable so I believe that this certainly applies to me. Again however I did not feel that the weaknesses of an “Implementer” applied to me, one weakness was that they are slow to respond to new possibilities. I don’t feel that this applies to me because I tend to relish and look forward to new possibilities whenever they arise.

The section that I felt most suited me was that of a “Completer Finisher”. I feel that almost all of the traits of a “Completer Finisher” apply accurately to me. Two things that I consider myself to be quite strong at are the ability to deliver on time and to be quite conscientious. These are two criteria which fit into the “Completer Finisher” role along with being painstaking, anxious and someone who searches out errors and omissions which I also feel applies to me, I am aware however that I need to improve on the latter if I am going to cut out on silly little mistakes. I also feel that one of the potential weaknesses applies to me which is that I am inclined to worry unduly. This is something which has been one of my traits for as long as I can remember and although I do get myself in a bit of a panic over the littlest of things it can also be of benefit sometimes. Because I do tend to worry I occasionally feel that I over prepare for things and do too much but I would much rather be like that than under prepare and not do enough!

My previous experience of working as part of a team was when I worked as a Claims Handler last year. This was because we all used to work in little teams. This was very different to what I expect team working will be like in this industry though as everybody all had the same job and just got on with their own work.

One recent little group task that I have done was to plan and perform a short presentation about a recent trip to The Design Mechanics in Huddersfield. I did this with Drew, Craig A and Craig B and overall I thought that this turned out to be quite a success. I felt that this was because we all fit into different sections of the “Team-Role Descriptions” and each have something different to offer. Even though it was only a short task I feel that Craig A took the role of a “Resource Investigator”, Craig B took the role of a “Co-ordinator”, Drew took the role of a “Implementer” and I took the role of a “Completer Finisher”. I think if we were to work in this group again we would be able to do a good job. I also feel that I would be quite happy to work with anyone within the group because everybody seems to get on well and should be able to work well together.

2007-02-02T16:22:00.000Z

To London and back…down to earth!!!

It has been quite action packed this week with plenty of things going on, starting with our trip to London on Wednesday and the start of our “as and when” tasks for the A6 Revert to Type assignment on Thursday. Even though there is plenty to do on the A5 Builder assignment I found that it was nice to have a little break from the routine and enjoy a day out. I was a little nervous about visiting London as the only previous time I have been was to go to Wembley in 1996!

It was certainly different from my expectations and the pleasing thing was that I found it to be a little less hustle and bustle than I imagined it to be. For the morning part of our trip we visited the Tate Modern museum, I was looking forward to this as I felt that there would be plenty of inspiring pieces which I could relate back to which would benefit me for the more creative aspects of this course. Because of this I was extremely disappointed to hear that because of recent strike action the museum exhibits were closed!

We were then given the rest of the day to explore the city which I enjoyed as it allowed me to sample some of the shops on offer! We were planning on going on the tube to visit several places but to our frustration we could not find an entrance to the tube stations anywhere and could only find the stations that stated “No Entry”. This meant that we spent quite a lot of time meandering and trying to find our bearings. To avoid this we could have returned to Leicester Square and got on the tube there and if I were in that situation again I would definitely do that. I do feel however that this trip was a good experience and even though the Tate Modern was closed I am glad that we made the trip.

After having around 6 hours sleep on Wednesday night due to the trip I along with the majority of the class was feeling pretty tired on Thursday morning. I soon realised however that I needed to get myself back into the right frame of mind as there was to be several “as and when” tasks throughout the day. I was quite looking forward to participating in these tasks because after my trip to The Design Mechanics last week I realised that this would be how tasks would be distributed in the workplace.

The first two tasks that we were given were pretty simple and I felt quite happy about what I had produced. The third task (typography design for a paint tube) however was much more complex and needed much more aspects to be taken into consideration. I was quite worried about this task at first because the brief was pretty strict and I felt that I would struggle to come up with enough thumbnails that were different from each other. I feel that this was a good experience however as it took me out of my usual comfort zone and forced me to work a little harder to get things right. I feel that I could have improved on my developmental work but due to the time restrictions on offer I did not find this to be possible. I do feel that if we were to do this task again with the experience that I have now gained I should be able to do it quicker and my developmental work will have improved.

2007-01-26T18:17:00.001Z

Life on the outside!!!

