Tuesday morning began with a visit to the Design Mechanics. After attending the last meeting with Dave Pannell I had a basic understanding of how the company worked and I was really interested to how see it in practice. I also wanted to hear the views of the designers who work there and see what they thought of the way the company worked.

The overall impression that gained was that they felt it was a great way to gain experience straight after leaving a university or college course and which makes for a great stepping stone for the future.

The volume of work creating in such a short time means that it is a great place to help build a portfolio that displays successful corporate design in both print and web design. The process of not meeting the client seemed to be a good idea for most of the work but I think this depends on the client and the quality of the feedback that they are willing to give using the feedback forms.

A5 has gone well this week and I have managed to finish the first version of the website. I have really enjoyed the task of authoring the website especially this week as we were allowed to spend the entire day working on our websites. This allowed me focus and get into a working mindset which enabled me to work faster and more efficiently.

Now that the first version is done I am focusing on the usability testing and the design of the feedback form that I will be handing out on the day. This is something I have never done with previous websites that I have built I think that I will gain a lot from it, which I can take into consideration in my future work.

After the visit to the Design Mechanics, Steve gave us a lecture on type explaining some professional names given to the different part of the characters that make up a typeface e.g. baseline, arm, stroke, counter etc...

I am going to take this information and try and break down some of the more famous typefaces designed by Erik Spiekermann using the information from the lecture and include this in my presentation.

Typography has the focal point of today and this is something I have really enjoyed learning about. With the A6 assignment I have been able to take the time and the study the fonts of Erik Spiekermann, as this is the typographer I will be presenting about, and look at the level of skill that is required to create a typeface.

After reading interviews he has done and reading his blog you can see that typography is his passion and it is almost an obsession.

“I read everything, everywhere. I cannot order a meal unless I have identified the font on the menu – drives everybody crazy – and I constantly comment on highway signs, traffic signs and transit signs.” Erik Spiekermann, Design Within Reach

The A5 assignment brings a completely different challenge especially when it comes to testing the website in multiple browsers. Using Dreamweaver and the layout tables can also cause problems in it's self especially as I haven't used them for a few years.

With the problems of tables I am constantly wanting to layout the website using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Hopefully the next website I create in college will be using CSS for both the layout and the formatting of text. With the use of CSS you have much more control but this can ultimately cause more problems in terms of cross browser support and validation.

In seminar groups today we talked about the A1 assignment and this is something I need to work on and really think about how all aspects of my work are related to this assignment. I think that due to the fact that the assignment is on going through the entire course I have always given A2, A3 and A4 preference over it and this is something I cannot afford to do.

My targets for next week are:

• Create draft version of presentation ready for seminar groups
• Complete website template in Dreamweaver (Ensuring spellings are correct, valid CSS and XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) 1.0 Strict)
  
• Start creating pages of website using template
• Collect more examples of inspirational artwork
• Review the A1 assignment in more detail and how it applies to my work

A new semester and two new assignments.

This will be the first time, on this course, that I will be authoring a web site and it is something I am really looking forward to. In the past I have spent a large amount of time in Dreamweaver or notepad creating the website and at times changing the whole design.

With this assignment, and the web plan from the previous assignment, I hope that I will be able to be a lot more precise with both my measurements and my code as I will have a lot more time to test and modify the website.

At times on the course it has been motioned that in the first few months that there is a lack of practical tasks such as; web design, but now I am starting to realise the important of things like web plans and how they are a skill that needs to learnt and improved upon.

The A6 assignment is very different and again I feel that this is very useful much like it was with A3 and A4. I feel that A6 will allow me to dramatically improve my DTP (Desktop Publishing) skills, e.g. InDesign. I also think that the fact that the presentation is an assessable part of the assignment the feedback will be a lot more detailed and allow me to greatly improve my presentation skills.

For A6 I have been given the famous German typographer 'Erik Spiekermann' to talk about and I have spent most of the day researching him and his work. I have found this very interesting but I know that I have to continue my research and gain a much larger knowledge of his work before I am any where near thinking about starting to create my presentation.

Gaining Merits in both A3 and A4 I know hope that I can continue this with future assignments and hopefully progress to gain a distinction in one of the future assignments.