This section is dedicated to my learning writings. Think of it as a blog, that concentrates on what happens during the projects, and where I reflect on what I have learned and seen on that particular day. It's written with the newest projects on top.
Please scroll down the page to read about previous projects.
2nd Semester examination Project: Copenhagen Climate Conference with Dong Energy
What follows here is a progress report that I updated from time to time about what happened during the project.
11/05/2009
Well now. Final project for this semester. Will most likely also be the final project that I do as part of the school here in Lyngby, as I’m going to study in the US for the fall and then be attending a real-life job as part of the school ending. So this one should count.
We received the assignment the previous Thursday. My group from the previous project asked me if I wanted to do another project with them, to which I had no objections since I thought the group work was some of the most coordinated and efficient I had seen in all the groups I had been part of.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Barbora had taken up on an offer to be in a all-slovac group, so we had a open spot in a 4-man group, which was filled out by Hatice. So now our group consists of Hatice, Julia, Garine and myself.
Anyways, this Monday was the first day that the group met up. The project is about the climate meeting that’s taking place in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Our task is to take a company who has some sort of interest in promoting their products connection with the environment and improvement to the climate.
We are supposed to do this through the development of a website prototype that caters to the target audience as efficiently as possible.
As things are now, we have most likely decided on using DONG, a Danish heat and electricity company, as the company for our project. We decided on that we would each have a good look at DONG until we meet again, so we can figure out some good idea’s for how to promoting it’s green intentions.
We also need to get a problemformulation up and running as fast as possible (due this Friday), as well as a time schedule. In the other projects we never really got to do a time schedule from the start and almost always ended up doing the time schedule a day or two before we actually turned in the project. This time around we should probably do it the correct way.
14/05/2009
Today we started out with a couple of hours of education where our teacher gave us some good tips on how to write a good report. After class I sat together with my group. The objective of that day was to finish the problem formulation and present it to our teacher Mette, but we also managed to get some other things done.
Most prominently, we made a timeline and managed to divide the tasks we needed to finish before the next deadline on the 20th where we have to present the Preliminary analysis and design sketches. For the time being, I’ll have to figure what the future communication needs for Dong will be for the 19th. After that we take it together from there before we present it to the teacher on the 20h. Most likely, I’ll also take a stab at the design sketches, since I’m most likely gonna do most of the coding and visualization for the actual site.
19/5/2009
Met up with the others again at school today. We made preparations for the analysis and design sketches presentation that we would have to show to the teacher on the 20th. We used time on making sketches of the design and layout of the page, and talk about the merits of the different decisions and why we made the design decision that we did.
27/5/2009
Forgot to update on the progress lately, but nothing big happened so I think I can let it slide J
We met today for the system design presentation. Basically we had to explain to the teacher how the site is going to function along with showing him some sketches and roughs of the composition. Overall the teacher was pretty pleased with it. The challenge now is to make all the idea’s come true, but all things considered it looks like it’s going to be somewhat simple to make the site. That’s gonna be my job for the next couple of days. On Sunday I’ll send what I have to the others so we can get something done on the final touches.
04/6/2009
Have turned in our assignment now. It required blood, sweat, tears and awfully long days to get all the stuff together, but we managed it somehow and are now in the clear. All that awaits now is the examination where we have to answer questions about the assignment on the 19th. Ah well, who said the pressure would ever stop J.
Update Finished the exams now and I got a 7 on the 12 scale. Think that corresponds to about a solid B. And pretty happy about it and I know the errors that came up can be corrected for the next time I have an examn so my mind is at peace. And now, summervacation
Semester 2 - Project 2.
13/03/09
We were assigned the project 3 days ago, but since we haven’t really done anything until now I’ll just start from here.
The group got together on Friday after classes. The group consists of Barbora, Garina, Julia and myself.
We worked on getting a good and nice problem formulation up and running so we are ready on Monday when we have to get it cleared with Mette.
We also got started on a project overview. That is that we put down a priority list of the tasks that has to be done doing the project and subtasks as well. We wrote it all done on big and small post-it notes for better overview.
