Evaluation of the Last Semester

This past semester has been somewhat...different.

To begin the semester was our CSS beauty assignment. This required us to not only learn CSS but also learn about the history of it too. I found this one of the most difficult assignments to date mainly down to the fact that I had never used CSS before, only once previously for our summer assignment. Although I found the assignment very difficult I also found it to be very enjoyable as CSS is a very valuable tool to use in making websites.

At the same time as this assignment was going on we were also given our team project assignment. This is perhaps one of the strangest assignments we have had as we were not really given a brief. This is because we were expected to go out and find our own client and build a commercial website for them. Although the assignment is a huge task, and one that we couldn't afford to do wrong it has been the best assignment to date. Along with Craig and Mirhad I think we had a fantastic group and all gelled well together to get the tasks done. Throughout this assignment I have also learnt a lot more than I first thought I would have. Before starting this assignment I had never used PHP before or a content management system but I now feel relatively confident with both and hope to use them both again soon in future projects.

This assignment has also given us the chance to work in a more 'industry standard' way. We set ourselves the task of building a website in a day which, although ended up being planned quite late (for reasons outside our control) went exceptionally well and I was very pleased as to how it turned out. In the end we completed the site (or as much as we could have done at the time) in the allotted time and I'm exceptionally proud of what we did. If anyone get's the chance to do this sort of thing (1st years spring to mind straight away) then do take it, it will be one of the closest experiences you will get to 'the real world' in an educational enviroment you can get.

Our latest assignment (A12 - Culture Vulture) has got to be the strangest assignment to date though as it has involved a backwards design process. This basically meant that we had to design for a product which was unknown to us at the time. I really struggled with this assignment right from the word go as not only did I completely mess up my presentation but also I struggled to 'let myself go' and be diverse in the creation of my ideas. As the weeks progressed I felt that I managed to be a bit more creative but I still feel like I could have done more.

One of the highlights of the A12 assignment has being the creation of our own compilation CD's, though trying to make them as diverse as possible was quite a challenge. It made a change to listen to music that we would not normally have listened to, and although I didn't like all of it, I think it served it's purpose of inspiring me and influencing me in ways I perhaps would not have been otherwise.

At present I am in the process of making my trexi designs digital which is a huge task in it's self and I am feeling quite nervous towards the looming deadline as I still have a lot of work left to do (for both assignments). I still have to complete the digitisation of my designs, complete my website to upload them to, create a collectors card and write an evaluation - plus everything else for A11.

Once the deadline is over I will be happy to have a few weeks off and enjoy the Christmas break, clear my mind and be ready to come back to work ready for the final semester.

The new semester will definitely be the hardest yet, with 3 huge projects to undertake including learning a new piece of software, creating my own portfolio and partaking in the dreaded presentations. But the end is almost in sight and it's no time to let my standards slip, as Steve has said many a time now, do we want to go out with a whimper or a bang, and I definitely want to go out with a bang.

It's just a bit of Monkey Business

For the assignment we were asked to do a series of tasks including looking into copyright legislation, come up with our idea of a good team roles combination, create a valid CSS/XHTML website, note the differences between various browsers, and create an executive business summary for our own freelance web design company.

This assignment was a relatively simple one once it got going, though there was a lot of research to be done prior to starting. The majority of this research came into play when researching for CSS web design as this is something I had no prior experience in at all. Other parts of the research, such as the copyright legislation I had some prior knowledge in. Even the business summary I had some knowledge of from my GCSE Business lessons.

Though it is quite easy to say that the assignment was simple looking back on it, I have had quite a stressful time trying to do parts of it, sometimes staying up until midnight trying to figure out what I was missing, or where I was going wrong – again mainly with the CSS website.

One of the most beneficial parts of the assignment would have to be the team roles part of the assignment. I think trying to work out just what members would be needed in a team and especially what documents would be required will help immensely in the group assignment next year, and it will be interesting to see just what other members of my group have come up with in respect to their ideal ‘team roles’ scenario.

