Life's A Beach

A very productive day on Wednesday that seemed to be filled with answers to a lot of questions I had without actually asking. A talk on how to prepare files was very worthwhile and just confirmed a few things that I already knew but wasn’t sure if things had changed since I used to deal with the printing industry. I am still amazed that in this day of modern technology and higher resolutions that printers still work at 300dpi as they did in the days 20 years ago.

Converting to CMYK is still relevant too when using the 4 colour ink process. The reason our monitors view as RGB and print is CMYK is easily explained in the images below. The name usually given to this difference is sometimes called ‘additive’ and ‘subtractive’ colour. The monitors use RGB together to create white on a screen, take the 3 colours away and the image would be black. Whereas no CMYK printed on a piece of paper obviously make white. CMYK mixed make up your solid colours.

I was pleased with my pre-assessment for the sketchblog assignment. This has been the most enjoyable for me from the whole course. A way of sharing your thoughts and inspirations, yet at the same time seeing how others react to the same situations that we all find ourselves in, along with a book to record good designs that can actually be used at some point in the future has also worked well. Imagine if everyone did this with their everyday life, kept a scrapbook of memories, events and thoughts throughout their life and it was given to your immediate family at your funeral. Would they not be able to see your life from a totally different perspective? I can see that blogs will be a good way of achieving this in the future.

I happened upon what has to be regarded as the website of the year for me so far. My brother pointed it out to me. You can find it at www.tomahawkhotels.co.uk. You have got to see it and tell me what you think. Useability? Accessibility? Target Audience catered for? W3 compliant? I don’t know and I don’t care, I was just blown away how the pictures for the rooms implode into view like a movie special effect. Let me know if you can better it for graphical content, in the meantime I will try and find out how much they were charged (strictly for research purposes).

As I mentioned on Craig Allington’s blog about listening to the music of our chosen CD to inspire the design, and also incorporating the title into one neat package. He has incorporated both in his latest idea. After listening to mine the few times that I have, I found images popping into my head of being sat on a quiet, sunny beach with my headphones on. So my idea to incorporate this beach theme into my own design gels nicely together with the title ‘Orphan Waves’.

After spending an hour looking through coastal photographs through online photo libraries it dawned on me when I got home that the photo I was searching for was under my nose all along on my hard drive in ‘my holiday photos’. And what’s more it’s ‘royalty free’. The hard part for me is finding a way to alter chosen images in a way that compliments the music at the same time showing my ability to design.

I spent quite a bit of time 'inside' freehand when doing my logo, so this time as we are nearing the end of the assignment I am doing my CD centre in Freehand, Cover Image in Photoshop and the cover layouts and inserts in Pagemaker so I meet all the learning outcomes effectively or otherwise.

Timeplan Revised

UPDATE FROM PREVIOUS BLOG:
After using the timeplan to plan the next 3 weeks. I noticed it needed altering slightly to accommodate the date and split college time away from home study time to make it easier to navigate.

The HNC version can be found here.

It can even be split onto 2 A4 Sheets if you find it too small to show 4 weeks at a time.

Assignment Timeplanning Solved?

I know it's a bit late for this assignment but after my talk with John the other week I decided to do something about my forward time planning. Discussions in the class to design something that would suffice everyone seemed to break down early on and no definite decision was made.

I hope I have come up with a forward planning sheet for the whole of an assignment to suit both HNC and HND's planning. The sample forms below are based on an 8 week assignment but can be adapted at the beginning to suit any length, be it 4 weeks or 10 weeks.
Please have a look at them and tell me if they would work for you.

These would then go alongside the sheets that are already provided that work well for week by week planning. I have thought about this quite a bit and the forward planning has always seemed to be my downfall when the grades are handed out.



Comments appreciated please, print them out and try them, it may just help you to create a good 'overall' timeplan without having loads of sheets of paper to sort through that can be confusing during an assignment when sorting out the workload. Not every line needs to be filled out, the lines/hours are to give you a choice on how you spread a task out.

PDF Versions can be downloaded for you to print out better quality here.
HNC
HND
HND2

On another subject, I am a member of www.juicybrainspanel.com where you fill out questionnaires about all subjects and get rewarded with amazon vouchers. The one last week was called 'how creative are you?' so thought it would be just up my street. Upon completing it I was amazed to find I was in the top 1% of the highly creative population.

It made me slightly proud on the day and was a little boost to the ego for at least 4 minutes.

Final Logo

I finally finished my logo for the Ambient World record label. This is the finished version after playing around changing colours and fonts. It has also been measured accurately so everything has a place and is surrounded by a white box when appearing on any other colour but white.

It has a 4:3 ratio as the design would have changed dramatically had it been 2:1 or 1:1. I am hoping that I can get some further comments, especially from the people who opted for one of my other designs. I went with my gut about what the image of the record label should try to portray. I think the colours say 'ambient' while there is an element of 'world' in there. All the while looking like it could belong to a company that produces and sells music of that genre.


I don't know how other people have found working with Freehand but this job alone has taken quite a bit of time as I have had the added task of learning Freehand. I have never used a drawing programme and thinking it would be just like Photoshop was far from the mark.

I kept in mind that among the learning outcomes was to use a Drawing Application effectively. I was hoping that I would have grasped enough knowledge to have a go at creating my CD cover in this application but with the deadline approaching I feel I won't have the time to spend using this programme to it's full potential as I can see from the sample files that it is a very powerful tool indeed.

It is a shame that we can't explore these types of programmes more when there isn't a deadline looming over our heads. I have just touched the surface of Freehand and would like to delve a little deeper when time and workload isn't against me.

A Nice Break

I am really enjoying the Easter Holidays so far. It's nice to have a break from college. However, my wife is getting fed up of me keep pointing out logos and saying what is good and bad about them. It is all around you and you try to look for the hidden meanings or wonder what was going through peoples minds when they created them. I find the whole thing fascinating and feel it is something I would like to delve into more in the future.

I have been tinkering with Freehand a little more now that I have the same version as college, I only had Freehand 10 before and it is vastly different to the v.11 that we use in class. I am still at a loss how they manage to create these fantastic renderings with shading and texture from a few lines. I am looking out for a cheap Graphics Tablet as I find it difficult to use the mouse in some instances. This is something I am going to train in further in the Summer holidays when I have more time. This week has been all about keeping the kids happy, Days Out, Funfairs, Theme Parks, in fact any excuse to empty my wallet. Been nice though.

I have had a few people ask for websites this week and after going to see them armed with a website plan and lots of recently gained knowledge they all went for it. I looked a lot more professional than I have done in the past and knew what I was talking about when it came to accessibility and useability. They showed me previous websites that had been built for them and I was able to show them exactly what I mean when it came to getting lost in a bad navigation system.

It's all the little things that you don't realise at the time that make up the knowledge. All the rest just falls into it's own little place in your subconscious ready to be used at your command.