Oddly enough, this section was also done with a few different groups involved. Many people hadn’t shown up for classes on that Friday so there was a lot of single people from different groups loitering about, so on the teachers request the entire class (about 6-7 people at that time :P) sat down and worked out a list of tasks that needed to be done during the project. It was actually quite efficient and I feel much better about the project now, even though I still don’t really have a clue how to do a market analysis.
Our group split some of the subtasks up between us, so some will look at the market and I will have a look at a model called the “SWOT analysis”. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats. The basic idea is to find out where the company’s strengths and weaknesses are and what they should be on the lookout for and what to take care of. It’s a very crude version here, but it will most likely be in the report if it sounds interesting J
16/03/09
Got back together with the group again today at school. First thing we did was getting an appointment time with Merethe at the faculty office. We had some 2 hours before the meeting where she would have a look at our problem formulation, so we went to the class and got up to date on what we had done and what needed doing. So far we have a functional SWOT analysis and product portfolio rolling. The market analysis was slightly shakier, but there’s still plenty of time so it should be done for the next time we meet up.
We went to the meeting with Merethe. She told us that she could approve the problem formulation but we didn’t go deep enough with the problems so that would need a fixing. She also clarified a part of the assignment that had left me mystified. They used a term called “Delimitation”. Sheer stroke of brilliance, only it doesn’t mean delimiting uh uh, it means –limiting-. Writing down where the limits for what you include is. Well who would have guessed that when they wrote the exact opposite of what was expected? I certainly didn’t! I sure hope that it was a fluke otherwise I will never be able to take one of the project papers serious again.
On a more serious note I’m slightly worried about doing the motion graphic part of the assignment, but luckily we will have lessons on it at school tomorrow so we will most likely get a better idea of what to expect of it. And it’s not like I don’t know how to use flash…
23/03/09
There sure is quite some gaps between my entries this time around :P
Finally got together with most of the group today where we discussed some of the pressing issues that we are facing right now.
Up to that day, I had used an entire day reading the big green book called Marketing Management, trying to understand the concept of segmentation. Unfortunately, the green books seems to be close to useless when it comes to actually learning something. It’s okay in teaching you the theoretical stuff, but it doesn’t explain how to actually use the theory in real-life and ultimately if it insists on just telling theory (which is quite hard to understand btw, since the books insists on using a huge amount of bullshit to explain simple things) it’s not really gonna get us anywhere. As it is now, It seems that the books diagrams are by far the most useful thing.
The annoyance with the green books aside, I managed to make a segmentation so now we are gonna meet up today this Wednesday and try and have a look at the Design Brief. Gonna be nice to do some actual group-work for a change. This group has mostly used the tactic of letting people do the individual parts of the marketing theory on their own and that seems like a pretty weird thing to do since many of the parts relies on using brainstorming or at least group feedback to get a meaningful result.
Hopefully this wont cost us too much in the long run.
25/03/09
The group and me met up today on workshop day. We had a look at what we had done and what we had yet to finish. Got the first version of the report together as well. Far from finished, but at least we have put our text together in one document now so things are starting to look at little more finished.
The design analysis is also done, so the major concern right now is getting the design brief ready. We have to show it to the teacher on Friday so the schedule is kinda tight. :P
After that the next major concern will be making the actual motion graphics movies which is also part of the project design requirement. I’m slightly less worried about that part though. We’re gonna make it in flash so it shouldn’t be too troublesome, as long as we do some proper planning beforehand. We’re planning on having a “inspiration” gathering where we look at different videos and plan out what our own is gonna look like, so we can actually produce something meaningful.
I just hope that we can agree enough on what to do so we can start the actual production. Hopefully the weekend will be enough to get it mostly ready.
30/03/09
The written parts are almost done now. Thank god for that. Now the great challenge stands in the motion graphics movie itself.
Up for today, we managed to pull a good bunch of images together and write up some ideas for how to approach making the actual video. After a few hours, though, we still hadn’t really gotten seriously started on the vide, we had only managed a few attempts at the effects we had in mind for the video itself.
By the end of the day, things were looking brighter though. Barbora and me had gotten a plan together for how the sections of the movie should be divided up, and what kind of effects should be applied to the different sections, and by the time we finished up in the afternoon we had a pretty solid plan for how to approach the movie.
