Orphan Waves

A pass grade was all I could muster for the last assignment. A bit disappointed to say the least as I am trying to pull out all the stops to achieve what I know I can achieve. I thought I had all the merit and distinction criteria covered but alas, it was not to be. Until I get my mark sheet I won't know on which parts of the learning outcome I failed to do.

The next assignment will be different; I have my eye on the goals and my finger on the pulse. I had a one to one with Mr Munday on Tuesday!! which opened my eyes a little as to what time planning is all about. I have always filled out the forms honestly and fairly as regards a diary of my self study but I can see now that the 'forward' planning is not just about pleasing the tutors but to aid me in my own planning of a task. And you know what? it works. Thanks John for a very informative hour that would have been far better being two hours, even three.

Being able to split the next assignment into hours, and the hours into separate tasks I can see beyond the trees for once. Although the sheet I handed in on Wednesday did not really contain the information I wanted it to, as I had only gained this insight on the Tuesday afternoon before.

Our Wednesday morning session was just as enjoyable as the previous Wednesdays. Being able to look at the logos that my fellow peers had created was an eye opener. This type of task is when you can see how the rest of the group thinks. I was particularly impressed with Rich's, Bens, Mirhads’ and Marcs’. When the majority was unsure of which they liked best, reducing them to a small size usually made up their mind for them.

The group was split when it came to my 4 main designs and in the end it was my decision using the feedback I had been given, I am now experimenting with different colours on my final 2.

It has been an interesting self study week when I finally got round to designing my logo in Freehand. I am finally getting to grips with how the basic tools work and how path points and curves are created. I would like to go into Freehand more in-depth but I need to keep the rest of the assignment in my mind and stick to my planning sheet which so far is going to schedule. I had to rearrange it a little bit on Wednesday as some of my logos would not open at college due to the lack of fonts, so I used the time to research a bit into Spyra, the whole concept of creating electronic ambient music and gathered some ideas together on what the target market would want to see on the CD cover from the information I had translated from listening to the music.

When I listened to the CD for the first time, I sat with my sketchbook and wrote down keywords and thoughts that cropped up in my mind from hearing each track. The list by the end of the CD looked like a nostalgia trip to the eighties. I now have more understanding on what this type of listener would want to see on a CD of this genre and hopefully I will fulfill that with my final design in time.

As you all know I buy a lot from Amazon. I regard these people to be one of the best in the buying online market.
Every now and again they send me emails with a list of recommended reading material that is supposed to be a 'personal' insight into what I might like. Either they have a camera hidden in my house or they can read my mind. I have included a screenshot to show you what they recommend this month. It's uncanny.

Have a good Easter holiday and will see you all in 3 weeks refreshed and overdosed on Chocolate.

Any Dream Will Do

Again, an enjoyable morning on Wednesday looking at more logos. I wasn’t really prepared to get up and talk about my favourite but enjoyed listening to my fellow peers’ views on their favourite logos. My favourite that I knew a bit about having done some research was ‘amazon’ which is very clever but my utmost favourite is the governments recycling logo. It has everything. (apart from a 1:1 or 2:1 Aspect ratio) It’s green to convey environmentally friendliness, it’s clear and concise, readable font, has a circle to say what it is trying to say, and has a heart to show love. Brilliant example of a simple logo that does what it says on the tin.

I haven’t done any more sketches since Wednesday but a weird thing happened on Thursday night, I designed one in my sleep. When I woke up I remembered the design and wrote it down and it is by far the best so far in my sketchbook. I even dreamt the colour scheme which shoots down the theory that we dream in black and white. I wonder if I can put these 8 hours of sleep down as ‘self study’ or use it as a merit and distinction category for ideas generation. Nah, didn’t think so. I can’t work out whether I have an overactive subconscious doing my work for me or I’m just sad and that I have nothing else to dream about.

I’ve been looking at logos outside, on the web and in magazines for 2 weeks now and find them really interesting, even the crap ones. I think everyone should have a logo just for their own name that conveys their personality.

When it comes to putting my ideas down in a vector format and experimenting further, I fear my only let down is going to be my lack of Freehand knowledge. The timescale doesn’t allow for too much training to create the type of logos that I have seen on my travels. Although my sketches give the basic idea, you can never tell if an idea is going to work until you have tried it with various fonts and shapes. Certain ideas will work with certain fonts, whether the font stretches below the baseline, seeing if all letters can be made the same length, using Capitals or Lowercase. How thin or how thick the font is, if one font should be used or more than 2?

So I am taking my sketchbook to work with me this weekend to try and choose my favourite 4 in between sets and bingo. I can then use Monday to put these ideas into a nice clean, crisp, accurately measured format in time for Wednesday. All the time listening to my chosen CD.

Incidentally if any of you aren’t doing anything on Friday 30^th March and fancy coming along to see what I actually do for a living, I will be performing at the Lupset Hotel on Horbury Road.

Hopefully we will have learned our Wolfram Der Spyra medley by then.

Einstein A Logo

Another interesting talk, this time from ex-student Marc Bowers. He works at Real Radio and like Jonny the previous week seems to really enjoy his job and the company he works for. Would be interesting to see any students who haven't found gainful employment and their struggle to find a job. How they would have changed things and what they would have done different.

The morning of Wednesday was filled with one of my favourite subjects: Logo Design. The lecture asked questions like instant recognition and what to look for in a logo and the theories behind the logo from an advertisers point of view. This is somehting that I look at all the time and was relishing the fact that the next assignment would be to design a logo. After an indepth but informative lecture we were told to design not only a logo for a company but a whole CD cover, inlay and centre for an album that actually does exist. We chose a title and next Wednesday we are listening to the music of said title which by all accounts is music for ears of a trained persuasion.

