Catch up!!!

A somewhat peculiar week this week, Having had some bad news last week and subsequently missing the presentations on Wednesday then all of Thursday I was again somewhat relieved to find I wasn’t that far behind.

Having missed the last week and found it difficult to get any self study work done I was really worrying about Wednesday, I was considering asking to work from home and try to crack on with as much work as I could but I found that just being in college with everyone else in more or less the same position of having to do the content I thought I might as well stay and do what I could.

Wednesday was a difficult day trying to concentrate, its not easy listening to a lecture when all you want to do is go home to bed though having the talk with Steve in the afternoon was a weight off my mind. In future I know now I will definitely try and crack on and get as much work as I can early on and not leave quite large parts until almost the last minute.

Thursday was an enjoyable day as we got a full day of working on Photoshop and restoring the photograph. This was something that I think most people were looking forward to and it was something I really enjoyed and cheered me up no end. I know in future this will be something that I should be able to get on with and hopefully not have so many problems.

I’m a little worried about my self study time again this week as I’m hoping I can concentrate enough to do a full 16 hours and document it. I wonder what other people think of documenting it if they haven’t done it before.

This has certainly been the hardest blog that I’ve written, having struggled to do any work at all over the past week I was wondering exactly what I could possibly write about.

Apologies.

First of all I would like to apologise to Steve and all my peers for what has been 2 really bad weeks, being ill most of last week made self study really hard and also getting into college hard. I apologise for missing the presentations on Wednesday afternoon and I apologise to Scott and hope he found doing the A4 sheet for everyone not too much trouble on his own.

After Steve gave the presentation lecture it wasn’t really a surprise to then be given a few hours to create and give one. I have to say that at first I was a bit nervous about it but after 5 -10 minutes of thinking about it I grew in confidence thinking well I cant pass the course without doing them and thought that the more the practise we get the better.

I hope everybody’s went ok and strangely I’m quite looking forward to doing mine and I suppose in a way getting it out of the way. The worst feeling is the nervous tension knowing that I have it still to do when I get back in.

I also apologise to everyone and especially my tutorial group for missing Thursday, I know how useful the sessions are or at least I find them really useful for feedback and a benchmark for my work. All I can do now is use my self study time for this week to the full and catch up on everything.

Once again I apologise for my absence, I don’t feel that it could have been avoided.

Feedback, Help or Hinderence?

After missing Wednesday through illness I was relieved to find out that I hadn’t missed out on too much. Things could have been a lot worse had I missed even more. In future though I really will try and drag myself out of bed to get into college.

Thursday was a day of hard draft and a new lecture. I’m starting to find note taking easier in lectures, whereas before I was trying to get everything down I’m now trying to get the main points from what Steve says and the highlighted parts of the lecture. John gave insight into his note taking that he only highlights the important words, I can understand how this may work for certain people, I would find just trying to learn about something from a word really hard, especially if I didn’t know what it was from before, I also find reading full notes makes a lot more sense than just words.

Julian and I were discussing how feedback can sometimes be less helpful and how sometimes it’s not always valuable and sometimes some is better than other.

The late morning and afternoon were taken up with the next part of the Picture This assignment. Julian and I found the first real task of this rather time consuming and monotonous; I wonder who else found it like this? I’m not saying that it was pointless as I do believe it will be invaluable information in the future.

Now that were in full swing of 2 assignments I don’t feel as I’m under as much pressure as I thought I would be, I really feel that I’m managing to use my time well and use my self study time to get the best out of the work I need to. I feel that I’m finding some good “inspirational” pieces to stick in my sketchbook. I find that studying at home to be more productive now that I have managed to put aside all distractions, such as the TV and computer games.

At last I managed to get webpage sorted and managed to put a coming soon page on, after about 2 hours of constantly trying on Dreamweaver. I finally managed to get it up on there.

Insert C.A.R.P blog title here

As the title would suggest we didn’t go fishing, or if we did it was fishing for knowledge about a crucial part of design. Yes this does sound really “smarmy” but having got my design for the business card to stay up on the wall until almost the end I was quite pleased with my first attempt although some way off professional standard a “not too bad” from Steve was to say the least pleasing.

C.A.R.P Standing for contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity, these are going to have to be the baseline for print and web design that we are going to do. Something that is pleasing is that so far I have managed to remember them; the test will be when it comes to designing will I be able to and after that be able to use them at a good standard.

The afternoon was a chance to carry on with vital work on getting goals, target audience research and work done, Having tried to write one of my parts of the target audience for the computer savvy user I got some good feedback from John. He suggested that I use more “key” words instead of the fluffy words such as “good” and “wide”. I’m defiantly going to remember this in future and even use a thesaurus for extra help.

John also suggested trying to come up with a list of questions that I could try and answer whilst writing for a target audience this should help with coming up with problems that need to be sorted for them.

Thursday morning started with a quick quiz on the past weeks lecture about bitmaps and vectors, I was felt quite relieved as I had managed to read up on the notes of this lecture the night before, something that I admit I haven’t done very often and something that in future I’m going to address. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this and I wonder how many others agree that reading up and making it stick is something that needs some serious looking at.

We then had a lecture on colour, which filled up some of the afternoon after our tutorial as it gave me a chance to find a colour gamut which I hope will help in the future. I also had a look for other bitmap images from the Designers Republic that didn’t appear on there website and having looked through all 17 pages of images on Google. This was a real frustration and it was still a challenge to find them, one of my items over the weekend is to try and find more. If anyone has any ideas where to find them it would be much appreciated.

Thursday morning was also a time when a lot of people got into the discussion about art and design and what the difference if any there is. Most of us agree and especially after reading Scotts blog entry that there is a definite difference and this is something which I hope will be a basis for the essay for the first part of the A4 assignment, I just hope I’ve covered it well and got some good points across.

Cometh the hour, cometh the Photoshop

2 Assignments in 1 week!?! Oh well it was bound to happen at some point and the work was going to start racking up. The comforting thing about it is that having done a very similar assignment last half semester I feel comfortable that I will be able to get this done within the time and hopefully with very few problems.

The second assignment is something that I believe many have been looking forward to and when Steve even said that it was "a lot nicer" than the other that also perked people up, finally getting the chance to have a go on Photoshop is something that quite a few people including myself have been looking forward to.

Something that has got to start to be done is more work going into my sketchbook in terms of adverts and websites that I find good or bad or that just happen to catch my eye for some reason. I’m quite disappointed that I haven’t got around to doing this before as I already have three or four adverts that I could stick in and annotate.

Something that certainly perked up Thursday afternoon was when Julian received a comment on his blog from the creator of a website that he strongly criticised, this shocked us all in the tutorial group and showed how good blogger is and how powerful a tool it can be to highlight how you feel about other designers work.

I was disappointed that I didn't pass the first two units in the first assignment, I passed the first but fell short on the second and this really was because of small errors that could possibly have been avoided though in future I will certainly be going over things more than the three times I did.

Discussions on Thursday were nearly all about the Designers Republic and how good/ peculiar that some of there work is, I can really see how they are world renowned for the work, Julian even wanted to attempt his own "Designers Republic" style after looking at many pieces of there work on the wall and there website. I hope that this would be something that I could aspire to but unfortunately I don’t feel that this would be possible, I’m certainly a long way off that standard!