After we went home I worked the movie out at home, trying to get the timing and basic composition of the movie down. It looks okay now and fits with the music so now all I’ve gotta do is the actual animation + a few code tweaks so we have a replay button fx.
31/09/09
Somewhat a busy day today. I was hard at work with animating the entire motion graphics video, and with both lunch and a school newspaper interview interjecting in my time schedule, it became somewhat late before I went home and even then I wasn’t all done yet. Luckily it was only 1 scene that still needed to be done and some simple coding for a replay button, but as I write this, everything is done now. The video has been uploaded and the files has been sent to the others. They will burn a CD with the report and make a hardcopy and turn the whole thing in at the reception tomorrow morning, so no I’m off the hook.
Thank god for that. A project about market analysis doesn’t exactly rate high on my interest scale, but at least the group was a nice group (hardworking girls J). Hopefully they will also be up to the challenge for the next project that will consist of making a website.
And of course the obligatory questions:
What I learned this time around was the use of different market related models such as the Boston model and SWOT matrix.
It’s hard to say whether or not I expected to learn these exact things, but I guess I had a good idea that I would be learning models of different kinds, since economy and analysis’s generally likes to support themselves to models in order to make sense of complex data.
Frankly, I don’t feel like learning a whole lot about marketing, but I guess I don’t have a choice all things considered. I wont make any assumptions about what to learn though, I’ll just take it as it comes.
Semester 2 - Project 1.
12/02/2009
The new project was unveiled today at school. Apparently we are going to make a website about food, mostly aimed at students and people where the budget is kind of tight. The list of requirements seems like a pretty big thing this time around, but it should be manageable.
At the same time I also managed to find a group. We will have a 4-man group that will consist of Stine, Lawrence, Peter L. and myself. Hopefully we will turn out something interesting.
We decided to have an extended weekend, so as to collect our thoughts a little and make some initial preparations for the project.
Edit* Peter contacted me Sunday and told me that he was sick and wouldn’t be coming to school Monday. Unfortunate, but luckily we are not pressed for time yet so it should be manageable.
19/02/2009
Okay, it’s been a week since the last entry and there’s not really a lot to report. We took it easy at start, and following that I almost haven’t seen anything from the other group members. Stine and Peter went to town and took pictures of different products for use with the homepage, which is fine but I’d have preferred that they were around school as well so we could do some actual work on the project, since me and Lawrence can’t just sit and make all the decisions for how the page should be made up.
We did manage to get together yesterday on the 19th though. We didn’t manage to make huge progress, we were still missing Stine, she’s apparently sick, but we did discuss some of the details pertaining the site.
We decided that since we had such a huge list of requirements for the site we were to collect data for the moment. I’ll most likely also have a look into making a navigation chart of something, despite the fact that we don’t have fully decided on what to put on the site yet, but we can always change it later on, and it’s a good thing to at least have an early draft put down.
23/02/2009
Not an insanely productive day, but we managed to discuss some more issues with the site and somewhat agree on a layout for the interface. We still have plenty of work ahead of us though. We have to get the articles we need as well as recipes + we need to make a graphical design, make the site and then test it.
And after that comes the report writing. God this really sucks.
It seems I just can’t find any enthusiasm for this project. It’s like a total copy of the 4th project in 1st semester where we also had to make a website, and our group even went to the trouble of providing lots of content.
26/02/09
Made a lot of progress today in the workshop. Unfortunately, Peter didn’t come because he felt that he was working more effectively on his home computer. But well, that just means that you are in no position to argue if the group takes a decision when you weren’t there.
We sat down a made a major brainstorming, a proper one this time, in order to come up with a name for the website. Eventually we settled for Studentchef.com. We also managed to divide the work tasks between us, so Lawrence and Stine will take care of the written content for the website. That’s the articles, themes recipes and stuff like that. Peter will handle a logo and the report while I build the actual website itself. Not an easy task, but it shouldn’t prove to be too difficult.
Luckily we have an entire weekend to each work on our part, but I still think that we will have a long day on Monday which is the final day we can work before we have to turn in the project on Tuesday.
