Greg Carrick – HND Interactive Media

This week has brought round some unusual events, most of which have turned out for the best. Monday started in probably the best way with my website template finally validating, with the much needed help of James. Thanks James. With the template out of the way I started to fly along and create the actually website. But after a short while I came across a few problems with the layout and the table sizes, which took a while to sort out.

So I went on my way again and though I’d have it finished in no time, but then another problem arose. I’d created the header as an image and planned to use hot spots for the links. I then came to realise that when you put a hot spot on an image, it creates a blue boarder round the image, which I’m guessing is to show you it’s a link. This then ruined the layout of the tables and after asking Steve’s advice, I now need to redo the header and not use an image because Steve’s advice was “Don’t use hot spots there for ammeters”.

On Monday I found out that I was needed for transport to take people to The Design Mechanics as Shaun was ill. I was unsure whether I was up to the task of showing and talking about my work when I was there and I was only going because of those who needed a lift. Don’t get me wrong I thought it was going to be a good experience, but I’m still not confident enough in myself to be talking about my work.

On Tuesday morning I found out I wasn’t needed after all because there was some confusion with who was going and only four people (including me) turned up. This left me with the option of opting out, but I plucked up some courage and jumped in Steve’s car with the others.

After a long car journey that consisted of only left turns, we realised that Steve’s Sat Nav (Satellite Navigation) had forgotten how to say “turn right” and we ended up in the wrong place. Stopping to redirect the Sat Nav, we finally started to hear those “turn rights” and knew we were heading in the right direction.

When we arrived we were invited into Dave’s office and heard a bit about how the company works and their background. It’s quite surprising how fast the company has grown, with over 800 clients after a year and a half of business. This shows how Dave’s way of having a set price list works, since people know what they’re going to pay right from the start with no hidden costs.

We were then asked to introduce our self’s, explain where we came from, why we’re on the course and what we wanted to do. As daunted as I felt when Dave asked us to do that, it actually wasn’t that bad and produced quite an informative conversation.

After that we had some time for questions before we went to talk to the designers. I wish I was more prepared at this point because even though I don’t usually ask many questions, I didn’t want to miss out on the brief opportunity. Especially since I’d spent some time last night thinking of some questions, which I ended up leaving in the car!

We were then invited to sit with a designer, to see what they do and ask them some questions. We ended up with one designer each and I was very impressed with the work she (I really can’t remember her name!) had produced. She had only been there 5 months and the standard of work was very high and gave a professional feeling.

She was currently working on a project that had been rejected twice and the client said they hated the designs (or that’s what she said to me), it was finally accepted with changes on the third attempt. She showed me the previous designs and the feedback from the client and I have to say the client was one of those that didn’t have a clue what they wanted and only had the third chance because she was having the full works (website, logo and business cards). It just shows you that you can’t always please all clients and you have to work on the basis of the client is always right.

I am really pleased that I went to The Design Mechanics and feel more informed; now I know how a design studio works. Dave has got a lot of plans for the company and I hope they all work out for him because he has done an excellent job so far.

The trip didn’t finish there because one the way home we actually saw the Humpers Camel design that Jemma had created. This was such a coincided as we had been talking about the design and she mentioned that the client had sent her some pictures of it on their van.

The lecture on typography anatomy was very interesting and gave me even more names to use. I’m going to identify these on the fonts of Frederic Goudy and use them in my presentation. The real task is remembering them all though.

It’s now the second week back and everyone seems to be back in the right mood for working. This week has been an enjoyable week and I’m looking forward to pushing on with my work in self-study.

The second tutorial on Dreamweaver and CSS was really informative and I learnt a lot about CSS, which was something I’d not used before. The part of the lecture on feedback forms helped clear up some doubts I had about the form and I’m going to do some trial feedback forms to make sure I know what to do when I make the one for the website.

After the lecture I started to compress the website images, to an appropriate size and crop them down as on some there seemed to be a lot of empty space round the edge. I then started to create the website and I can’t believe how much I enjoyed it. That afternoon seemed to fly by and I didn’t want to go home when Steve said we could go! The website is coming along well and I’m pleased at how the measurements from the screen design work.

The lecture on Typography was interesting and gave me some official names to put to things; I just hope I can remember them all. There are so many things to be aware of in typography and it must take a long time to become an expert on the subject.

We had the first timed task today, well a practice one anyway and it’s a good job it was only a practice because my performance during the task was terrible, even though I did meet the deadline. This practice task has shown me that I need to take them more seriously, as there was not that sense of pressure, like in the timed tasks for the banner designs. I now know I need to work better on my time planning and get my rough ideas drawn quicker, so I have more time later on. I also need to show Steve my designs earlier on, so I have more time to alter them.

After I go into the swing of the task I really enjoyed it, but there was one part I found hard and that was when I came to choose the typefaces. I’ve never been good at choosing typefaces and seem to stick with basic ones. So this is going to be something I’m going to work on and try and get a broader knowledge of typefaces.

I’m glad with my new seminar group and feel Steve made a good choice putting the groups together. In the seminar group it was highlighted to us that we where neglecting A1 and we have quite a lot to do to get it up to a better state.

It seems so long ago since we broke up for Christmas and I’m glad to be back at College. Monday morning started off quite low with a discussion on A3 and A4 which gave me and I think everyone a bit more apprehension towards receiving our grades.

I’m glad we’re finally getting the website built as I’ve been looking forwards to this over the holidays and I know it’s what everyone else has been waiting for as well. Even though I had a slight idea about using Dreamweaver, I still learnt quite a lot from the introduction to the program Steve gave us.

I actually enjoyed the time we had in the afternoon to play about with the program, that helped secure some worries I had about using the program and now I can’t wait to start the actual website. It should be really enjoyable creating the website, even with the amount of testing we have to do! I think I should have made more use of the time we had to get used to the program and I should have made more notes in my sketchbook to record the time. But leased I know to record everything in the sketchbook now, so I won’t have an excuse anymore.

I think this way of receiving the results seemed to work out a lot better and I think it would be best to do that in the future. I’m really pleased I passed both assignments and I didn’t think that I would have.

Tuesday morning helped clear a few things up about the new assignments and the things required for them. I am looking forwards to the typography tasks, but I’m not sure I’ll be saying that when we get one.

I’m not really looking forward to the presentation but it’s something I have to do and get used to doing. After some research today I realised that it’s going to be hard to find plenty of information for the presentation and I’m going to have to put aside plenty of time to research.

I spent some time today using In Design and I learnt a lot about using the program and even recorded it in my sketchbook! I browsed through the tutorials on the program and I was surprised at how helpful they were and I’d recommend it to you if you’re not feeling confident using the program.

The feedback from Steve was good and bad. It was good because he said I am capable of getting a merit, but bad because I realise how many little stupid mistakes I’d made and not even realised. Like I didn’t use capital letters for a scripting name, which has really annoyed me because I did it right on A2 and it’s something I don’t usually do. I also shortened the name for the Hardware [Internal and External], to just Hardware and I didn’t even realise I’d done it!