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.