Reading Week Tasks

The tasks I was given has all been enjoyable, apart from having to listen to the music. The music isn’t what I usually listen to and I don’t really see the point in the kind of music I was given, in some parts of the music it as some kind of creepy sounds. So having to write a review on music I didn’t actually like was hard. At first I didn’t know what this certain type of music was called, but once I had researched for a bit I found out the music type was called ambient.

I had to listen to the music a couple of times before I could start the mind maps because I didn’t know what to write. Even though I did the mind maps yesterday I went over them again today and added a few extra points so it made it easier to collect things for the mood boards. I have liked making the mood boards, first I choose a colour scheme then I chose the images and fonts to suit the music. I have done mood boards for some songs, the record company and the overall the album I was asked to listen to.

Here is some mood board examples which I have used (It’s for the first song on the album)

Colour Scheme

Image

Font

The thing I have most enjoyed this reading week is collecting the logos, once I had started collecting them I couldn’t stop I ended up collecting 50 and I could have carried on collecting more of them. I tried to get a wide range of logos, so I covered a lot of different company types, from car manufactures to children programmes. It was harder collecting the record labels logos as I had to find the right record label to suit the album I was given and then a lot of the record label didn’t have logos on the internet that I was able to find. I collected just under 30 logos and they all look very different, some I like, some are not that good and some are processional looking. Most of the logos I collected all had the name of the company as the logo but some just had images which I thought doesn’t make you link the logo with it company easily.

Gel- sol - 1140 Review

First view of the album cover it looked like water going over autumn leaves, which gave the expression this album, would be relaxing nature music. Once the CD had been put in to the CD player and I started listening the first song my original idea of what of the album was going to be like disappeared.

The first song (Assemblage point) starts off silent making you think that the CD isn’t working then the music is faded in creating a relaxing start to the song. The name of the song gives you an idea of what the song is going to me about, Assemblage meaning collecting. The song is a collection of sound brought together to create comforting symphony. The song is a great start to a wonderful album.

The music on this album can be described as caress and confusing, it relaxes and calms you but at the same makes you think about the music. Bursts of different sounds and voices are added to the songs in certain places, which makes you feel like the sounds as been created right next to you. This making the music create a range of emotions for example calms, upbeat and shocked. The first time you listen to the album the different range of sounds and beats can make you think why have they added that but the more you listen to the album the more it sells its self to you.

This type of music is said to be the next generation of dance music and I can hear why that as been said, the music is different but likely able and once you have listened to it once you wouldn’t be able to stop listening to it.

A6- Evaluation

Before the first timed task, I thought I might not like doing the tasks but after finishing the first task I was shock that I actually like it. For the first task I had to create a book cover for Font book. When designing the tasks product, I designed as many thumbnails as possibly in the time I had allocated for that part of designing, I found the more thumbnails I had the better it was to choose the final design as I had a wider range of designs to choose from. When I did the final design I made sure I did it to scale of what it was going to be on the computer, so when I got on to the computer I didn’t have to mess about with measurements.

Font book was a practice task, the first real time task was Hokai. This was one of my favourite tasks out of them all but I did have a problem while making the design. 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 weren’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 done some improvements on it. This did teach me to set the margins to my chosen size and allow leeway time, so if problems do accrue I have time to correct them.

The second task was to create an advert for Vodafone, advertising a designer’s job. When I did the design for the Vodafone advert I liked the design and I still do but I think I could have done a bit better. For this task I finished 20 minutes early, this gave me plenty of time to check my work and get feedback. Learning from the errors I had with the Hokai task, I got feedback on my designs all the way thought the stages of the designing of the Vodafone advert. Which made me fell more confident about my work because I wasn’t having to worry if my designs were ok.

The Jonathan Gee task was my least favourite, I wasn’t happy with the design I produce. 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 how it looks. I handed the design in 5 minutes before the end, so I was pushing it a bit that task. Improvement I made from this task was to stick to my time plan, has for this task I used more designing time then I planned to use. So when we were asked to remove out least favourite piece of work, I removed this one. I thought the design looked plain and boring. As I wasn’t happy with the design I did and it was the last minor task before the major task, I felt a bit nervous about doing the major task.

Before I did the two tasks today I thought I might do designs that I wasn’t happy with. So I wasn’t really looking forward to doing the tasks today, but once I had started them I really enjoyed them and I was pleased with the designs. One thing that occurred while doing this task, when I was put my design on to the computer, the image that had been given didn’t really fit in the space I had chosen to put it and not all the text would fit on with the size of the image. So I swapped for one of my other final designs because if I had tried to make all the content fit on the page, the text would have been unreadable.

When I first found out I was going to after do a presentation I wasn’t really bothered. I like creating presentations, I just don’t really like showing them. When doing a presentation I find it better to be all prepare and ready for the presentation so I am confidence about what I am talking about. The only thing I didn’t like about this presentation was the French words, I am really bad at speaking French so I tried to break down the words using a web site that help break them down for you. I have enjoyed doing the research on Roger Excoffon but there isn’t a lot of web site with information about him and his typefaces, but I did find some very useful articles by two men that came in useful. One was called Grace and speed of Roger Excoffon, it described about his life and what he was like, which made it better for me to understand what Roger Excoffon and his life was like. A lot of Roger excoffon typefaces were display font that would be hard to read small and they give a lot of impact to words.

Roger Excoffon only designed about 11 fonts so when choosing 3 to go into more detail I chose 3 of his most popular typefaces. I found a web site that shows Roger Excoffon typefaces used in everyday life. These images were good to add to the presentation as example and it also shows that the typeface a used for a range of different things, like on shop signs. For the hand I chose a different way to show his typeface examples, this was the alphabet typed out a number of time using Excoffons different typefaces.

The feedback I got on the last presentation I did was that I didn’t finish well, so I am going to try and improve this time by firstly adding a slide at the end of the presentation asking if there is any questions, so it will remind me to ask if there is any and also I need to remember to give my handouts out. The main improvement I wanted to do was to try and keep it to 5 minutes, which I did today.

Overall this assignment as made me do things I didn’t think I was good at or liked. I use to hate presentations the thought of having people’s attention just on me made me really nervous, but I can feel improvement in my confidence in doing presentations. Improvements I think I could make when doing presentations is to start stronger and carry it on though out the presentation.

Improvements for the time tasks would be stick to time plans and received as much feedback as possible so that improvements can be made to my work, which will help me make a better standard of work.