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.