Greg Carrick – HND Interactive Media

This reading week has been quite enjoyable and I don’t know if I should be ashamed to say this but I have grown to like the music by 302 Acid. It’s defiantly not my taste in music but I could stand it and have listened to it many times over the week. But I have to say I’ll never listen to it through my own free will, even though it is quite relaxing.

I collected loads of logos from large companies and what was surprising, is the fact that I found it hard to think of the names of some large companies. But once I started getting some I found loads and ended up having to stop myself from getting more and filling an entire sketchbook up with them. I have noticed that may larger companies have quite simple logos and this makes it easier for us to remember them. A few examples of the logos are below:

I found it hard to create the mind maps for what the music suggested to me and ended up sitting and listening to the music for a while to try and put it into words. After a while I finally realised what I thought about it and made several mind maps.

The hardest part of Monday was to write the review about the album. Firstly I was not sure how to write a review on an album and after it took so long to create the mind maps, I knew it was going to be even harder to do this. So I set out and did some research into album reviews, just to get the idea how there written. After I had a better idea about that, came the hard part, writing it. It took me quite awhile to write the review but I eventually got it done.

When I read what we had to do for Tuesday’s reading week task, I panicked slightly as I had never done a ‘mood board’ before and didn’t think I would be able to make one never mind more. Well after a while I enjoyed finding things to put on them and then creating them and I ended up making three of them.

Below are the three mood boards I created for the music:

When I was collecting logos for record companies, I was surprised at how many different companies (especially those specialising in ambient music) there are. I never realised how large the ambient music genre is.

Even Calls (0005) is the first album from the Washington D.C. group 302 Acid. Currently signed to the Ambient music label Em:t Records, the band consist of Doug Kallmeyer (samples, bass), Justin Mader (samples, projections) and Andrew Reichel (electronics).

The album uses a vast verity of different sounds including clicks, beeps and squeaks to give the necessary effects to each track. This is on top of the bass, drums and the song melody, which makes 302 Acid’s work sound like it is been played by people, opposed to other music from the ambient genre.

With Even Calls, 302 Acid have show they are able to explore the boundaries of music and create an album that is capable of drawing you in and keeping your complete concentration throughout. The album feels as though it takes you through a journey with the tracks flowing together seamlessly, it’s as though the album is just one continuous track and in my opinion that’s exactly how it should be played, from start to finish with no interruptions.

Even Calls is a must have album to those who love to relax, with a bit of music in the background since it’s an easy album to listen to repetitively, just hit the repeat all button and get lost in the music. The bonus about the album is that it’s flexible enough to be used as background music, but needs to be played very quietly otherwise you’ll get draw into it!

A6 – Revert to Type has been a really enjoyable assignment and I feel that I have performed to a reasonable standard. I don’t feel that I performed very well during the start of the assignment but have made a steady improvement over the course of the timed tasks. I have improved more on my time planning during the timed tasks and this has helped me to complete the tasks with time to spare and made me realise at what pace I work at.

I am now stricter with myself in the time planning during the timed tasks and once I have reached my set time, for the task I’m working on, I will move onto the next task so I don’t jeopardise finishing on time. This of course is if I am able to do so and if I’m not, I’ll rework my time planning so I am not running out of time near the end. This is not usually the case as I have now got into a habit of checking the time regularly, which makes me work faster when I realise how much time I have left.

The main thing that is letting me down is my ability to pressurise myself into working at a fast pace and just drawing plenty of different ideas down, instead of sitting and thinking about them, which wastes time. This is something I really need to work on as I have seen the advantages it has, during the banner designs in A4 – Image Rights and I feel it will help in the next assignment.

I believe I have not pushed myself enough to get the presentation completed early on, which has not left me with sufficient time to practice it. This meant that I did not feel confident when presenting it, since I did not fully remember my script. I feel very annoyed with myself for doing that as it’s something I’ve always said never to do, especially after I did it somewhat on the first assignment (A2 – That’s the Plan).

I found the presentation quite hard to create both in the design side and the information it contained. With the design side of the presentation I just wanted to have a simple design as a presentation is there to get the information across and I did not want to have the presentation too distracting. But I’ve said that and for some reason I think my presentation was too plain and needed some common feature throughout it, to make it more attractive.

I found the presentations content hard to write because I did not know what to talk about and could not find much information about the typographers work. I had this problem because I did not plan what the presentation would contain before I started it, so I ended up thinking of what to include as I was going along. This is also something I am annoyed at myself about because it was not a sensible thing to do and I really felt the repercussion that occurred from it.

I enjoyed the timed tasks and feel I improved on them every time I did one. I was not pleased with my design for the Hokai paint tube as I feel I did not choose the right design to use, out of the ones I came up with. This would not have happened if I had got feedback on the design before I had desktop published it and I now know how helpful it is getting feedback and how much the design improves after some feedback.

I feel more satisfied with my design for the Vodafone advertisement and saw a gradual improvement in the design before the final one. This is because of the adequate feedback I received on the designs and the improvement in my time planning that lead me to, having enough time to apply the changes and improve the design. For this design I thought more about the font I used and though it’s not an exotic font, I feel it’s suitable for an advertisement and is a better choice than my usual basic fonts.

I was also pleased with the final outcome of the Jonathan Gee article and like the Vodafone advertisement I saw a gradual improvement in the design after requiring feedback. I think I chose a suitable font for the type of document and am pleased that this design turned out the way it did as there were some issues with alignment and size that cast a doubt on whether the design would work. Now I look back at it I wish I had used more newspaper devices in it, to give it some personality as I only really used the drop cap.

I did not perform very well on the Grid timed task and was not overly pleased with the final design for the header and footer. I feel I choose the best number of columns for the article using three, but choosing and measuring this out used a lot of the time I’d set aside for the designs. This meant I did not spend as long on the header and footer and ended up settling with a basic design.

The final Story timed task did not go too well either but there were some aspects of it that I quite like. I used a few newspaper devices but did not estimate the text size correctly. I went for an 11pt size but when I printed it out it look quite large and I did not have enough time left to change the size and add more newspaper devices to get the text to align properly.

I ended up dropping the Hokai paint tube design because I feel this was the most poorly designed out of the timed tasks.

If I were to do the assignment again I would make sure I practiced the presentation more because I was not full confident about what to say for each slide. I had thought about it and wrote a script but I had not fully memorized it. I would have also made sure I revised the lectures and did more research into the topics; this would have helped a lot more in the timed tasks as I would have known more devices to add to the design.

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