A week till the hand in date!

Today we did another timed task, for this one we had to design a newspaper design for a Jazz artist. I wasn’t happy with the final design I produced. Near the end of the time I looked at the design and thought it looked basic so I try to add some things to make it look better but I still aren’t happy with it. I handed the design in 5 minutes before the end so I was pushing it a bit this week. Improvements I could do next time are stick to my time plan, I used more designing time then I planned to use.

After dinner today we had seminar meetings, we went over what should be handed in next Tuesday. It was good to go thought what is needed so it’s fresh in my head. We were also given an idea of what we will be doing in the reading week, I am not sure what to expect. It sounds like we are going to be given some strange music to listen to and ask to make designs for it.

A5 work isn’t as good as I wanted it to, at the moment I am a bit lost with it. So tomorrow I am going to work on my A5 and hopefully get the web site done, so I can continue with the testing and start thinking about the evaluation. For the web site so far I have created all the pages and I have the feedback form nearly finished I just need to validate it and link up the e-mail button. I have tried linking the e-mail button, but I haven’t been able to do it yet, I am going to keep having a look tutorials, till I get the button to work.

For my self study last week I work a lot on my presentation work, I have cut down the amount of information per slide, made the text larger so it’s easier to see and used more slide so the information is more spread out. I have had more images to the presentation as I thought too much text could make it boring, the images are examples of Roger Excoffon’s typefaces and an image of Roger Excoffon. I have also added to my handout, I have added typeface examples and web site addresses that have information about Roger Excoffon and his typefaces. When I did the presentation last week I had my speech wrote down on little pieces of paper, so this week I have typed up my speech and have printed it out in A5 size, so I have less pieces of paper when I am doing the presentation and I can update my speech a lot faster and easier.

Finished my image restoration

Over the holidays have been doing a lot of course work, mainly working on my image restoration work. My referral work was due in on Monday so I had to get all my A4 work to get done in the holidays. For the image restoration I have to remove the fold line and do the corners of the image. I had a few problems doing the image because at first I couldn’t see any improve and that made me stress that I wasn’t going to get it finished in time. So it took me quiet a few attempts till I was happy with the image. I can see a difference between the image I did before and my new image, the image is been more sharpened, as more contrast and the fold isn’t as visual as before. I am glad I have got my referral work out of the way so I focus on my other two assignments now.

On Monday morning we did the usability testing. Before I did it I thought that I wouldn’t like doing the testing, because I wouldn’t know what to say about people web site. Give feedback was easier that I thought all the web sites were good and there were only little errors that I notice. The feedback I received was very useful, a lot the same things got mentioned. Including homepage needs more link to, the logo was already a link to the homepage but I am also going to add other link. People also commented on that not all the terms had pictures, so I am going to get pictures for all the terms. There are other things I need to improve but the two above were the main things that were mentioned.

Using the feedback I got on morning I did a few improvements to my a5 website. I made the size of the page smaller, before the width was 900px now it is 750px. This make the website look better as the text isn’t has spaced out, so there is thicker text blocks which makes it easier to align the images with text. For this weeks self study I am going to try and get all the improvements done before next week, so I can get more feedback. The website will be uploaded again this week, feedback on improves would be nice. Click here to view the site.

Today we had a presentation on newspapers design terms and then we did a timed task. The task was to create an advert for Vodafone, advertising a designer’s job. I enjoyed doing the task and I even finished 20 minutes early this gave me plenty of time to check my work and get feedback. Last time I did a time task I think I used too much time for designing so this time I just used 10 minutes for some thumbnail design, 10 minutes for the 3 final designs and 10 minutes for my final design. I got feedback on my designs all the way thought the stages of designing the advert. Which made me fell more confident about my work because I wasn’t having to worry if my designs were ok or not.

This afternoon in our seminar groups we practice our presentations. I did my presentation in CS3 In Design, and I forgot to change the file format so I could open it at college in CS2. So I had to use an older version of my presentation, so my presentation didn’t go as good I wish could have. Hopefully next week we can have another practice and I will a lot better. This week I am doing work a bit more on the presentation then I am going to do a lot practice, so I can get better at the presentation.

Image restoration progress

For self study last week I started doing my referral work for A6. The main thing I need to do for the assignment is the image restoration. So last week I was shown the first stage of what I needed to do to improve restoring the image. Last week all I did was take the blemishes out, It took me nearly 3 hours to take them all out, but I do think the image looks better at this stage then it did last time. Using the guides made it easy to break the image into stages, so I didn’t feel I had loads to do. I also sharpened the images more than last time which made more blemishes come out but it make the image looks better and you can see more details. This week I am going to have a go at doing the main scratch and the corners. I was going to do the top corner last week but I didn’t estimate to spend as long as I did taking out the blemishes.

On Monday I did a lot of work on the back to basic web sites. I have got all the pages made but I am just not happy with how they all look at the moment and I had a few problems while creating the site, but now I have discussed them with Steve I know how to revolve them. One of the things I didn’t understand about was the template, I used the template to start the pages but I thought I might be able to update the template which would update the rest of the pages, but it didn’t. The thing that looked bad on the web pages was the massive spaces between the texts, and if I didn’t have a space between the body text and the title, the paragraph would have to be the same font style when I wanted the title bold and the rest of the text not to be.

Today at 9 o clock we had a timed task, I did enjoy the task but the only thing that I messed up with I lost a lot of time because I couldn’t get the page size to the correct size, but in the end it was because the margins wasn’t set at 0. So I added all the information I had to use, laid out the design, spell checked and handed it all in on time, but if I had not had the problem I had, had I could have got feedback on the design and improved it. Hopefully next time I will not have a problem and get my work done a little quicker so I am not rusting at the end and get some feedback.