A Lion, A Witch & A Powder Blue Samurai

I'll start with Thursday and it appears that I have my wires crossed with what a 'Task Bomb' is. Thursday was actually a really good and productive day. The first 'Bomb' was 20 minutes long and we had to replicate a page design, using page elements about the Jazz player Jonathan Gee. I was pleased to finish this on time but then it turned out that this was just a test, and the real one was issued straight after. Using the same elements we had to construct the page again but we had to design it ourselves.

In the afternoon I was hoping to be doing more presentation work but we were hit by another 'Bomb'. We were to create a label for an Oriental paint tube which I really enjoyed and it allowed me to get creative although a bit limited as it was only a typographical solution but seeing the size I don't think that much coyuld have been done. I selected the rather oriental powder blue colour and wanted to end with a label like this but apparently the colour would bleed.

Back to wednesday now and a rather long day it was as I live light years away from college I have to be up at 5:45am and get to wakefield at 8:00am but yesterday we went to London for the day to go to the Tate Modern museum. Unfortunately all we got to see was a few slides, as in theones you slide down. It was a bit of let down but it didn't stop us having a good time sponging in all of the art around us ending up in a brightly lit famous square having photos taken with the local wildlife to which I fell off and hurt my ankle, twice.

Whats that about learning from your mistakes?? They day wasn't lost though for if anything the group managed to gel together even more and I had a really good time.

Chris Smash Puny Dreamweaver!!

Well I thought that I was good at coding in HTML but it appears that Dreamweaver had other plans. Tables and cells I thought were the easiest things to code except when they get over complicated, with rows and columns and tags that include colspan="2" & rowspan="2" in the tags.

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.

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.

I'm the Best at What I Do...

... well i'm practising at least.

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.

'The Calm After the Storm'

Deadline day was similar to the last with a few less headless chickens running around frantically trying to tie up the loose ends. I felt a sense of 'freedom' after the assignment was handed in and am now fully in the Christmas spirit, happily singing Christmas songs at work ad finally opening up a few neglected advent calendar doors, left shut through terror of the deadline date looming ever closer!

The first semester has passed so fast but I have learnt more from this course in the first few months than I have in the full duration of any other course I have done.

SketchBlog
The first major assignment given, I have never really had to record my thoughts and feelings in a Blog before, in all honesty never having used one either, but this process is something I look forward to now as it is a great help when writing evaluations, looking back etc. The Sketchbook, another new element to the course, is again something I have never used but mine is hopefully getting better with a few pieces of inspirations (and not one comic in sight).

That's The Plan
The first submittable assignment, this was a good break-in gently' assignment although it wasn't all plain sailing. The first thing that made more or less everyone cringe was that dreaded set of initials P + M, otherwise known as PageMaker! With the template PageMaker seemed easy to use and to get used to but the screen designs were a new and sometimes painstakingly impossible to get measurements right. I think the thing I made an advantage on was the master page putting all the same elements on this page so I didn't need to redo them.

Back To BASIC
Another website plan but this time we were promised that we could make the website, first feelings were 'oh god not another web plan' but this is practice into making a web plan which is necessary to making a website. The screen designs were easier to do this time and I found it easier to do the measurements this time. I even managed to educate myself with some of the content for the site. The thing that stalled me a bit was finding the website images, this will need to be thoroughly investigated before I continue next time.

Picture This
The assignment I had been looking forward to as I finally got to play in Photoshop, looking back I could have done things better but people have to start somewhere don't they? I did not like the image restoration task and if I ever see three old men on a bench with a cup I may turn slightly mad... However much I liked / disliked this assignment it was very good practice and it was fun to complete and let me be creative and I think this has re-ignited a creative element to my life.

Overall the semester has gone fast but with fun and a lot of new friends to which I say Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year, and I am looking forward to going back in the new year to a fresh start with time planning!

'Things are Starting to Heat Up'

As assignment day is looming ever so near, I thought I had managed to get everything sorted and to submissiom standard. However the road to success is never a straight flat road as I have found out.

After the feedback meeting on Thursday this did nothing but throw up a few errors in my work and missing pieces. This felt annoying at first and made me panic again... but it has to be said that I will do a better assignment afterwards. I did think that the major part of the assignment was completed and to be honest it still is but there is still a little thought nagging at the back of my mind that it might not get finished in time.

The first hurdle to face is the fact that a website used to retrieve images has said that their images are the property of the creator and cannot by copied. This means that I have to search for the remaining images that were found on said website.

The second is the Back to BASIC assignment, this needs some tweaking although all the references are in place and so are the figures [image figs]. The only thing that needs to be done is the Budget Statement and now a table on the website hosts displaying which will be the best to use.

On the A4 assignment front all that is needed now is to print the colour images out and finish the image restoration exercise. I didn't think that I would complete the two essays as good as I have as I didn't really know what to write in the assignment and this is why I think they were left until the last minute.

The final exercise is to complete the two evaluations but with all the problems I think that I will have enough to write.

'Every Superhero Needs a Sidekick'

On Wednesday I was greeted with 'a new best friend', in the form of a Spongebob Toy. I managed to get my screen designs started and nearly completed, but another bomb was dropped when I discovered that images count as content.

I quite enjoyed Thursdays lesson as we started with a quick fire 'art attack' kind of session. We were asked to draw 6 wide skyscraper layouts and 6 medium rectangle shaped banner ads in our sketchbooks. We were given 2 minutes to draw 6 rough designs for the banner ad assignment, per photograph. I found this daunting at first but found it really exciting to do and, in the end, discovered I had completed the bulk of this last assignment task.

I feel my artistic qualities could be better but that is something I'm wanting to work on. The final designs that I came up with were interesting but a little hard to explain on paper. I have shown an image below to try and show what the effect I was after was in the form of a single sleeve from U2.

This is not so much meant by the background image but I do like the text as some letters are capitalised and some are lower case. This also shows a form of contrast in the different case of letters and colours. I also like the lines behind but I have to be wary with the file sizes. This image may even find its way into my sketch book.

Last but certainly not least is the fact that assignment hand in date is looming ever so closer. Feelings of panic are starting to set in and I can see the weekend being taken up with a lot of work, as self study hasn't been efficiently used the 16 hours and it is starting to show the effects of this. This is my own fault and I know that so tonight on the train home will envolve a little 'list making' exercise to see what needs doing and then organising it into a routine to stick to.

I can see this list getting quite long but not as long as my Christmas list, hopefully! I have an extra day off this week so that gives me another day to do some work.