Sans Common Sense

Wednesday’s session began with a talk about typography, after an immediate pretend that we were going to do a ten minute presentation. So, with a quick sigh of relief and a nervous laugh out of the way, I was quite pleased with the lecture subject.

It has been a problem of mine in the past using text in my work, I have been a student of illustration and art but never graphics since GCSE and yet my work has always been of a graphic style and so the lecture was a great help.

The lecture covered the basics of typography and broke the different fonts into categories, the most memorable thing, and valuable, was that I learnt that sans meant without, in French, which clears up the problem I had when remembering which serif and sans serif fonts were.

Going ahead from the lecture I will make sure that I consider my fonts more carefully, it was valuable to learn of the research regarding which font is most easily read on screen; sans serif. This is something I can definitely make use of with immediate effect.

Following from the lecture we were given the rest of the day to work on our projects. Steve made a point that he expected us all to have our web content finished by Thursday; I had assumed that I was behind most people on this account but as it turned out I was ahead of quite a few people, having already produced over half of my content.

I gave myself a pat on the back to congratulate myself, this is something I will make a big effort to achieve in future as the feeling that I am ahead of the deadlines is such a relief. I will definitely be trying to maintain my position ahead of the game going on from this point, all I have to do now is pick myself up from the last race where I died on my… posterior.

Later in the afternoon I got chance to have a talk with Diane, this was really useful; I finally understood something that I previously had misinterpreted about screen display 800 x 600, that this is resolution not actual size, another blonde moment.

During the afternoon I got chance to use my peers as a sounding board for my creative ideas, I decided on a garden theme website that I will call grassroots.co.uk which I am quite excited about.

In addition Diane looked through my written work with me and gave me some pointers to improve it. I have to say this was invaluable as I am quite a plain talker and I think this sometimes translates to my written work, when writing I often assume people will know how and why I have gotten to my conclusion or way of thinking, which is not a good way of writing. Diane pointed out some really useful changes that I could make to uplift the work I had already produced.

After talking to Diane I got a good understanding of what I need to do to improve my written work and I am going to make the changes and in the future I plan to use more detail and make note of where I am getting my information from.

Overall it was a very productive day and I left the class full of beans, which I will now use in my garden, grow a beanstalk and put on my website.

Turning A New Page And Burning The Old

Today in class was a bit of a shocker, I sat down and looked up at the board to see the lecture title, and it was a lecture on presentation. Following the theme of the previous weeks I immediately assumed it would be how we present our work. I soon found out that in actual fact we would be learning how to give a successful speech and present our work to an audience.

This seemed to me to be slightly irrelevant at this point in the course as it seemed the purpose was to prepare us for the final part of the course where we will have to present our digital portfolio; however, this isn’t at all how I felt by the end of the day.

After the lecture ended we were then told we were going to be making a presentation today, total shocker, I was not prepared for that one. My thoughts were mainly that I was not ready to stand in front of the whole class and deliver a speech. After the task was elaborated on, we were told we would be given a colour to research and work in pairs to prepare for the task, this was a relief to have some support, I don’t think I could have volunteered to work by myself like Craig did.

I think this was due to the fact that I did not know what was expected, but having now gone through this process I am more confident in my own ability. I hope that in the future with more practice I will not be afraid to do the same.

I was given the colour orange and Ben as a partner, I thought what a better way to highlight we had worn the same outfit today. Clothing issues aside, I was happy to work with Ben as I know he works hard and that we get on.

Working with Ben was very productive; our combined insecurity that we weren’t doing enough work seemed to propel us to produce far too much content. This wasn’t something we realised until it came to rehearsing our presentation. We had to get through the presentation in two – three minutes, my first attempt lasted about 5 minutes and I hadn’t covered all the information we gathered, I thought crikey what a fine mess Ben’s research, and my fancy pants PowerPoint jiggery pokery, has gotten us into.

After much practice and what felt like a history lesson, we had the speech down to a respectable two minutes thirty seconds. This was very relieving; I had felt at a bit of a loss when we first discovered that we’d gone too in depth.

In the future I will now consider the length of the presentation much more, producing ten slides for a three minute presentation is more the double what is required.

I did enjoy making the presentation and using PowerPoint, a programme I have not used before, I do feel I got to grips with the basics of it quite quickly though.

Overall the presentation was a success, and I feel it was a really useful thing to do. I did not expect to have gotten so nervous stood up in front of two people though; as I am know for being quite an attention seeker. This is definitely something I can learn to improve, just by taking deeper breaths during the presentation. The positives were that the content we produced seemed to go down a storm and that nothing was mentioned about my body language, so I’d just like to thank my Mom and Dad and everyone at Interactive Media for being so supportive. I do feel that I could have used the time more effectively working on my project today, so I will now have to take a look at my time plan and move a few things around.