The business summary was also a vital learning experience for me, as if I were to go into freelancing, then I would need to know about business summaries to even get my business off the ground.

I think however that as a whole the CSS website design will be the most beneficial, as this will be one of the most used aspects of the assignment over not only the coming months, but hopefully the coming years too, whether I go into freelancing or into a job as a designer with an agency. By learning some basic CSS now, it will also hopefully make learning some extra CSS knowledge next year easier and allow for even bigger and better things to be built. With the assignment being quite long, it has also given me time to experiment with CSS, and although the design is a little bland, I am happy with what I managed to achieve.

Saying this, I did try to implement a Google Map into the website showing where the school was for visitors, but I struggled to get it working which is a shame, as the map is sometimes quite a useful tool to have on websites, especially when users can get directions from their own homes to the school.

Still, perhaps I should have tried to take my time more with learning CSS and learnt to crawl before I learnt to run, but this is a case of learning from my mistake and I will try not to be too down about it.

Time Has Told...

On September 14th 2006 my first blog was written, titled 'Who Am I, and How Did I Get Here?'. In it I wrote about myself, and my previous experiences and I also wrote one key paragraph:

"This now brings me to my reason for writing this. It is not so that in 50 years, when I’m old and grey, I can see what I was like as a child, but hopefully, so that in 2 years, I can look back at the end of my course at Wakefield and see what I gained from the course, and if it is what I expected."

Well now I am almost half way through the course, and already so much has changed.

A day after writing my very first blog I wrote a second blog about my first week on the course. In this blog I spoke about already having 2 assignments, the first been the Sketchblog assignment, the second been the 'Great Briton' assignment.

Once again this blog had key points to it, most notably the paragraph about the sketchblog assignment. In it, I write about the sketchblog assignment been down to 'habit' and remembering to write my blog and stick things in my sketchbook. I then write that if I remember to make my sketchbook the first point of call for all work 'I can't really go wrong' and that 'only time will tell'.

Famous last words.

I've found the blog a very enjoyable thing to do, I think this is obvious by the fact that I sometimes can do 2, maybe even 3 blogs a week. Sometimes I have written blogs and not published them for their relevance to the course was limited. Perhaps this was a mistake to make? Perhaps I should have made a more personal blog to voice my less relevant points? I have since learnt from these mistakes and can rectify them in the second year.

The sketchbook on the other hand was a completely different story. From the word go I didn't do as well as I could have done. I got a few images I liked and stuck them in, I took notes, I drew designs, but none of this was good enough.

Adding colour, getting more inspirational art, two very simple things, and yet both I failed to do until the last few weeks of the course. At this moment in time I sit still unsure whether the amount of work I have put into my sketchbook assignment the past few weeks is enough for me to pass it. I hope it is, but if it's not, there is no one else to blame but myself.

The Great Briton assignment was much better, and as the 'first' assignment, another very enjoyable experience.

I think my main problem with this assignment was that I spent too much time researching, and not enough time designing. Spending hours trying to find a copy of John Peel's book, which would most likely of had very little useful information in it was possibly the biggest waste of time. If we were actually making the website and putting content into it I'm sure it would have been very good, but just for a website plan? Useless.

Three weeks into the course and yet more famous last words - 'If I'm going to mess something up I think I’d rather mess up at the beginning of the course than half way through'. My own thoughts and yet I didn't even take them into consideration with the sketchbook assignment.

One major fear factor of the course for me when we started was having to learn new software. I had some basic experience in Photoshop, some experience using 'The F Word' and that was about that. Dreamweaver, Flash, Freehand were all new to me, and I'd never even heard of Pagemaker.

However, as young and naive as I was, and in some respects still am, I think that the technical side of the course has been relatively 'simple'. As was discussed this morning, the amount that we have to use some applications barely scratches the surface of what can be done. This is no fault of Steve's of course, to fully learn an application could take months (at least!).

With the limited time we have had in class to learn pieces of software, spending time at home learning them has been one of the most important items of self study I have done over the past year. Without knowing the software, how are we supposed to get anything else done? This I feel has benefited me greatly, probably most in Pagemaker than any other program.