This week has been really eventful but also quite enjoyable. On Wednesday we were given the day to get on with our A5 assignment and bearing in mind the trip to London next Wednesday I was very happy with this as it allowed me to make significant progress. I am beginning to feel much more confident in using Dreamweaver now and I think this is due to the fact that I dedicated a lot of time in my self study to doing the tutorial. By doing this I have learnt how to use many features and learn some of the shortcuts and easier ways to do things. I feel that I benefited greatly from doing this and I will certainly try to do this again whenever we are introduced to a new piece of software.

Earlier on in the week I was informed by Steve that I would be going to Huddersfield to visit The Design Mechanics with some other students on Thursday afternoon. I was quite apprehensive about this as I did not really now what to expect but I found this to be a really good experience.

One of the biggest challenges of the day was actually getting there as the company is situated immediately after a variety of hills and fields which was quite a surprise. My preconception of the industry was a pressurised environment but I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was not the case. When we arrived it was quite a laid back atmosphere with people quietly getting on with their work and plugged into their iPods! This immediately put me at ease and I was eager to hear what everybody had to say.

We were soon taken into another room to be greeted by Dave who owns the company and Paul who is the lead designer. Then after making sure we were all comfortable with sitting on the floor they started with giving us an introduction into what they actually do. It was interesting to hear that they employ sales people who deal with the customer and go through a questionnaire with them which helps to give a good idea of what the customer is requesting. This is then passed onto a designer to create the designs which means that designers can focus solely on designing and do not have to waste time in liaising with the customer. Because of this approach they are given quite short deadlines to complete work, examples of deadlines were 1 hour for a logo to be completed and half a day for a website to be completed.

I was quite interested to see if the majority of their work was on websites or if it was print based. It soon became apparent that it was actually print based as a typical client who goes to them will request a logo, website, business card, letterhead and much more meaning that websites are only a small part of what they do.

Another part of the visit which I found to be advantageous was when we were all given a designer to sit with for twenty minutes to see what they did and to ask them any questions. I was quite happy with this as I was talking to Oliver who has just left our course last summer and he seemed to be enjoying the experience of working as a designer full time. I also asked him many questions that I had in the back of my mind such as his working patterns, if it was a good place to work and if he found it easy to make the step up from college. One of the most encouraging things was that he along with Dave felt that he just as capable if not more capable than other students who had gone their straight from university.
Overall I found the trip to be a great experience as it gave me a taste of what to expect when I finish the course, if anybody else is offered this opportunity in the future I recommend that they take it as I am sure that they will benefit from it just as much as I have!

2007-01-19T16:37:00.000Z

Getting back to the old routine!!!

This week has been pretty eventful as we were given our results for our previous assignments and were also given two brand new assignments. After having so much time off and feeling quite relaxed I soon realised that I had to quickly revert back to being focused on the course.

On Wednesday morning we were given our results for the two assignments that we were working on previously. I was quite apprehensive about this because even though I knew I had put a lot of time and effort into each assignment I was aware of how simple things missed can easily lead to a referral. I was however delighted to learn that I had achieved a merit for assignment A3 and a pass for assignment A4. This was a good experience as it gave me renewed confidence for the upcoming assignments as I would not have to revisit anything. I will do my utmost to mirror this in my new assignments because being able to focus totally on them and not having to worry about old assignments is a huge relief.

Wednesday also involved the distribution of the new assignment “A5 Builder”. This involves building the back to basics website that we planned previously. It is going to be made in Dreamweaver and this is a program that I am looking forward to working with as it is the primary piece of software that I am going to be using over the duration of the course. I am however a little anxious about using this as Steve explained just how complex this application is.

Thursday also involved the introduction of a new assignment with “A6 Revert to Type”. This is a typography assignment culminating in a 5 minute presentation and timed piece of work. This is something which I was not really expecting but I think that it will be a good experience as we will be forced to work under more pressurised circumstances. This is eventually the type of situation that we can expect when we gain employment after the course so it should be a beneficial task. Tasks are also given out randomly and not at the beginning which means that time planning for this assignment is much more difficult.

In my self study this week I decided to spend time looking through some of the further reading exercises for assignment “A5 Builder” as this will be my first ever website. I found the World Wide Web Consortium website to be quite interesting as it is something that I have not really looked at in depth before. By looking at this I learnt much more about the use of CSS and where it originated from which helped me to understand the coding a bit better. The original proposal can be found at http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/p/cascade.html.

2007-01-15T12:34:00.000Z

Bring on the second semester!!!

As the first semester is now over and we are soon going to be moving on to the next semester it is an appropriate time to evaluate my progress so far in relation to the formative statement I wrote in September.