2+3/03/09
Decided to put these to days as one intro since they pretty much flowed together this time :)
Monday 2nd we all met up at school around 9 AM and started the final stretch on the project. Peter was working hard on the report, even though he had a mishap with his software, meaning that he had to go home and get his stuff updated and then come back to school again.
Lawrence was working on getting the last articles ready for the website, and Stine was having a hay day with writing all the last recipes for upload.
I myself was working on the actual website. Up to that day, the website had only been drawings on a piece of paper, and some basic DIV tags in dreamweaver.
We worked all that day until it was 6 PM where we all went home to do the last stuff.
I kept working when I came home. Me and Stine both worked throughout the night. She was getting the theme articles and recipes finalized and sent them to me as they got ready along with pictures for the site.
When I got them, I would process the pictures in photoshop where I cleaned them, resized and cut them for the website, and put the recipes in their place on each site subsection. I kept working on the site until around 6 AM. At that point had been up for more than 24 hours and was dead tired, but at least the page was now done and ready.
Lawrence and Peter went to the school to turn in the report.
I took a well-deserved rest for some 10 hours :)
The fun isn’t over yet though. We have to plan a presentation of the site at school, and then we have to present it. I’m not looking forward to it, since we cut a lot of bends on this one. On the other hand I’m so tired of this assignment that I can’t wait to get it over with. Hopefully there will be a bit more fun to be had on the next assignment.
Semester 1 - Project 5. Remake of the portfolio.
You wont find a section on this website dedicated to the 5th project, since the whole project is somewhat intangible. Bascially, the assignment is to rework my portfolio website on my own. As I write this, I am now 6 months into the course, and about to start on the second semester of my education as a multimedia designer.
I thought this would be a relativly easy assignment, and a good one since I've been wanting to give my site a good make-over. It wasn't to be as easy though.
*Whine on*
First of all I ran into one of the greatest creative droughts I have ever experienced. I cannot count how many times I did some design or another, just to start over again or get totally stuck. Working with a media as "dry" and slow as webdesigning, can really be though on the creativity, especially because it's far from anything that's possible to do with HTML.
I'll be the first one to admit that I perhaps was a bit lax for the first while when the vinter vacation started, during which we are supposed to do this assignment, but that doesnt make it fair that in the last week up to turning in the project here, where I was planning on doing the bulk of the actual work of making this page, I get hit extremely hard by a nasty case of the flu, totally disabling me.
Making the page turned into a frantic rush against time, with an all-nighter and somewhat dissatisfaction. I can always improve the site, webdesign is always fluent, but I'd rather that the site looks top-notch when it rolls out the gates. Guess you just can't get everything, and all things considered, the page could be far worse off. At least all the coding works like it should, and the slimbox java code is pretty nifty to look at, so I think I'll do just fine for this one. The bigger problem is gonna be to do a presentation about this page, since I'm not all that much of a presenter.
*whine off*
Time for some reflections on all my projects as a whole.
What did I learn? Tons of stuff. When i started on this line of study, I didnt have the faintest idea of how to make webpages, use flash or what to consider when trying to cater to people, and look at me now! Roaring out div after div tag :)
It goes well in line with what I expected to learn. Not too much too fast, but I dont feel like were just twiddeling our thumbs, so in general I think we are making good progress.
It doesnt mean that I feel top-notch though. There are tons of stuff that I have to hit up to find out what they are, and there are still stuff like CMS system, database handling and color theory that I'm expecting for us to try our hand at somewhere in the future. It sounds a bit dry, but hey! Noone said that school was fun and games. Besides, it's mandatory knowledge if we wanna make something of ourselves in this line of business.
All I can do now is just hang in there. I can feel my skills grow all the time, especially this one has boosted my skills with page-building significantly, and before that I saw a lot of growth in my group handling skills, even though I quite loathe being in charge of a group. I'd rather do the fun graphical work :)
I guess that's it for this time. There will be a new round up when we conclude the next project. That'll probably be in about 1½ months.
Semester 1 - Project 4.