It's nice that that I have an assignent that combines both my love for design and my love for music and even though I have had chosen for me a title that sounds pretty and retro, I know that the design will have to be based on our own interpretation of the music. The one I have been assigned is 'Orphan Waves by Spyra'. Looking at some reviews on the internet I am interested to hear what one reviewer describes as "Bleeps and static give way to a slow relaxed rhythm and little delicate melody that you can just lay back and luxuriate in,"

when I listen to music I listen to the lyrics over anything else and I am hoping that this piece will contain some throughout its length. These would at least give some clues to how the cover would look. I have a book already that may be useful, '100 Best Selling Albums of the 80's'. Looking at albums nowadays the designs haven't changed that much and very rarely relate to the title.

This week I am cutting out logos from magazines for ideas, (something I have always fancied doing but never had a good enough excuse other than being sad). I am also taking my sketchbook to work to jot some ideas down for the 'Ambient World' logo until I get my piece of music to either inspire me or destroy my music system.

Some good logo sites to give you inspiration. This one has all the most famous ones and an explanation on how it came to be. (don’ t you just love a good back-story)
Here is a massive A-Z of just about every famous major corporate logo, you can also download some in vector format.

Finally my favourite explanation and please tell me if you already knew as I didn’t, and think the idea is brilliant. It’s good old amazon, and guess what? The orange arrow or ‘smile’ underneath is actually pointing from ‘a-z’. Ingeniously clever and well hidden meaning? Or have I just been thick missing the message?

I'm Bad, I'm Bad, Sh'mone

I am relieved to say the least that another assignment has been handed in. It has been the biggest learning curve so far and has given me a taste of what I want for the future. Being at college has been a real eye opener, it hasn't just been a case a doing the job that is presented to you, it makes you look at things in a whole new light. Opportunities are everywhere and new things that you didn't know about are just 'happened' upon.

It is getting to the stage now where I am looking at work I have done in the past and seeing that it does not meet certain criteria or it is incomplete. I have taken it upon myself to contact a lot of my previous clients and tell them just what a bad job I did and I am sure with what I know now I can do them a much better job. With websites, it has come to fruition that the design and look of a website is only half the job. The functionality, accessibility and usability is the other half and think that both things should be looked at as a separate entity and charged accordingly. Whether these people are willing to pay for this extra input is up to them but my job now is to let them know how important this is.

I did quite a bit of research into search engines, keywords and ranking (see previous blogs) and I have managed to get my assignment website in the top 5 of a Google search when looking for 'your pc explained' & 'pc explained'. This was just an experiment to see if it could be done by using googles' addurl and verification service. I now know that when I do my portfolio I can play up there with the big boys by using the correct keywords and phrases carefully.

I designed a flyer from an old template I made a while ago and have just had 5000 A5's printed. I gave the client a final proof and purposely put an error in it to make sure he had read it correctly. I knew he was not scrutinising it like he should and he didn't pick up on it. However when I sent the design to the printers, they said they had looked at the website that was printed on the flyer and it wasn't there. I quickly realised that I had used .co.uk instead of .com on the flyer without realising. Neither the client, nor I, had seen this error that could have been costly. The cost would have been to the client though and not to me as I had given him a final proof to check thoroughly. Next time I am going to use a similar system that the printers gave to me where you sign a form saying that all has been checked and you are happy with the design.

Incidentally, I shopped around quite a bit for the cheapest and best quality litho prints I could find on the internet and managed to get them for £96 delivered. For 5000 full colour A5’s that’s not bad at all. If you need any they are Fairprint, be warned though, they are the same price for 1000 as they are for 5000 so it is worth getting 5000 and using them as toilet paper for a while.

Looking forward to next Wednesday when we get the next assignment and open up a Pandora’s Box of design wonderments.

Honey Pie

What I thought was going to be a run of the mill talk on Wednesday from Jonny Haynes turned out to be very interesting and very informative, he really knows his stuff and looks like he is doing well for himself, so much so that I emailed to tell him. It did help that he was an interesting guy and certainly had the patter for talking. His use and knowledge of CSS seems to be the foundation that I need to build on.

This assignment deadline has really crept up on us and it has been one of the most enjoyable so far. With doing websites beforehand I was able to use my study time for learning about different things, in particular CSS. The involvement of CSS in this project has led to a few messes up with coding and things happening and not knowing the answers to.

The main outcome has given me a new willingness to learn something that I know nothing about and I'm looking forward to it. I know there are quite a few in the group who also didn't know anything about CSS and they have really come into their own on this project to the point where they are showing the stalemate CSS gurus how to do it. I must admit I was impressed by this and couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I finally got my feedback forms back from every single person, even though it was a bit late in the day. The outcome of that was very very positive for me and gave me the impression that there wasn't much to change. One thing that I had thought about was the use of green for the jargon bar and the same green for one of the categories, this was picked up by an unexpected source and prompted me to change it. There have been some minor changes from the feedback I received but on the whole I am happy and my only problem now is to put this information into chart form which I had not planned on. My questions were mainly made up of yes and no answers and self opinion. Seeing as how all the answers were yes the pie charts would be 100% each which in effect is just a circle.

I am spending the rest of the week tweaking, finalising and completing my Evaluation which I am told can exceed the word count if need be, this was welcoming news. Also glad to know we have a 5pm deadline which gives a little bit of time on Wednesday to fine tune.