Masquerade in Blog

Hi again,

Over the course of the week I have spent a fair bit of time getting some designs created for the iMe in my sketchbook. I have been putting a lot more effort into my sketchbook when sketching ideas for website designs. In particular I’ve been making sure that I annotate everything that I draw and self analyse everything. Another thing I have been doing is trying to explore my design ideas more than I have done in the past. For example on one page I tried a design idea using different shapes, tried it with different colours, and also tried it with different spacing.

After a chat with John this afternoon we discussed how I can improve further upon this. I can achieve this by going back to my notes from last year for the ‘C.A.R.P.’ principles. (C.R.A.P.? No I don’t think it is). The C.A.R.P. principles are of course colour, alignment, repetition, and proximity. I can use these four principles to analyse my sketches in my sketchbook, and thus building up my knowledge of good practise.

Starting from now on each main weekly blog entry will contain information on where I am up to on one of my assignments. There will be a different assignment featured on every main entry, so for example there will be three weeks between talking about the iMe assignment.

On The Job #1

So we are just over a week into this group project now and I was hoping we could have had a final layout design chosen by now. But unfortunately we haven’t as on Monday I think we went off on too much of a tangent trying to design a different theme for each page. It turns out a lot of them ended up looking a bit cheesy. We now have clarified that the client wants a template layout that is consistent throughout all of the pages.

Out client also liked the look of the image galleries which mark had designed, so I had a look around on the net for a solution to this. I instantly thought that using JavaScript would be the solution so I went off hunting for a suitable script. Our team is pleased by the results I achieved as it looks rather nice, and I think our client will also think so.

Another new weekly addition that will be featured on every main blog entry I make is an update on my six month learning plan. So… here it is!

Six Month Learning Plan

This afternoon I have started putting together a detailed plan for my six month learning plan. I have 90 hours to cover, and I must show measurable achievement. The way I am going to go about doing this is firstly purchasing Adobe InDesign CS2: Classroom in a Book. I read about fifteen user reviews of this book and it seems to be perfect for my current Adobe InDesign level, which is a complete novice. A useful exercise I have undertaken on my learning plan is to answer these questions. WHAT am I learning? HOW will I get there? WHERE am I now? And WHERE will I be in the future? The reason I have found this useful is because I can use it as a basis for my plan. In this weekly blog update I can answer the question of WHERE am I now?

Other things I will be using to complete my learning target are the online Adobe Tutorials.

Thanks for reading,
Dave.