17/11/2008:
Found a group today at school. It’s going to consist of Frederic, Jason, Lawrence and me. I am already a bit troubled by the group though. Jason and Lawrence is just fine, but Frederic have already written to us that he is very much absent from the group-work because he has to go to work.
That does not bode well, if we are supposed to have a group that works together.
On a different note, we managed to put together a “What are we aiming to learn” and a problem-formulation today.
Tomorrow we have a lot of spare-time in the early hours, so we are most likely going to gather some more information about the Monastery, that we have chosen as the target of our subject.
18/11/2008
Today was a quite productive day. We got the goal summarization done, made an overview of what we need to do and should be careful of, made a Thorlacius model and planned out how we are gonna do our research.
Unfortunately, Frederic wasn’t here today either, but we have sent him information on that we are going to do a fieldtrip this Thursday to the monastery by the lake. Hopefully he won’t have to work again, so he can come with us. Would be nice if he actually got to contribute in some way…
19/11/2008
We didn’t have much to do this day, since most of our planning revolved around collecting material for the page.
We did do some brushing up on the objectives and goals though, and planned out some idea’s for media we could put on the page. Things like embedded video’s from youtube and a map from google was all considered.
20/11/2008
Jason, Lawrence and me went on an excursion to the monastery today. We took plenty of photos of the area surrounding the monastery itself, and also did a few short videos. Unfortunately, the nature around isn’t incredibly appealing when it’s rain-soaked fall weather, but perhaps we can mix in some photos from the net to show the summer parts too.
We also went inside the monastery that has been renovated, and converted into a small-time museum. The lady at the reception was kind enough to allow us free access when we explained that we were students, doing a website project on the monastery.
She even asked us to contact an historian that is connected to the monastery, and show him the website when it is done.
We might perhaps even be looking at the possibility of selling the website when it’s done if they really like it :P
We took plenty of photos of the inside of the monastery, studied their exhibitions and managed to secure and good handful of different leaflets, containing story and background material for the monastery.
All in all a very productive day. Tomorrow we are gonna sit down and study the material. There’s so much of it that it might take us a few days before we have gotten through it all, and have figured what will make it to the page.
Good thing we have a good while before the project needs to be done. We should also consider making early diagrams of how the website should be working.
21/11/2008
Somewhat productive day. We managed to get a lot a decisions done on how to divide the tasks, how the page should look like, and having a good look at the pictures.
We are still deep in the planning, but we have started on both the look and the function of the actual page, and at this point it feels like we are still ahead of the game.
Lets just hope that we don’t run into any unforeseen problems.
25/11/2008
Looked through a homepage proposition that Frederic had sent to us today. Overall it looked quite nice with very few things to change, so I can start resting a bit more easily when it comes to thinking about the homepage.
The only problem I can really see for the homepage is that we are most likely gonna let Frederic handle most of the coding and production of the homepage, and that isn’t very good considering that we are all supposed to improve at coding homepages.
Ah well. Guess it will come in time. It’s also just as important that we learn how to plan and execute a proper production.
Unfortunately, Frederic wasn’t in school to receive the feedback from teachers himself, but we sent at mail to him with what the teachers said.
We also agreed upon starting work on our own individual things.
The whole problem with doing a report like this is that it’s hard to keep people together for extended periods of time and therefore it’s also hard to get a report like this written.
Therefore we have decided that we individually write some keywords and short memos for the report, and we pick out what sounds best and streamline it later on. As I’m writing this we have a little more than a week before we have to turn in our project, so I guess we are still in good time, but it wont take much slipping on our part before we run out of time. We have to keep up the pace.
That also goes for me. Been wasting a bit more time these past few days than I’d care to admit, but it’s just so hard to take time for schoolwork when hugely entertaining games are released :P
28/11/2008
We only met shortly today, but it was still productive. Discussed some of the issues surrounding the report and got some clarification on what was still needed for the homepage.
Time is getting tight though. If worst comes to worst, I will just have to pull some all-nighters since I blame myself if there are any delays.
01/12/2008
No word from Frederic today, but he’s usually responsible enough to get stuff done on his own, so that’s not too much of a concern.
Had some more stuff finished as well. Jason got the layout in Indesign finished and Lawrence got the communication model to look nice in Visio, so what we really need now is the actual report content that I’m working on getting done.
