Friday, September 29, 2006

Finally I get to draw...

As you can probably guess from the title this week I got to draw.

We started of Wednesday learning PageMaker, which I have to say is not easy, but as we need to use it for assignments I guess it's true what they say 'Practice Makes Perfect'.

Following Steve's clear instructions I managed to amaze myself and get the first exercise right. It felt good to be able to take 1 picture, 1 block of text, a header and a sub header and turn it into something that looked appealing. After being let loose, I found it to be more difiicult laying out the content, but I do know when a design is wrong.

Wednesday night came and, sat alone at home with nothing to do, I decided to grab a pencil and start the final [none digital] screen designs. After about 10-15 minutes I found myself designing what could be a well thought out website and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I guess anything beats report writing.

Friday came and again we had another visit from Helen Rivron, this week showing us the best ways to take notes. I have to admit that some of what Helen said made sense, and it showed me that i'm not the best at note taking. If anything I've learnt that I need a structure to my notes incase I need to turn back to them in the future. With nearly all the assignment done I feel that i'm totally in control of this assignment, something which I've never really felt before.

Too much description, not enough reflection.

I've never 'Blogged' before so I was not really sure what to write, and what I did write was too descriptive and looking at past Blogs from the HND Interactive Media Website was not a good idea. I can see that so here's attempt number two.

This week topics had been added to the group discussions, topics which were part of the assignment and which needed to be brought to the groups the next day. As most people were running around trying to complete three things at once I was happy knowing that I had already completed most apart from Time Planning. Seems ironic that I have finished the things I needed to on time. The concept of time planning isn't fairly new but I'm not really one to plan things before I do it, but it does appear that something must be working. I felt a weight lift off of my shoulders though noticing what I'd done had matched what needed to be done. In previous courses deadlines have been my enemy but in this course I intend to fight them!

Friday came and so did a lady called Helen to teach us how to research properly, at the time it seemed a bit unnecessary, but thinking back, it has helped and next weeks lecture on referencing will be helpful too.

Week 1

I received my first assignments for the course this week to plan a website. A lot of research involved but today I managed to choose a person to design it on and find at least two competitive sites to compare to.

Goals for the site have been done but was a bit unsure as to what actual goals were. One correct goal was to "Create a website with a page size smaller than 40k". This can be measured but other goals like "Create an informative, educational website" couldn't be as I can't evaluate the goal because there wouldn't be a function to measure if the goal was met or not. However I managed to get 4 goals which are both achievable and measurable.

The final thing I managed to look at was target audiences. As this is going to be an informative site it will generally be viewed by students, but a few minutes research showed that not only students would look at it.

Work for next week is to complete the target audience section and start to research into the many different technologies involved in creating and maintaining a website.

Where have I come from?

When I left school I started the AVCE ICT 12 Unit course at Selby College covering units like Web Development. In this course I discovered software such as Dreamweaver and Flash. This is when I found Web Development to be a keen interest so when this course finished I looked into courses doing Multimedia and Web Develpoment. A lecturer showed me the Foundation Degree in E-business and I wanted to do the course straight away so I enrolled and, in the end, completed the course.

From the AVCE ICT course I have practised using the software Flash and Dreamweaver, and as of lately Photoshop. As I have done this my interest in the programs has grown and have found that this is definitely the career I would like to go into.

Whilst doing the Foundation Degree I was, and still am, working in a retail shop, and 5-6 months ago I was given the job of acting supervisor and started working full time. Recently, due to the stress of the job, I have been feeling that this is not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life so I decided to do something about this and looked for a course in Web Development and Multimedia. This is when I came across the HND Interactive Media course.

Where am I now?

I am currently still doing shop work but have cut down my hours to 3 days a week which will let me focus more on the course and what I really want to do in the future. Now that I am on a course which I have a greater interest in I feel that I can progress and achieve my goals. Being on this course I hope I can further my knowledge of the software programs used on this course.

Where am I going?

For the future I would like to be the best of the best in Digital Media. I would like to see myself gain a job in the Interactive Media area, mainly in a small business to start with, and then advance to freelance when I have a bigger client base behind me with repeat work. This however will not come easily, so in order to get there I am going to work hard and to produce work to the best of my ability, learning as much about the software used as possible.