I am extremely surprised with the amount of work that I have got through in the opening semester. When I applied for the course and found out that I would only be attending two days a week I thought that I would not have covered so much in the first year never mind the first semester! This though is because I had left education for a year straight after college and gained full time employment so I was only basing this expectation on the amount of work I would have done at college. It soon struck me however that this course would be much more challenging and was a pleasant surprise.

Another aspect of the course which has surprised me is the amount of work that I have been doing in my own time. When I researched into the course it was made clear that there would be 16 hours of self study needed each week to supplement the two days at college. This is something which I expected myself to struggle on as when I was at college I always seemed to be easily distracted at home and never managed to get anything done. The nature of the college work however meant that I could do this work on a free period or a break lasting 30 minutes. I soon realised though that I would really have to improve on this aspect if I were to get anywhere in this course.

As I was worried about the self study aspect of the course I was very happy to find out that Steve had created a time planning form to fill in each week. This enabled me to write down what tasks I needed to complete and how long I expected each task to take. This was a huge help in the first half semester as I found it much easier to put the hours in as I knew exactly what I needed to do. In the second semester I supplemented this by an assignment planning form where I had set myself deadlines throughout the assignments for when things needed to be complete. Because of this I could keep on track with the workload which enabled me to feel much more relaxed when it came to the day of the deadlines for the assignments to be complete.

Another big thing for me on embarking on this course was getting to know people. As the majority of my friends had gone off to universities the year before I knew that I would not know anybody on the course. Different group tasks and activities that we did in the early stages of the course really helped as it allowed me to interact with the different members of the course and get to know them. Now after the first semester it seems like we are in quite a close group where everybody gets on with each other creating a good working atmosphere. Different members of the group have different levels of experience in programs and applications which means that there is always somebody around to give you a hand if you are struggling with anything which has been a big help so far.

When starting the course I stated that I would like to go on to a third year and achieve a degree and I am still aiming to do this. As Steve is pressing for a third year at Thornes this would certainly be beneficial and I feel that many members of the group may stay on for the third year that may not have done otherwise.

As the next semester is approaching I am looking forward to the new assignments and learning more new software and applications. As I will be creating my first website I will be using Dreamweaver which is something which will be used throughout the course and into employment so I am eager to familiarise myself with it and use it effectively. I am also keen to find out my results from the previous assignments as I feel that I put a lot of time and effort into them.

2006-12-23T12:36:00.000Z

The deadline runs smoothly!!!

This week was deadline week and although I was quite panicky about this a few weeks ago I am very pleased with how everything went. Because of the amount of time I had been putting in during my self study in recent weeks I was able to just turn up at college at 11.30 and hand the assignment in without any real pressure. I think that this was really beneficial as when I handed in the last assignment I came in at the normal time and needed to work on a few things before I handed it in. I think that because of this the quality of my work would not have been as high as I believe it is this time. However, you only learn from previous experiences so I feel that this time I feel that my approach was much better and I will certainly try to do this again for future assignments.

After completing my first semester I can honestly say that the course has far exceeded my expectations. If somebody would have said to me that I would be writing 4500 words 6 months ago I would have not believed them at all! The real problem I have found is trying to cut down on my words and not trying to write them so this shows just how much my attitude has changed since starting the semester.

Another surprising element about the course is the amount of work that I am getting through and the new programs that I am learning, as we are only a few months into the course I would not have thought that I would have got through almost 2 sketchbooks and be working in programs such as PageMaker and Photoshop this early on. I am beginning to feel much more comfortable with these programs which can only benefit me in the future.

I am also pleased with the group as a whole because before I started the course I did not know anybody at all. I think that it is a good group to work in and there is not anybody in the group that I do not get on with. This creates a good atmosphere within the class and I feel that this helps whenever you have any problems. All of this culminates in everybody’s work benefiting from being in such a good group.

2006-12-14T16:38:00.000Z

Everything falling into place!!!

Even though our assignments need to be handed in this time next week I feel that this week has been quite relaxed. I think that this is due to the fact that last week I realised just how close we are to the deadline and spent quite a lot of time on both assignments in my self study. This was extremely beneficial as it allowed me to just gather everything together so that everything was in order and ready for our group discussion on Thursday. I feel that because of this I then received better feedback which will enable me to improve on both assignments. I believe that the next time I am in this situation it will be a good approach to take and I will certainly try to do this again.

Thursday’s group feedback meeting was also the last time that our current group will be together. I think that it is quite a shame that this group is being broken up because I feel that we have worked quite well together and I think that the fact that we have been so well organised and seem to have everything in order is down to being in such a close knit group. I am however looking forward to working with other people in the group who I have not really interacted with as much.