Main concern right now is getting the use case analysis done, and making a user test with someone.
Time is getting tight now. Doesn’t help that we was informed that we have to turn in the project this Wednesday, that is the 3rd and not the 5th like we though. The all-nighter I was talking about seems all to real right now.
I’m gonna work on the report throughout this evening. We cant afford to have the report fall right now. The final result of the project is not as important as being able to show the teachers that we actually thought about the development in the right way.
02/12/2008
Not much to say about this day. Got some more stuff finished on the report, and most of it is in order now except for a few things like user test and other stuff. But in order to do those sections we –must- have the website. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen or heard much from Frederic that is almost solely handling the website.
If he doesn’t turn up tomorrow we are in very deep shit. We wont be able to make the deadline if he doesn’t show up and is able to help out with the last sections of the report.
I’ve requested that he comes, so lets hope that he does. Like it or not, I might have found another person in class that I will strong objections against being in a group with again in the future.
03/12/2008
Work was pretty frantic today. We still needed to write most of the report and perform a test on the website + a multitude of all sort of little things. Thankfully, we got it all fixed and I sent the finished text for the report to Jason.
04/12/2008
Okay, so the text hadn’t reached Jason, but at least he had made a layout so it was more or less just a matter of getting the text inserted and fixing it up.
It took some time. I could at least take some solace in the fact that we were far from the only group that was doing a lot of last minute work on their reports, and from what I could see most people were turning in their reports later that day.
For some odd reason, we also had to make a presentation of the report on the very same day that we were to turn it in.
Went reasonably well for our group. Teachers didn’t mention any real foul-ups on our part, so I guess it’s a mission accomplished.
And then for the obligatory project evaluation:
I think we managed to reach the main goal of making a website concerning something around Esrum lake. The site is fully functional, and doesn’t have any real errors that you notice. If there’s really something to mention in terms of errors it’s probably that the site hasn’t been optimised for use with internet explorer yet, just with firefox. Not much can be done about that since we haven’t been taught how to make optimisation for different browsers yet, so I guess it’s acceptable.
What I learned about myself is that I can get pretty assertive when I have to. My group was somewhat lax this time, and didn’t have a whole lot of drive so I found that I often had to sit down and simply make decisions and tell the guys how far we were and what needed doing from time to time.
Not a totally bad thing, but I still prefer the role of being the graphics guy to the administrative role I had this time. I don’t think I got to make anything creative for this project. Frederic was taking care of the websites design, Jason handled the layout for the report, Lawrence took care of diagrams for the report and all I got to do was making decisions and basically write the entire report.
God I hate writing reports.
But it’s also nice to know that I really took on a role this time that I dislike just for the sake of making sure that the project would turn out right. Guess that means I was really serious about it. After the slapping we received from the report my project 3 group turned in, I was set on making sure that the next report would be better. Luckily, it turned out that it was loads better. So I guess that’s also what I’m particularly proud over: That I could force myself to do something I usually dislike doing for the sake of making a good end result. Let’s just hope I wont have to do that too often.
Next time I should probably find someone with strong administrative skills :P
New things I learned is how much damn work it is to keep a project group on their toes. All the planning, all the overview you need to keep and simply all the workload that’s connected with it is enough to make one smack his head into his laptop.
Guess that will be enough for this time. Talk you next project.
Semester 1 - Project 3:
29-10-2008
We sat down for the really first time today. Although it was kinda backwards, some of the group members had already made the company logo even though we hadn't clearly defined who the primary target group was yet. Luckily, we came to the decision that the logo would do well in catering to the target group we eventually worked out, but clearly, it isn't adviced to start doing the actual visual work until we have defined who we are trying to appeal to, but I guess people just wasnt able to supress their urge to do actual graphics work, rather than trying to analyze target groups.
Hopefully, it's a habbit people will grow out of as their creative side gets stimulated.
We also managed to figure out a problem formulation.
I also noticed that we had some problems reaching quick decision. I think this is mostly because our group has 3 "strong personalities", each with a idea of how the project should be.
