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!
Hi Greg
I think that over the holiday period, it is easy to loose grasp of time. It does seam like a long time ago since we were in college; however, I believe that we all ‘hit the ground running’ so to speak.
I also picked up things that I didn’t know both during the lecture and the ‘creative play’ regarding Dreamweaver.
Whilst I have not yet received my formal feedback for A3 and A4, from reading other peoples journals, I am sure that I also have made some ’silly’ mistakes.
I COMPLETELY agree with you about how the grades were delivered this time; it worked much better for sure.
Indesign is a much better application when compared to PageMaker and the much more basic Microsoft Publisher. There is still features that would have nice to take from each of the applications to make just one solution.
Try not to over-think presentations, it really is something that gets much easier with time. Perfect practice makes perfect.
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Thanks
Shaun Bellis
I also agree with what you say about the way results were delivered being better, although I’d much prefer not to have to wait until the afternoon! It causes a lot of apprehension and nervousness!
With reference to what you said about the discussion on Monday morning, like I said on Gary’s blog, I actually thought in the end it was quite a constructive conversation.
Oh and something else… If you’re struggling to find information on your typographer, maybe you could consider focusing your presentation around one or two pieces of work they completed. Maybe focusing on the nuances of each font?
I understand what you mean about the apprehension that builds up, having to wait till the afternoon, but I think it was done because of how the class reacted to the results on A2. Since some people were disappointed it gave the afternoon a very awkward atmosphere and made it very unproductive.
Thanks for the advice on the presentation.
Hi Greg, I agree with Toms idea, of using a full slide to just talk about one peice of the typographers work. it would show that you have been doing specific research and not just an overall roundup.
Yeah, I agree that the way it worked this time when giving the results out was alot better, though personally I didn’t mind the last method. People spoke about their grades as soon as they got back into the class, but it was a softer way for each to learn theres.. making less of a harsh effect on the whole group.
When it comes to the presentation, I’m personally going to try break the whole thing down and each piece of work, so I can fully grasp the subject. Remember what Steve said about really knowing your subject before you go in; that helped me so much in the last presentation, I don’t think I felt that nervous at all.. it all went quite smoothly.
Hi Greg
I also think the way the results was given out was a lot better this time.
Try not to worry about the presentation, it gets better with time. To be perfectly honest everyone gets a little nervous. I think it’s like Shaun said “Practice makes Perfect”, although I kind of disagree in a way because no matter how long you do them for I think they will always be a daunting task. The best way to overcome a bit of the fear is to take slow deep breaths before going in to do the presentation. This helped me last time I went in to do mine.
Indesign is probably better you are right, but for the moment I am going to stick with Page Maker as it’s the first thing that was taught to me and I don’t want to get confused by using a new piece of software.
Remember to use your sketchbook more, I am a bit like you as I didn’t used to put everything in there, stored a lot of it on my computer and printing them all off as taking me a lot of time not to mention then annotations.
Thanks, Martyn
Well done on passing your assignments.
I thourght that the presentation on using the software to make are site really helpped. I know most people already have used this before but it realy helpped to have the time to just go over the software again.