I finally finished the image restoration work on Thursday afternoon and this is a real relief as this time last week I thought I would never be able to complete it. With the guidance I got from Steve in last week’s feedback meeting I had a much clearer understanding of what I should be trying to achieve and I am quite happy with the end product (Images of original and finished image at bottom of entry). Because of this I am now much more confident in Photoshop and if I were to do this again I am sure that I would be able to do it more effectively and quicker.

So this week is really going to be focused on tying up a few loose ends so that I am ready to hand everything in next Thursday. Hopefully this time I will be able to get everything completed to the required standard so that when we start next semester I will be able to focus solely on our new assignments.

2006-12-07T16:28:00.001Z

The end is near!!!

As our assignments have to be as complete as they possibly can be by this time next week the pressure is now certainly on. It hadn’t really struck me just how much work there was to be done until the latter part of last week so this week has been pretty manic to say the least!

On Wednesday as normal we were working on our back to basics assignment. Before the lesson started I was quite comfortable with this and most of my anxiety had been aimed toward the other assignment. However this all changed as I started to put my screen designs into Pagemaker.

I decided to design the text on the website to be quite wide so that there would be no scrolling on the site. By doing this I totally forgot about the principals that I learnt about in the previous assignment about how wide text should be to keep users interest. As I had spent the majority of the afternoon doing the design it was quite demoralising to be told that I would have to drastically alter it but I feel that once this is out of the way I have will have the majority of the work done and will be able focus more on the other assignment which I find much more challenging. If I were to do this again I will definitely remember about text width on websites so that I will be able to design the website better and save myself a lot of time.

On Thursday Steve wanted to see our image restoration task to decide if we had done a good enough job or if we had to do it again. I was not confident in my image at all as I felt that I had adjusted the levels of image incorrectly which meant that certain parts could not be distinguished.

As expected Steve did think that I should do this again but this was beneficial as he told me what I could do to stop this happening next time. Even though this is going to be a very time consuming task I feel that it will certainly benefit me in the long run as I will be able to have more experience and become more familiar with the application. If I were to do this exercise again I would definitely keep a closer eye on the image when I am altering certain settings to stop the same thing happening again.

There is an awful lot of work to be done between now and next week, hopefully I will be able to complete it to a decent standard so that any little things that may result in my work being referred can be identified and worked on before it is too late!

2006-11-30T17:09:00.000Z

Getting to grips with Photoshop!!!

This week has been quite productive and I feel that as we are now past the half way mark of the assignments I am quite happy to see that some aspects are coming together.

The web content section for the back to basics project was finally completed this week and although it was quite a repetitive task and proved to take much longer than I expected it seems to be the last piece of heavy written work for a while. I feel that it was a beneficial exercise as it allowed me to research into things that I would not necessarily have looked at otherwise. To improve on this I could have spent more time researching into a wider range of definitions but this may have taken up too much valuable time. If I were to do this again I feel that I would be much more confident as I now have a wider knowledge of these terms so will not have to do as much research into them.

I had my first real detailed experience with Adobe Photoshop this week as on Thursday we were handed the Image Restoration task. When Steve was going through what we would be doing I was thinking that this would be a nice creative task to do and that it should not be too difficult. This could not have been further form the truth however as I found some aspects of it quite a struggle and it proved to be a very monotonous and quite time consuming task. Steve also stated that some people may have to start this again when he has a look at these next week, this may not be such a bad thing though as hopefully he will be able to give me some advice on how I can improve it and my work should be better as a result.

I feel that as I have never really done anything like this before I was always going to find it difficult but I did not understand just how much time and effort it would take to do this exercise. I am however confident that as I progress through the course I will become much more familiar with the program and if I were to do this task again I would not find it so complicated.

2006-11-24T16:16:00.000Z

“Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow”

This week involved making my first presentation which up until now was something that I had not given much thought to. When Steve informed us that we had from 10am until 2pm to research, prepare and rehearse a 2-3 minute presentation on any given colour my first thoughts were that this would not be possible. As I had never done anything like this before I was apprehensive about doing this and just wanted to get it out of the way.

When we were put into different groups and each given a separate colour I was quite happy with the outcome. I was placed with Drew and given the colour orange. Because I get on well with Drew I was confident that we would be able to prepare well enough to be able to produce a decent presentation. I was also quite happy with the colour orange as there were several associations that I thought of straight away such as Holland, the mobile phone company Orange and EasyJet.

