James Bell | HND Interactive Media | Online Learning Journal Year 2

I'll give you 20k for that banner!

| Tuesday 4 December 2007

The A3 assignment has taken up most of my time this week and now I finally feel like I am nearly finished. I have completed most of the written work and this means that I have only got the web plan to create in PageMaker once I have decided on my final design.

After completing the content I feel like a large weight has been lifted off my shoulders and the finishing line for the assignment is now coming into view. The main task for me this week is to finalise my web plan and make sure that it will be achievable to create the website whilst keeping it under the 50k page size limit that I have stipulated in my project goals.

Although Monday was a very busy day for me and had a lot of work to do it came nowhere near to the amount of work we had to do on Tuesday. To generate a large number of ideas Steve had us create a number of designs in decreasing amounts of time, the shortest being 4 designs in just one minute!

I felt that this followed on very nicely from the task last week and I am really going to try to create the same intensity in the way I work during my self study, well maybe not quite so intense.

After dinner we had to create two banner ads that conformed to IAB standards, one skyscraper and one medium rectangle banner. Below are my banners so feel free to leave and comments that you wish.






I really enjoyed the banner creation task. I have found the challenge of trying to make an appealing and relevant design which contains all the correct information in under 20kb(kilobytes) really interesting. This taks also enabled me to Adobe Photoshop and I feel the more I use it the more confidence I have using is it.

My targets for next week are:

  • To finish the budget statement
  • To finish the assets list
  • To finish my web plan and feedback form
  • To complete any changes to banner
  • To ensure that the spelling, grammar and punctuation is right in all my work
  • To put all work into the PageMaker format ready for next weeks seminar group

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's best to avoid fiddly effects like drop shadow and outline text on the banners.

Actually it's best to avoid fiddly text effects period.

Tom Smith said...

I think the 'T' on Tina starts a bit too close to her head! It's also quite hard to read the outline text at times... maybe reconsider the typeface used.

Other than that I like the banners, and I quite like the addition of colour solely to the sax.

Tom Smith said...

Oh and thanks for the link to the IAB standards!

Greg Carrick said...

I have to agree with Tom the text is a bit too close to her head and her name is quite close to the edge.

You have put “February 8th September” for the date! Don’t know if you’ve noticed.

I do like the designs though.

Victoria Fisher said...

It’s good to hear you enjoyed the task and you can see that in you designs as they are really good. I like how you have added colour to the Don Wella banner, the colours and the text you have used are what I would associate with Jazz. It makes it clearer to people who don’t know who Don Wella is, that he makes Jazz music. For your second design I liked the title, it stands out and it’s easy to read, but the other text I found kind of hard to read, you might be better with a simpler text style.

Michelle Bonfield said...

I agree with the feedback on the text.

Banner 1; If you're set on keeping the typeface for the first banner I'd just use it for her name. Then find a simple, solid, sans serif for the rest of the information. Equally I think you need to have a little more space between the image and text. A smaller point size will easily achieve this.

Banner 2; Again increase spacing between the different sets of information, to increase the law of proximity.

I think the typeface needs a re-think, and as the banners are meant to be a pair maybe have it the same for both?

I understand you're thinking behind the colour and its been done well. However, it dominates the image and draws your eye away from the figure. Possibly tone it down or just focus on the sax. This will put emphasis on the figure and the jazz theme.

Rebecca Bradley said...

I am glad you liked the task, I did to.

I really like your designs I think that where you have added colour to the image is really good.

Well done.

Anonymous said...

Comment deadline.