Tuesday 13 November 2007

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

8 comments:

Mark Torrington said...

I agree with you that having one universal library would be easier to understand, however it is not practicable. These are a few reasons why:

1. Not every colour can be achieved in CMYK (Printing Process) as apposed to RGB because the gamma is wider. This is why printers use spot colours to keep colour that are out of the CMYK gamma consistent.

2. Materials such as vinyl have a different RAL palette of colours due to limitations of creating a vinyl to match printed material that use pantone references.

Greg Carrick said...

I’ve had a look for some websites for the competitive analysis and there are a few we can use, but it might take a while to find a usable one as most websites that show seem to be a glossary for a website.

Michelle Bonfield said...

On the problem of the competitive analysis it might be worth analysing a 'good' website purely aimed at the over 50's, regardless of its content.

I suggest this as the majority of websites I have seen, which are similar to the ones we will design, are pretty shocking! At least that way we will gain valuable information about sucessful aesthetics and navigation etc.

Of course we'll need to clear this with Steve, but I feel it would provide a better balance in the analysis.

Tom Smith said...

I've managed to find a couple of sites for the competitive analysis, but like Michelle said, they're pretty shockingly designed. However, I'm going to use them anyway, as after completing a SWOT analysis, there is still plenty of aspects to comment on.

I agree about one universal colour library being helpful, but as Mark said, it's not really do-able. Even if it was, I'm sure there would still be competitive libraries trying to take over, like there is with everything. An example I can think of is the mp3 music format... universally accepted, but Microsoft still force WMA on us, and Apple force AAC on us. It's all about competition in our culture.

Victoria Fisher said...

When I was researching about silver surfers I found a few web sites that could be used for the completive analysis, all I did was type different sentences into Google like basic computing for elderly, which should bring up some web sites about silver surfers. I found a good web site at college, so on Monday if I can find it I’ll send you it.

Suzanne Hullah said...

I think that this week will be hectic for everyone, due to the weekly essays we all have to do and the A3 assignment piled on top. This will be a testing time for all of us and will hopefully set in stone whether this course is the right choice for those people that have been wondering if they've made the right decision.

Having one colour library would be a nice idea, especially one that could convert from print to web and vice versa. Maybe one day someone will invent one?

James Bell said...

I that the colour libraries would be easier to learn and understand if there was just one universal one but like Mark said it wouldn't be practical.

Each colour library is used for a different purposes and each one of these purposes has different requirements.

I believe this makes it almost impossible to use just one colour library.

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