I enjoyed researching into everything that we would be putting into our visual aid (PowerPoint presentation) as I learnt many interesting things such as the origins of Holland’s relationship with orange. As we had created a list of ideas which seemed to be getting longer by the minute we were quite worried that we may not have enough time to cover them all. We resolved this by splitting the task in half with Drew making the visual aid with me creating the fact sheet and this seemed to work well.

When it got to 1pm it was time to rehearse, we decided to go to the car for this as there would be no distractions. However this proved to build up my nerves even more! The more times I rehearsed the presentation the more mistakes I seemed to be making. I even confused orange with yellow! I did though find that rehearsing with somebody in a quiet place without any distractions was a big help and I feel that if I were to do this again I would certainly use this method.

After sitting in the canteen waiting for my turn for what seemed like an eternity but was more like 2 hours it was my turn to give my talk. By this point I was incredibly nervous. I did feel though that the lecture that we had been given that morning was a huge help as it went through what different emotions we may be feeling and in a way this acted as a tool to calm me down a bit.

The presentation was not perfect but I was pleased that I did not make such a mess as I had thought! I think that we definitely created too much work for ourselves and this resulted in not having much time to cover each section of content we had written about. This was also a hindrance when it came to rehearsing as I seemed to forget some parts. If I were to do this again I would certainly make life easier for myself by making the visual aids shorter and simpler which will allow me to focus on other aspects which I struggled on such as my body language.

So overall I feel that the presentation was a quite a helpful exercise. I think that getting the first one out of the way will remove any fear of the unknown and the whole process will be extremely beneficial to me as I progress through the course and perform other presentations.

2006-11-21T17:14:00.000Z

The importance of the blog!!!

After recently receiving an e-mail from Steve regarding the use of my blog entries and what should and should not be included in them I decided to take a look through what I have done so far.

I feel that as I had never even heard of a blog before I started this course I am pretty pleased with what I have been doing so far. If I look back at my early posts and more recent posts I can definitely see an improvement. I feel that this is down to "The Reflective Cycle" [Gibbs 1988] (see image at end of post) which I often use when I am stuck on where to start!

I think that this is also proven with the fact that I only received my first comment on my blog 3 weeks ago and I have had a further 11 since then so I hope that this proves that my entries are improving. However I think that this is also to do with the fact that I have myself started to come out of my shell a bit and started commenting on other people’s blogs. As Steve has stated several times “feedback is an excellent way of accessing higher level grades” so I think you start to pay more attention to it when you hear that!

From now on though I am going to pay much more attention to my blog and make sure that I am using it properly and making sure that I give constructive feedback to my peers.

2006-11-16T16:56:00.001Z

Photoshop arrives!!!

This week I had my first real experience with Adobe Photoshop and so far it seems to be quite a good and efficient package to use. It is really interesting to see how simply changing a file format and optimising an image makes such an impact on the file size.

As this is the industry standard application and is a program that is going to be used quite a lot throughout this course I am quite apprehensive about using it and hope that I will be able to use it to the required standard. However judging by what I have done on it so far which is more or less limited to this afternoon I am quite confident that I will be able to handle it.

The Image Compression Report was also introduced this week and this has proved to be an extremely time consuming task, bearing in mind the word limit of 500-1000 words it has also proved to be quite a difficult task and one currently that I cannot wait to get out of the way!

In our group feedback sessions this week we talked about where everybody was at and I was quite relieved to see that I seem to be keeping on top of everything. This was one of my key aims when we changed to doing two assignments at the same time. As we are now fast approaching the half way mark of the assignments I am happy that I have been able to juggle the workload efficiently so far and hope that I will be able to do this until the deadline.

As I have planned to complete the dreaded compression report by this time next week I am certainly going to have a lot to do in the coming week.

2006-11-10T16:53:00.000Z

Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity!!!

This week has been quite hectic because along with doing the two assignments I also managed to resubmit my A2 assignment. I was quite relieved to get this out of the way so that I could concentrate more on the other two assignments but I just hope that I have got everything to the correct standard. I certainly will be pretty nervous over this next week leading up to receiving my final mark for the project. For these next two assignments I hope that I will be able to hand them in to the required standard first time round so I do not have to worry as much!

On Wednesday morning we had a lecture about CRAP, this was however quite an important lecture and I will have to make sure that I can remember Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity as these are key principals which I will need to take into consideration as I progress through the course. I think that it will be quite a challenge to start using terms such as these commonly but I feel that it will eventually all sink in and I will be able to be confident in using these terms.

