If its not right its wrong...

Overall I am happy with the progress I have made this week. I will start this journal entry by talking about the recently awarded grades.

Results
A5- Pass
A6- Pass

I am actually quite annoyed with myself about my performance in the last two assignments. As always I think It was a case of silly mistakes cropping up that could have been easily avoided.

The BIGGEST silly, stupid, annoying mistakes I made was with A5. There are advantages of having more than one computer, but the dis-advantages sometimes outweigh the advantages.

I constructed my website on my laptop and all of my other work was done on my desktop. And of course In the panic of getting everything complete I forgot to transfer my website files to the desktop where I later went on to burning the CD.

Of course the website files were still very happily sat on my laptop and were missed off the CD. I knew what I had done only days after submission. It was too late by then. I don’t know if I am angry or upset. Probably a mixture of the two. It was something that I could very well have avoided.

Of course that put a massive downer on the entire assignment. Other than that I think the website went quite well and given the circumstances I am happy, and thankful for the grade.

There were a few things which I could have improved slightly, such as clickable images to take the user to a larger version and is certainly something that will be on the list to consider for any future projects and indeed if I were to do it again.

With regards to A6 (Typography) all was ok; it was just more of a level of consistency. There were a few little parts of one (or two) of the timed tasks, which could have been improved on. It just goes to show, you can’t let your attention go on something like that.

Overall I am happy with my grades. At the start of the course I said it didn’t really matter to me what results I was awarded. It is not really what I am doing the course for. I want the experience and so far there is not a single regret (apart from the CD). One of the main things is that I can certainly see progression in my skills and I have learnt so much. To me that is worth more than some piece of paper that has a grade on it. It is all about self-achievement and how you feel you are doing.

Obviously the grades are very important too, they give people, including myself, a great deal of confidence. To me it is a superficial accreditation for the work, which has been produced, and as a stepping-stone to urge you onto striving for the best.

Print Lecture
The print lecture was quite interesting and answered many questions of the unknown. However I don’t feel I know enough about print to go straight into commercial print. I think I would benefit from having a test run with a printer as a trial and error. I think sometimes that is the best way to learn.

Although I understand more about the colour spaces a little more now I still don’t feel completely comfortable with them. It would be useful to know the effects and see the effects of getting them wrong. It is something that scares me actually.

Style guide
This week I have been concentrating on my corporate style guide. At the same time producing the documents such as the letterhead and business cards. I have enjoyed creating the document. I see it as a design task in it’s self and have used it as a chance to produce another layout using the design principals learnt several months ago and have begun adding the print terms that was in the final lecture of the Year*.

The letterhead and business cards are something that I have particularly enjoyed producing. I have found I quite hard to find a balance between something that works and something that looks nice. The thing with a letterhead is most of the space is required for the letter content. I feel on my design I have utilized the space available to get something that is just right.

Letterhead
Most of the first years have seen my letterhead and have given informal feedback. I would like for those people to give some feedback in their comments. This will allow me to record it and make more accurate amendments to my designs.

The main thing that is worrying me at the moment is the fact that there are 2 objects that flow off the page. A stripe that goes straight the way down. The problem with this is if it was commercially printed it should have a bleed on it. This will push the paper size above A4 thus costing more.

At this time I don’t see it as a problem as we have not been given a “budget”. I think it adds to the design slightly.

Business card
Below is my chosen business card design, which I am very happy with. It fits in with the style of my letterhead and corporate style. It has been designed to be “future proof” in having lots of blank space for such things as long names and email addresses. Incase you cannot see there is a large watermark of my logo as the background. I really like the use of watermarks for things like this it gives a very subtle appearance, which is a massive contrast to the bright stripe down the left hand side. I feel if I did try adding the logo as a solid image but it looked quite “plonked” and cluttered the design. The Tint is at 8% which is just enough for it to be visible but gives the right amount of contrast to make the text legible.




*First Year lectures