In my own opinion this is shown in the 'Picture This' assignment more so than any other. I know I keep ranting on about it but the 'task bombs' as they were nicknamed produced some of my best work to date. This surprised me immensely as it was the first time that I had been forced to create something in such strict, mini time scales.

The Picture This assignment was not all fun and games however, in fact the majority of the assignment was hard, exhausting work. Probably the hardest part of the assignment was the presentation aspect of it.

Many people, including myself, have had limited or no experience of giving presentations and so this was a very nerve racking thing. The fact that we were being assessed on it made it even more nerve racking personally because I knew that if I really messed it up that I could fail the assignment and then possibly the course. This sense of unease also ran into the final 'test' of the assignment which was a lot more formal than the previous timed assignments we had been doing.

Luckily however, this was not the case with our Back to BASIC assignment, as this was much more laid back and less time restrictive than the Picture This assignment. This was quite a boring assignment as a whole as it was pretty much identical to the previous Great Briton assignment we had done, just with a different subject.

There were a few minor differences in the assignment though, the major difference was the knowledge that we would actually be making the website and so we had to find/create all of our own content for it. This was our first glimpse at not only creating a working website, but also into copyright laws and just what we could and couldn't do to obtain images. Google images was immediately ruled out of the question which left people with the challenge of finding images.

Finding copyright free images was a lot harder than I imagined because I had no experience in it before. I got most images from Wikipedia for the majority of the assignment, and it was only late on that I found out about the free image site SXC.

I think this is something that has plagued me throughout the year when it comes to images. Been somewhat tight when it comes to money, I have wished not to spend money on images that we may use just once or twice. I have since come to realise however that this is a very negative attitude to take and that if buying an image is the difference between pass and merit, merit distinction or worse pass and fail, then I should not dismiss it as easily and just pay £1, or even less to download it.

This was a fact I wish I had once again learnt a lot sooner than I did, as once again in A7 it has caused me no end of troubles. At first in the assignment it relatively easy to find the images I want, I collected the images from SXC in the correct resolution and I thought that was that, and on I got with the assignment. It is only recently that it has become clear that one of the images I downloaded was copyrighted and so I couldn't use it. If I had bought an image then the likely hood of it being copyrighted would decrease, but at the same time there is no point just buying an image for the sake of it.

The Fax of Life assignment has probably been one of the most interesting to do, and a big jump up in the amount of work we have had to do. With so much work to think about at the start of the assignment I was worried about making the deadline, but with good time management I have managed to complete nearly all of the assignment already, with a few days still to go so hopefully I won't be leaving everything until last minute.

Looking right back to my original blog, a lot has changed in well under a year. I am now more technically able than I was back in September. After all, although I mention about having self taught skills, these in no way compare to the level of proficiency that I have learnt in my first year of the course. I am also really enjoying the course, something which Steve always says is not his plan but a subsidiary of the course and I think this is really helping motivate me to get my work done and try and do the best I can.

With the first year almost over, the second year will be my chance to try and make another huge step up. In the next year my main goals are to:

• Get onto the second year
• Get at least a pass on every assignment first time
• Obtain at least 4 merits on assignments
• Improve on my design process (Design more than 6/7 thumbnails)

If I can do all these things I will be extremely happy, especially with obtaining 4 merits. Hopefully I will be able to do better than 4 merits but to start with I don't want to concentrate too much on merit criteria and end up failing the assignment for not meeting the pass criteria.

Time and Time Again

A6 has been probably one of the strangest assignments we have had to do. In fact, it has been probably one of the strangest assignments I have ever had to do, ever.

Because of the nature of the assignment (to test and prepare) it has been extremely difficult to prepare for a lot of things. Although this is what the industry will be like, experiencing it for the first time has been a huge step.

6 months ago when starting the course, my knowledge of typography was, shall we say, limited. Today however has shown me just how much I have learnt in such a short space of time. From knowing Pi only in the mathematical sense, to know knowing it is a type of font too (Dingbats - a.k.a web dings/symbols) I have received a great sense of achievement in the past few months.