Our group feedback meeting was also beneficial on Thursday as there were quite a few things that I was worrying about and wanted clarification on. It turns out that I have not made such a mess on The Designers Republic essay as I had thought! Steve also seemed impressed that all of us had our time plans and were able to say what we would be doing in any given week. I think that we do work well as a group as we do talk about things together not only in the feedback sessions but also in lesson as well. I feel that we are all helping each other along and this can only be beneficial as we progress through each assignment.

Deadlines are coming thick and fast and with competitive analysis and delivery requirements to be completed by this time next week there is certainly a lot to be getting on with!

2006-11-03T15:12:00.000Z

Double Trouble!!!

This week has certainly been eventful with the introduction of two new assignments, receiving feedback about my previous assignment and the fact that I fainted and fell on Marc during Thursday morning’s lesson! This was quite worrying at the time as I didn’t have a clue what had just happened when I got up but I am feeling fine again now though.

On Wednesday morning the results for the previous assignment were posted on the wall and I was quite disappointed that although I had passed one of the units I had a referral for the other. When I received feedback from Steve and realised that it was only a small thing that I did not do I was even more disappointed with myself and I will certainly not be making the same mistake twice! I think that the whole experience has brought me back down to earth a little bit after having last week off to relax and will definitely be beneficial for future assignments.

The introduction of the two new assignments also occurred this week and with the amount of time given to complete them my time management skills are certainly going to be put to the test. As last term was just solely concentrating on one assignment this is certainly going to be a bit of a juggling act but I am quite optimistic that I will be able to cope efficiently with this.

The fact that we will be studying assignments on separate days will undoubtedly lead to less class time on each project than I am used to, bearing this in mind I am going to have to really try hard with my self study but I am however looking forward to the challenge. On Wednesday’s we are now going to be concentrating on “A3 Back to BASICS” which is pretty similar to our previous assignment and on Thursday’s we will be concentrating on “A4 Picture This”, this involves predominantly using Adobe Photoshop which is an application that I have very little experience in. I am however sure that as before with Adobe PageMaker Steve will give us sufficient knowledge about the program so that we can complete the tasks effectively. I am also eager to learn how to use this piece of software as Steve has stated that this is recognised by industry professionals as the tool that is most commonly used.

This week’s group feedback session was also helpful as we are now in new groups. This has allowed me to interact more with different people who I may not have done so if they were not in my group. It also allowed me to see just what is needed to be done in terms of improving my sketchbook and creating a broader planning form encapsulating the whole of the two assignments. I feel that this will be advantageous as I progress through the project as I will be able to see if I am keeping up to date with the workload.

2006-10-30T11:13:00.000Z

Time to relax!!!

This half-term holiday has allowed me to reflect on the assignment that I recently handed in and I feel that now the first one is out of the way this experience will be valuable for future assignments. Completing this first assignment has allowed me to identify what exactly is required by Steve and to what standard, this should make things much easier for the next two assignments which are due to be issued later this week.

I feel quite pleased with the assignment that I handed in and hopefully the string that I tied it all up with will be strong enough to hold it all together! I felt quite relaxed about deadline day as I had already completed the majority of the assignment so this allowed me to just make minor amendments and then hand it in with time to spare. This was extremely beneficial as I was not rushing to get things done which may have led to mistakes being made. I hope that I will be able to repeat this exercise for the two forthcoming assignments as I will be much more relaxed about the deadlines.

The fact that we will now be doing two assignments throughout the next term instead of the one that has just been completed I am quite anxious about this as the natural thought is that the workload is going to double. Bearing in mind the amount of work that went into the last project this could lead to a lot of work needing to be done. I am sure that this will not be as bad as I expect but I can’t wait to get these projects started!

2006-10-18T15:35:00.000+01:00

Deadline day!!!

After spending the majority of today tinkering with the assignment and making several minor changes I am quietly confident about handing in my first project tomorrow.

I’m sure that it will feel like a huge weight is lifted off me when I hand in the assignment as this is the first one. It has however been quite enjoyable and the experience that I have gained during this assignment will hopefully stand me in good stead for the two assignments that are approaching. Factors such as Weekly Planning Forms and working in PageMaker are slowly becoming second nature to me now and that is definitely beneficial for future assignments.

Trying to sort out what I need to include on my CD that I hand in tomorrow has also been quite a challenge. As we only need to include the work that we are handing in on the CD it has really all been about filtering out the work that is not needed. This was quite difficult at times because many of my file names looked pretty similar especially my picture names. To avoid this confusion I could have given them all suitable names the first time I saved them but unfortunately this was not the case. The next time I do this I will certainly put more thought into the names of my files so they are easy to identify when it comes to gathering them on the CD when the assignment deadline approaches.

