What I wanted was a single big cell at the right hand side and then 3 smaller cells towards the left hand side. What I got was a single big cell in the middle, 2 cells on the left hand side and 1 single cell attached to the other side. All was not lost and by 4pm I had it sorted with the rest of the navigation sorted.
The cells had been given sizes to suit the template. This has made the layout the correct size but the screen does not resize the page as it is measured in actual pixels. To change this I will need to put them into percentages so that the design does resize giving it a liquid design opposed to a fixed layout.
Apart from these little mishaps I am really enjoying this assignment as this will be my first website on the internet.
Thursday turned out to be only half a day with the rest of it being self study. Still slightly nervous about the presentation but the research is nearly finished and ideas into the presentation style have been started. We had a lecture on Newspaper layouts and this has given us a clue, I think, to our first assignment task. I'm actually looking forward to this 'task bombing' now as I feel it will be very helpful when we expand to the real world and our clients decide they want things before they are scheduled to be completed. The nerves are gone from this part and I feel i'm ready for anything.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
You Won't Like Me When I'm Cross
To say I was nervous walking up to college would be an understatement. The first concern was to hopefully pass into the second semester and the other was to have passed the Picture This assignment.
The lecture began with a “Without knowing your grades what are your thoughts / feelings of the first semester. I gave the answer “Nervous about getting in to the second semester” and was instantly set at ease when Steve said that I wouldn’t be sat there if I hadn’t made it.
Next was the grades, these weren’t revealed until after break but again I was set at ease when I found I had passed both assignments. To have passed Picture This was good as I had never really used Photoshop to create anything let alone restore an image.
After finding out our results we were given the next assignment, to create the website designed in the A3 Web Plan, and it was a relief to find that the only written work would be the evaluation. So the rest of the day involved 'playing' with Dreamweaver.
I honestly don't know a lot about type faces, next assignment is all about type, so I was pleased to have a presentation on fonts and there 'bits' e.g a cross bar connects the two stems of the letter H. However I never reaised there were so many terms for a letter! Ranging from a cross, the line that cuts a'cross' the f, to terms about the way the font is displayed with ascenders and descenders, baselines and x-height lines.
The next big surprise awaiting us was in the form of the assignment A6 - Return to Type which not only involves a presentation, "panic alarm bells ringing" but there is also a timed assignment.
Personally wanting to achieve a Merit now for an assignment thought that these two assignments would be easy for timeplanning but the final bombshell blew that idea out of the water in seconds. The last part involves a randomly dropped assignment task at any given time to be completed for any given time, so I'm sad to say the nerves are back again.
Friday, January 05, 2007
I'm the Best at What I Do...
Over the holidays I picked up a copy of Photoshop and decided to hunt down some tutorials. Having looked around I found the best to be on http://www.tutorialized.com and here are some of the results. The first was meant to be done with a fairground image but all I had was a Lego Spiderman. This gives me a spacey kind of feel or a fairground feel.
The second is a star field which was used by adding noise to a black canvas and then making the bits glow.
Third image is a planet taken from a flat texture to a glowing planet, I attempted to shadow out the bottom segment of the planet to make it look like the sun is shining from the other side.
The last image I created was text with a glass effect and I think this was one of the better ones that I did.
From starting out at knowing very little about Photoshop I think I have progressed a little and know more about the software and a few of it's capabilities. Hopefully the only way is up from here and I hope to complete some more tutorials as this is the best way to learn software.