On a different note, it would seem that it is time to turn over a new leaf, after receiving an email about the content of the blogs last week I did feel that some of the points raised could be applicable to my own blog.

After a discussion about the blogs with my feedback group it was touched upon that there is room for improvement. To be honest I was slightly surprised at the time, but looking back at my entries, I can see that I tend not to dwell on one subject for very long with little evaluation. However I am always willing to step up and take criticism on the chin so feel free let me know if this ones up to scratch if you manage to wade through it.

I now intend to use the evaluation system that was given to us in our first project to try and improve my blog. I shall try to delve deep into my psyche, which is about an inch deep and a mile wide, and I hope that I can then produce something of the standard that is expected or even improve on it. If I can do this, then hopefully, it will carry through everything that I do and this can only lead to success.

Wheely Confused

This week we carried on with the theme of design principles. Following last weeks lecture about layout, this week, we looked at colour schemes.

I found this lecture extremely valuable as the wrong colour scheme can make your work look completely amateurish no matter how long you have spent on all the other element of its design.

The way in which we approached the subject was to use the colour wheel, a principle that was deduced by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666 no less. It was quite surprising to learn that a design principle was discovered by someone of the science world.

We were advised that to make good use of colour in our work we should use a principle called ‘Colour Harmony’ the pr-defined colour harmonies or colour schemes we were told about were:

Analogous
Complementary
Split – Complementary
Near Complementary
Triadic ( I thought this was a type of Chinese gangster)
Tetradic
Polychromatic
Monochromatic
Neutral Colours
Discordant

Looking back at my work previous to the lecture I can see much of it falls into the last colour scheme, Polychromatic, which means that the colours have no discernable pattern. I think in the future I will now make sure that I consider the colours I use much more rather than randomly picking some ‘nice’ colours.

In the afternoon we were given the time to work on our projects which is always good news. I got the chance to catch up with the research I hadn’t finished in my personal study time. I had thought we were having a lecture from 11am to 4pm but it turned out I had just misunderstood that this was the position of the warm colours on the colour wheel.

C.R.A.P.

I found this week at college really enlightening regarding how I approach design. We were given a lecture on designing a business card which, at first, seems like a straight forward and simple task.

As I later discovered this was not the case, and there were more things to consider than I had expected.

The lecture was broken down in to smaller sections and the next section wasn’t revealed until the previous was completed, this gave the task an added element of fun, in addition it allowed us to concentrate on the task at hand and not concern ourselves with the end product.

What I learned from this task today is that when given a rectangle in which to produce a design I fill it right up to the edge, which is not necessarily a good thing. What I will concentrate on in future is using negative space as an element of my design. The basic principles we learnt were 1. Contrast 2. Repetition 3. Allignment and 4. Proximity

In the afternoon I used the time we were given to work on our projects to look in the college library and read some books. I am glad that I did this as I came across a book called ‘don’t make me think’ I immediately thought this sounds like my kind of book, and as it turned out, it was.

The book makes some really useful points and basically talks a lot of common sense and although I only got through the first chapter it is a book I plan to finish. I has some really useful tips, and points out in a really simple way the pit falls of designing a website, it really brings home how important usability is.

Dethroned!

I have really enjoyed the time off and having my free time to myself but I do look forward to progressing and learning new skills. I can’t deny this first day back after half term was a total stress.

The day started out with the anxiety of awaiting my mark, I kept reassuring myself I had passed and done well, though I did have a creeping feeling that I had missed something out of my project, which would result in a fail. Anyway after break my worst thoughts were confirmed and I had been given a referral due to lack of referencing my printed resources, for my research, in the written work I submitted.

This wasn't confirmed to me till late afternoon so I managed to work off a few hundred calories that morning stressing myself out. I also bugged a few of my class mates thinking of the possible reasons for why I had a referral over dinner.

Once I found out the reason of my referral I was much happier than before, I was as happy as you can be when you have a referral on your first project, and so I was now all set to get on with the new brief.

I’m really looking forward to this new brief as it’s a much bulkier assignment, but also we are eventually going to be building the website which is a very exciting prospect. The new project is to design a website for people who have little understanding of computer systems etc. which is a great way of expanding our own understanding as we are to create to the content for the site ourselves.

Being one of the lesser technology buffs in the class I feel I am going to benefit from researching these topics, however I think this is going to be a much taller order.

Overall a stressful day.