As tonight is the night before the deadline I am going to spend it amongst other things trying to attach the CD containing all my work to the arch lever folder by any means possible! This is due to the fact that if my folder fails the ‘shake test’ then my CD may be lost and this could result in my work not being marked. I am also going to try to hunt down some string so that I can attach the sketchbook to the folder and keep it all together so all in all it is going to be an eventful night!

Hopefully this time tomorrow I will be relaxing after successfully handing in my first assignment to the desired standard!

2006-10-15T18:32:00.000+01:00

The deadline approaches!!!

This week has been pretty hectic as the deadline is fast approaching and there is plenty to be done. I find it hard to believe that all this time has passed and it has certainly gone quickly!

On Wednesday morning John came to give us a lecture on blogs and how they should be presented. This was quite helpful and it culminated in me displaying my blog to the class so that any improvements could be identified. The results of this are that several changes are going to have to be made in the near future, this may prove to be challenging as this involves editing the code which I have very little experience of.

Getting all the project work into the template and in the correct order was fairly challenging this week as consistency is paramount for this course and the slightest mistake could lead to me failing the project. Bearing in mind I did not even know what PageMaker was this time last month I am quite happy with how it has turned out. I did however put the references in the document straight away, this turned out to be a bad idea as I ended up editing the document several times and the references ended up in completely the wrong place. The next time I produce a Web Plan I will certainly leave the referencing to last!

The group feedback session was also very helpful this week as it gave me a better insight into what Steve is actually expecting from us and I was quite pleased that I seemingly only have a few minor amendments to make. This was also beneficial as it allowed me to see what other people were doing.

The deadline for the project is next Thursday and I am slightly apprehensive but also quite confident in the work that I have done. As this is the first project I am not expecting to achieve the highest grades but I feel that this has given me a good insight into the course and be valuable experience as I start the two new assignments in several weeks time.

2006-10-06T10:58:00.000+01:00

Getting things done!!!

This week was all about getting on top of the workload and making sure that I am on track to have everything completed for this time next week. I had to transfer my sketchbook designs to PageMaker which proved to be a very time consuming but quite an enjoyable task. This enabled me to give an accurate representation of how the site should look if it were to be published to the internet. The design for the site template is at the bottom of this entry.

Thursday’s feedback session was also very productive as it allowed me to show my designs to Steve, Scott and Jamie and receive comments from them on how it could be improved. As a result of this feedback I added images to the design to give a more accurate representation of how the site will look, made the size of the title fonts larger so it stands out more and rearranged the layout of the contents by adding more text and moving the whole layout to the right eliminating the large amount of white space. I felt that this was effective as it gave me a good idea on how a prospective client may react in these circumstances when designing a website for them.

Diane was in the lesson on Wednesday afternoon and she spent quite a lot of time discussing where I was with the project and offering any help she could from her experience of previously doing the course. I found this to be extremely helpful as she was able to show me what she had done and how I could improve on what I am currently doing. I think that it will be useful to have her around in the coming weeks as the deadline approaches and as we start the new assignments.

In my self study this week I am going to have to try and piece everything together and do some slight amendments to the work that I have done so far. As the deadline is approaching fast I am going to dedicate a lot of time to my self study this week so I am in the position of handing it in to Steve next Thursday!

2006-09-29T16:17:00.000+01:00

Getting Creative!!!

This week I got started with the more creative side of the course as I was taught how to use Adobe PageMaker 6.5. This is a program that I have never used before but it seems like an effective package to use and this is what the assignment will eventually be presented on.

I produced my first ever set of thumbnail sketches for the design of the website which was quite difficult as I have never done anything like this before. I found it quite challenging to come up with many different designs and the majority of them looked quite similar. To improve on this I could have researched into website design and the different layouts that are used but due to the amount of time I had this was not possible. Next time I do this I could improve by coming up with a set of designs that differ from each other and will give me a wider choice to choose from for my final design.

This Group Feedback session with Steve, Jamie and Scott was also very useful this week and it allowed me to see where I was going wrong and to get their opinions on the work I have done so far. It also allowed me to see if I was up to date with the workload which I feel that I am.

I also produced the final designs for both the sites template and the feedback page. I was quite happy with these and when Jamie was asked in the feedback session if he could go and create the site based on my designs he said he could which was very pleasing to hear. However one big problem that I had was that the sizes I had used were in millimetres and not pixels which are required. Converting this proved to be extremely difficult and I will probably have to create the designs again but with the measurements in pixels, this is something that I will have to do in my self study this week. The next time I do this I will definitely do the designs in pixels first time round so I do not waste time!