As a 'part time' journalist I thought that I knew quite a lot of the different elements that made up a newspaper or magazine, after all, I've been part of making one once before. However, if I could go back and make the same newspaper again now, it would be so much better as I actually know what I am doing. Mastheads, gutters, decks and more, once pure gibberish to me, now firmly set in my mind as important information that I must not forget.

To start the assignment off I was primarily worrying about the timed tasks aspect of the assignment. I had no idea what was being planned and what would be expected of me, but it turned out that I produced (in my opinion) some of my best work to date. Admittedly I may also say I have produced some of my worst work to date (Jonathon Gee re-design), but I think that was mainly down to panic of the first timed task.

With the rechristening of the timed tasks as 'task bombs' the mood soon lightened, and perspective shifted to the presentation. For a while I left the presentation, and didn't really give it my full attention, worrying more about getting the website up to scratch for A5 than researching about my font. "It's only one font, and there will be loads about it" I kept telling myself. I needed a kick start to get me going. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily) this came a couple of weeks ago when it suddenly hit me that our practice presentations would be in a couple of weeks.

Once sufficiently motivated, and hyped up on coffee, I began working on the presentation. I wish I had done it sooner as immediately I was faced with a problem. Max Miedinger... My-ding-er? Myde-in-ger? Just how do you pronounce his name?

My-ding-er I think was the option I chose, and so I continued with the presentation preparation.

My first real problem I faced was what to put on the presentation. Finding information wasn't as easy as I first thought, and with no real examples of my font available to me, panic soon set in. Eventually however, I got my presentation finished, well I thought so anyway, and in usual style set about making my cue cards the night before the practice presentation was due.

This was definitely a bad choice as it gave me no time to really practice my presentation, so I had no idea about timings or even what to say. I just knew that my script would be purely read from the cue cards. And it was...

After getting some feedback from Steve and other members of my group, it soon became apparent that parts of my presentation were lacking. I was quite shocked to hear that I was the first person to actually get there sketchbook to write down the feedback we were given, as I believe that it is vital to keep a note of it. If it wasn't for the feedback I had written down from my last presentation I don't think I would have been anywhere near as prepared.

With the practice presentation completed, I had just over a week to tweak and perfect it. Plenty of time I thought.

There is never - Plenty of time.

Once more I believed my presentation was completed. That is of course until the day before I was due to give the presentation, when I was talking to Steve. He may as well have said 'Do it again'.

I still had lots to do.

That night I stayed up quite late preparing for my presentation, adding slides, taking slides away, practicing, practicing, practicing, and revising for the next days test. Oh how I wish I hadn't. I arrived at college tired, it was only a matter of time before something went wrong. Adding together a mix of tiredness and nerves, my presentation started off wrongly with me forgetting to change the PDF file to full screen, and then by me accidentally knocking the board and changing slides. Hopefully the afternoon would bring more luck.

With a few hours spare we set about revising for the afternoons test. We had no idea what to expect and I think that is what caused the most unease for me, not nerves, just unease. The task we were given was a simple one. Very simple in fact. With so much time spent dwelling on the subject, a lot of ideas came up, but creating a fact sheet about different type elements seemed relatively easy.

I wasn't that happy with my final product however. I think I spent too much time trying to remember all the different elements for the test and writing them down, instead of designing my fact sheet. Looking back now I can think of many things I have missed from my designs, including important information such as font types and sizes.

In the end I think I managed to write about 28 of the 57 which is quite a lot, but I keep wondering "is it enough?". With Steve's typical cryptic style, I don't think I'll find out until we get the results back from the assignment.

Next time we get a similar assignment I will be much more prepared. For a start I will use my time much more wisely. I will also take the time it takes to prepare something so small as a 5 minute presentation much more seriously, as the time I spent on it doesn't accurately reflect the time that should have been spent on it. Although I think I got quite lucky with the presentation and the information I could find, this will not always be the case, and therefore leaving things until the last minute is possibly a rather stupid way to go about it.

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