During this semester of the course I feel that I have already gained a large amount of knowledge about the design industry and what it would be like to work for a professional design agency. I believe that this will be invaluable to me after the course when I am looking to go into employment within the design sector.

In previous forms of education I have often felt that I was, at times, going through the motions and completing work not for my personal benefit but just to meet certain objectives of an assignment. However this not been the case on this course as I feel that each task is being done for a specific reason and they will all help with my progress on the course and in the future.

As this course is of a higher level, in terms of the amount of detail and work required to be completed, I felt that this step up would be major challenge and it has been. Although I passed my first assignment I did make a number of mistakes and this is something I hope to have rectified with the A3 and A4 assignments. The largest step up I have felt is the level of research and detail that is required for the assignments. The amount of research required for the assignments is something that has really taken me by surprised and it is something that can often take up most of the time for the assignment.

As well as undertaking research, for the assignment, I am starting to appreciated that the more research I do about the information in the lectures, that Steve gives us, the better prepared I will be for the assignment work. Also this research can be used as evidence for the assignment if I record it in my sketchbook. The sketchbook has, over the course of the first semester, become essential and this is something that I would have never imagined at the start of the course. Everything from the notes from the lectures to inspirational work is in the sketchbooks and at times I would feel lost without.

Another use of the sketchbook has been collecting feedback on work and documenting it. This is something that has proved to extremely useful as the more opinions and viewpoint I can gain about my work ultimately the better it will be. Blogger has also been an essential tool not just for gaining feedback but it allows me to check on my own progression throughout the course and it is something I will be able to look back on in the future.

Short term
My short terms goals for the next semester are that I want to pass all the assignments and hopefully gain a merit in one of them. I also want to improve my web authoring skills and my design skills in general.

Mid-term
By the end of the course I want to have passed all the assignments and feel confident in the fact that I have given the course my full commitment. I want make the most of the opportunities that are given to me such as; going to design studies, working for real clients as this help me to become more employable as I will have that vital ‘experience’ of working for a client.

Long-term
With regards to my long term goals I want to gain employment for a web design agency creating website but also with some graphic design elements. This is because I feel that ultimately I would gain a large amount of skills in a much shorter time and I would also gain more experience in employment compared to further education.

The week before deadline and I am feeling that I have got 95% of the A3 assignment complete. I have completed the all of the written work and I have only got to check for spellings, grammar etc... The A4 assignment is also almost complete, with only the banners to finish, so any feedback on my banners above will really help.

I have found the development of ideas for the banners proven to be very useful and it has shown me all the little details that can be altered and how they can have a major impact on the entire look of the design.

This week has been 'a get on with it' week and it has helped me to finish my written work and helped me to be more relaxed for the hand-in next week. With the hand-in next week I have almost got my web plan finished so I will be posting them tonight.

My targets for next week are:

• Complete banners
• Complete screen designs
• Collect all images together and place them in the assignment template
  
• Add all references into assignment template and align them to the assignment work
• Add image restoration to Pagemaker template and add border
  
• Arrange all work into the folders in preparation for the work
• Print assignments off and sign them
• Hand the assignment in!!
  

Thanks for all the feedback that has been left regarding the banners and the screen designs. I have made changes to both and will be posting the new screen designs soon. Meanwhile here are the new banners.



Again any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

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
  

Below are 5 screen designs I have created for the A3 web plan. I would really appreciate any feedback. Please tell me what you think and vote using the poll*.

Thanks

*voting lines close on 5th December and votes placed after that will not be counted but you may still be charged

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5. 

The image restoration task has occupied most of time this week and what started as fun and interesting task and now become a little frustrating. I am still interested in the task and I feel that the Photoshop experience is essential and something that help me a great deal.

After receiving feedback on the task I now know what I need to do to and hopefully I will have it finished during my self study time.

This week I have to pay a large amount of focus on the A3 assignment as I have been neglecting it unintentionally due to the more creative A4 task. This week I need to create my screen designs for the web plan and I will be posting them on my blog soon so any feedback would be appreciated.

Steve provided us with the task this week of designing and creating a business card in a very short space of time. The first time I did this on Monday I had a few mistakes which could have
been easily prevented as they were simple things such as typos.

The PARC (Proximity, Alignment, Repetition and Contrast) lecture that followed was very useful and it will be something that I will be investigating further into as I feel that they will be essential in my future designs.

On Tuesday we all had another go at the business card task and this time I took more time and a lot more detail in the information from the brief. This meant that I didn't make any typos and I felt that I made a much better job of the design.

I found it very interesting to see how much work could be done in 30 minutes and this is something I hope to be able to take through to my self study time and I hope this allow me work more efficiently.

My targets for next week are:

• To complete content for the A3 assignment
• Complete image restoration task
• Gather copyright permissions for the images I will use in the A3 assignment
• Add this information to assets list
• Complete budget statement
• Develop screen designs and start create them in PageMaker
  

With two assignments on the go at the same time it makes each of the two days at college at completely different experience. Monday is currently the more paper based analytical work for the web plan and the Tuesday is more creative with the image restoration task.

The image restoration task is something that I think everyone is enjoying and it is finally allowing everyone be more creative and actually use Adobe Photoshop. I also think that this task is helping me to understand the level of detail that is required in design more than any other task I have done.

This was also coupled with the lecture that Steve gave to use about the bitmap and vector image format and the fact there is over 5,000 pixels in a 72dpi(Dots per Inch) 1inch by 1inch square image. This has really helped me during the image restoration task as I have to zoom in really to close to match the colours of the pixels to restore the image.

I have some basic experience with Photoshop but I have never tried anything like image restoration before. This has really helped understanding colours more, especially when it comes down to creating the skin colour for the people in the image.

Typography was also one of the lectures this week and before this I never knew how much there was to learn about the typefaces we use everyday. After this lecture I am looking forward to the assignment on typography after the christmas break as this will enable me to research all the different aspects of typography.

During feedback groups Steve motioned the possibility of doing one of the assignments over the summer holidays as this would relieve some of the pressure for the 2nd year as we would have already completed one of the assignments.

I felt this was a good idea as good idea as it would allow time to finish any referral work from the 2nd year assignments and also we would have one less assignments to do in the 2nd year. It would be very interesting to hear everyone opinion about this, especially the 2nd years as I believe you did this last year.

My targets for next week is:

• Amend target audience profile, delivery requirements, technologies and competitive analysis for A3 assignment
• Complete first attempt at the image restoration task ready for feedback
• Collect images for the computer terms in the A3 assignment
• Start writing content website plan