I have just produced my weekly planning form for this week and it has proved to me just what I have to get done for next weeks Group Feedback session. I will have to spend a lot of time on the project this week but this should be worth it in the long run and I should not be as pressed as the deadline advances!

As I am progressing with the course I am finding it extremely helpful to visit www.hnd-interactive-media.co.uk which contains several portfolio’s of previous students work. This gives me a good idea on what to expect and what I should be aiming for.

2006-09-22T15:46:00.000+01:00

Getting to grips with the course!!!

In this past week I have successfully completed my first 16 hours of self study which made me feel quite triumphant and has put me in the position this week where I do not need to do quite as much. I feel that I have really got on top of everything and following my Feedback Group session with Steve I feel that I am fairly up-to date with where I should be. I think that with a few hours spent improving the work that I have done so far I will be ready to start with the more creative work next Wednesday.

This week I created the Delivery Requirements for this assignment. Even though this was quite a difficult task to do I did enjoy doing it as it involved me thinking into the future and specifying everything that I am going to use in the production of the site through to the maintenance of it. This was beneficial as I feel that it will help with the overall planning process. This was also quite complex at times as I needed to research things such as CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

I also researched how much it costs to create a standard small website. This was interesting as it allowed me to see how much designers are charging currently for this service. I could have improved this by researching more companies and possibly contacting some designers directly for a clearer indication of the costs so I will consider this for next time.

I struggled to find relevant sources to research how much should be charged for the maintenance of a small website and this proved to be quite time consuming. This was mainly down to the fact that the criteria that I was entering into the search engine (Google) was not efficient enough to find the info that I was looking for. After trying several different combinations I eventually got a set of results that were representative of what I was seeking. To help with this I could have contacted a web design company to see how much they were charging but this may have taken quite some time. Next time I will try to refine my search so that it accurately represents what I am searching for and this will hopefully present me with more accurate findings earlier.

2006-09-15T16:59:00.000+01:00

Second Week!!!

The first assignment was handed out this week. As this is the first I am sure that I will find this the hardest to complete to the appropriate standard but I think that I have got a good grasp on it so far. I have already picked the Great Briton out of the lists that were handed out. I chose Michael Crawford who is commonly know for his role as Frank Spencer on "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em" it seems like he will be an interesting character to do! This week I feel that I am settling into the course a bit more and the demands that it places on you. Completing the Weekly Planning Form really showed me just how much work will be completed from home so I need to get my time management skills in order! I have just done my first 8 hour stint of my self study today which will be very difficult to get into the hang of but i'm sure I will get used to it soon.

2006-09-13T20:28:00.000+01:00

Formative Statement

I left school having completed a GNVQ ICT course in 2003. This resulted in me having a keen interest in computers and I was eager to learn more in this field. The natural progression was then for me to move to NEW College in Pontefract and study AVCE ICT as a Double Award. Along with this I also studied Economics and Business Studies. After completing the first year of all the courses I felt that I needed to dedicate more time to my ICT course, I decided not to continue with the second year of my Economics course gaining a C grade for the first year. I completed my A Levels in May 2005 gaining a BB grade in AVCE ICT and a C grade in Business Studies. Although I enjoyed the course I decided to leave education to gain full time employment as I was put off by the high university fees which I felt would leave me in too much debt.

I soon got a job working as an Administrator for a firm of Solicitors on a temporary basis. A couple of months later I got promoted to a Claims Handler on a permanent basis. After doing this for almost a year I realised that this was not for me so I started actively looking for a new challenge. I visited the UCAS website to find out information on courses and try to identify a course that would suit me. I looked at several different areas and many different courses and eventually learned that Interactive Media was taught at Thornes Park in Wakefield. I thought that this would have been ideal for me as it was fairly local and would allow me to still live at home. Bearing this in mind I decided to contact Steve Smith who teaches the course to find out more information and to see if the course would interest me. After several e-mails and attending a short interview I decided that I would be suited to the course and decided to apply.

I am currently on the first week of the course and am looking forward to getting started with the assignments and building my portfolio. My aims are to complete the course to the best of my ability and gain a good grade.

After completion of the course I would ideally like to go to a local University for one year and hopefully achieve a degree. In order to do this I will need to accomplish high enough grades and an impressive enough portfolio to allow entry to the third year of the degree. Looking ahead into the future this will give me the skills needed to work in the Interactive Media industry when leaving Higher Education. At present I am not sure which area of the industry I would prefer to work in but hopefully when undertaking different aspects of the course I will gain a clearer understanding into the job area I would wish to work in.