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.

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