Down With The Sickness

Although the title sounds a bit obscure; it has a meaning behind it. It is also the name of a song by The Disturbed.

Last week was an extremely hectic week, every night I was up till at least 2 o’clock, doing as much referral work as possible. Every time I thought I had finished, I found something else I had to change. The one thing that took me ages to do was changing the page numbers and trying to order them, it was very messy.

Due to illness on Sunday night, I was off all day on Monday, which I was disappointed about because I had purposely spent all day Sunday writing out notes andproof reading A2

I rested for most of the day and in the afternoon; I decided to print off my Referral Work ready for Tuesday.

During the rest of the afternoon I attempted to finish the Image Restoration task but only got as far as colouring in the middle man. I found it particularly difficult to find a colour for the men’s ties; every colour I tried seemed too outrageous and bright.

Today I managed to get myself out of bed and come into college. The first thing I did was hand in my Referral Work, I felt relived that I now only had 2 assignments to do instead of 3.

Today’s lecture was….well…. not really a lecture it was supposed to be a recap of yesterday work, but unfortunately I wasn’t here yesterday.

We had to design a business card but had to include typographic solutions, which I didn’t have a clue about and struggled with.

The entire classes work was judged by everyone, and mine was the worst and got such a roasting, mostly from Gary, but he was just trying to be awkward.

Throughout the afternoon I continued the Photo Restoration task and managed to find some reasonable colours, which I was pleased with. Later on we had our weekly seminar with Steve, this included looking over the image compression essay and the image restoration task. Unfortunately I have to start the image restoration again I actually admitted that I needed to do it.

These are the tasks I must do this week:

• Complete new Image restoration
• Do Time sheets
• Complete most of A3
• Comment blogs

Restoration Proclamation

Monday morning was rather similar to last Monday, I had just put my foot in the door when I was asked If I had wrote up the notes that I had missed last week, unfortunately I had been busy all week doing my referral work, A2 and A3. So I was sent to the library to write them up. I was followed by the same group of people that were with me last week.

We in the library for the remainder of the morning, this is because we only had one sketchbook to copy from, and there were 6 of us. So one half took the book and copied the notes while the other half of us write out time sheets, I also began to write my delivery requirements in my sketchbook. Half got it done for just after break, the rest of us were stuck there doing it till lunchtime.

In the afternoon I continued my A3 assignment and managed to get most of the deliver requirements out of the way. And as usual our group had a seminar session with John Munday; we talked about problems and such.

Today was a completely different day, this morning Steve gave a seminar on Image restoration; he explained how to use certain tools in Photoshop that could help us do this easily. I'm glad he did this because this is really the first time I have used Photoshop for something like this.

After the seminar, the group were given the image that we had to restore and add colour to, from what I understand it’s the same photo from last year, I’m guessing the year before that as well.

For the duration of the morning I practiced using the tools in Photoshop, it seemed easy enough and I enjoyed it.

In the afternoon it was time to knuckle down, but before that we had a seminar group with Steve, for this seminar we all needed Projects goals, Target Audience, Delivery requirements and Competitive analysis for A3. Steve went over with us what he expected, I had most of it, I just need to add some technologies to the Delivery Requirements.

After seminar I got on with the image restoration task, I found it is quite frustrating when something goes wrong, because you can only go back so far, I had to scrap it and restart several times through out the afternoon but I eventually managed to get the hang off it.

These are the tasks I must complete thought the rest of the week:

• Email Steve when applicable
• Complete A2 referral Work
• Comment blogs
• Write on DAS Forum
• Get first version of image done.
• Continue web plan

Also I urge people to add to the “Send Gary on a Plane to London” Fund. Because were all common according to him.

To PNG or not to PNG that is the Question

This week is going to be so hectic for me, I received my feed back from Steve for my a2 referral yesterday, it seems I have quite a lot of tweaking to do with that, some are minor things that I have missed out, like half of one of my project goals, which I still can’t get my head round.

Yesterday morning, I and a few of the other students were sent to work in the library, this we because we had forgotten to fill out a production schedule. So we all spent the first part of the morning writing it, and figuring out how to use the printer and copier in the library.

The system its self is so confusing it’s unbelievable, you would have thought it would have been simpler.

Throughout the rest of the morning we were all given a brief of how to layout the new web plan, it was basically the same apart from the entire class had the same target audience. The rest of the day consisted of tutorial with John Munday, receiving feedback from Steve and doing the first few tasks for A3.

I managed to complete the Project goals and the target audience and have got half way through the delivery requirements. The only thing I'm worried about is the competitive analysis, I know its going to be difficult trying to find similar websites to the brief we have.

Today we began with 2 presentations from Steve, the first of which was colour space, which spoke of different types of colour libraries, what I can’t understand is why don’t they just have one universal library? It would make it a lot easier in my opinion.

The second presentation was about image compression which I found quite interesting, it described the different formats in which you can compress a bitmap and showed examples on how it’s done.

Throughout the rest of the afternoon I have began the second task on A4 which is about image compression, hence the presentation this morning, so far Ive managed to do some comparing of compression types and formatted them into tables, I have also began to write the essay.

Things to do this week:

Complete A4 essay
Begin Referral work
Continue web plan – get delivery requirements and competitive analysis done
Email Steve
Comment on blogs
Post on DAS forum

Its not all bad news

This Monday was probably the worst day on the course, I had just come back from half term and we were told that we were showing our presentations today.

I was extremely nervous and just genuinely didn’t want to do it. I was called up and presented it in front of Steve. I overshot my 5 minute limit by about 2 minutes; I don’t think that this will be a bad thing at this point.

I felt nervous throughout the whole experience but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Afterward I felt quite please with myself, but I had rehearsed it before and it was under 5 minutes and I was shocked about the change in time, maybe it was just the way I read it.

That afternoon we were put into our new seminar groups and I feel that we will get along really well; they are a good bunch of people. We were given a task to do asking us to produce a list of what we felt the first part of the term was like and I think we did rather well with that.

Then the dreaded news came of our grades, Ive been having doubts about it for the past week so it wasn’t as much as a shock that I got referred, besides, I can make it a pass when I get my feedback from Steve.

More than half of the class got referred, some took it harder than others which are understandable and we are all a team and will support each other through this dark time.

Today I feel a lot more refreshed am confident that I can move my grade up. This morning were put into our seminar groups again and were give a task to answer the question, “Are we Designers? Are we Artists? Or are we both?” we all came to a conclusion that we were in fact designers, after an excruciating Discussion.

We also enjoyed a talk about a cow cut in half that’s at Tate modern in London; I personally really want to go see this.

This afternoon we were asked to investigate into A4 which is Image rights, ironically the first task that I have to do was the question that the class did this morning, hmm…

At about 4 o’clock our seminar group were called in for a session with Steve, we had all created a list of questions that we wanted to ask Steve about the new assignments. All my questions were answered and I'm now on track.

I also have my new domain - Here

Here is a list of the tasks that I must complete for next week:

• Essay on Design and art
• Begin A3
• Produce Production Schedule