This could be both a good and bad thing. The good part is that any decisions made has been discussed to death with several angles and arguments for why it should be that way. The bad thing is that it significantly slows down the project.
Let's hope the personalities can show enough restraint to let decision go through that are not entirely to their liking.
Semester 1 - Project 2:
09/10/2008
The second assignment was to make 3 add banners for a fictional travel company, working as a group.
We managed to make the 3 banners, although I feel that we probably didnt stick too well with the consistency of expression, but given that we have never made a banner before or had to do work like this as a team before, I think it lies within the range of forgiveness.
Personally I found that working as a team had both it's share of advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages was that there was a much wider range of creative input for how to make the banners, the company and the production of the banners themselves.
Workload is also divided so it's not so hard on each members.
The disadvantages is closely related to the advantages though. All that creative input can sometimes delay the process, especially if people aren't willing to give up their idea's if the group thinks they shouldnt be used. This can easily extend the ammount of time you have to use, if you have to produce arguments for every design decision that you propose and the group have to make up their minds wether to go for one or the other idea.
Workload can also be a problem if there are some teammembers that are better at using the tools to make the product, or if the entire team needs to have a hand in the production process. For productions that are so relativly easy as this was, it almost requires the entire team to sit around the same computer, in order to make sure that noone is overheard in the production process.
That also brings me to a personal oppinion of mine: Having such a big group (in my case, 4 people) for such a relativly simple assignment is counter-productive. Having 4 people for the creative developement process is fine in itself, so there can be as much creative input as possible, but once you move into the production phase it would be much more efficient to have a single effective individual to make the production decisions according to the guidelines thought up by the creative team.
Of course, this wasnt possible for this assignment since it was a requirement that everyone participated, but that is the ideal situation when you consider how easy the product is to make.
The shortcommings didnt stop people from trying their best though. I never got the feeling that anyone was slacking or uninterested in the project, so that's always a good thing.
And also, considering that I have never made a banner before this assignment, I'd say that we did pretty well. The banners work like they should without any obvious faults or glares, so I think we have some room to be proud of ourselves.
I also learned plenty of new stuff. The banners themselves consisted mostly of basic stuff (movement tweens, opacity changes etc.) but there was plenty of other things on a non-technical level that I learned along the way. Group dynamics, how hard it is to make a creative product when you have an group of equals (no specific job description) and getting the approval once the actual product is made.
And on to the technical process:
Company and logo:
It might seem odd, but one of the bigger problems was comming up with the actual company name and logo. Names and logo's usually go hand in hand and it has a big role in determining the way the adds will be made, so deciding on the name and logo took some time.
We eventually decided on calling the company MAD travels with a fingerpainted spiral to underline the crazyness of the name. We used illustrator for that part since it doesnt really care how much you stretch or manipulate lines and it also has a lot of cool line effects.
With the name and logo done, it was time to move on to the banners.
The banners:
Despite the advantages that illustrator has when working together with Flash, we opted for using photoshop for the actual production. The 3 banners would consist mostly of bitmap images, and the only element that would be Vector graphics was the text. Now flash can nicely do text on it's own (heck, even photoshop makes it's text with vector graphics) so we didnt use illustrator for the banners themselves.
So the pictures would be brought into photoshop, manipulated to get better colors, cropped and imported into flash. When new pictures was needed, they would be directly cropped in photoshop and copy-pasted into flash.
After that it was mostly just down to manipulate all the elements of the scene. Moving and using opacity was mostly what was needed. Biggest problem was keeping track of all the different layers and their timelines, so layer folders was widely used for layers that had some sort of relation with each other.
So that's about it. Dont think I can say much more to this assignment. Banner links are in the art section.
Semester 1 - Project 1:
22/09/2008
If we use the provided as a springboard for my reflections:
Did I reach my goals? Pretty much. The portfolio works at it should and it looks somewhat nice without brimming with artistic expression. Future versions will probably get a good tuning on the visual front, but for now, this will do nicely.
What did I learn about myself? I found that I am willing to make do with something that is less than I expected, but I jump at the chance immediately if I find a way of doing it better. Sorta like a healthy compromise between ambition and reality sense.
Did I make a serious effort? I'd like to think so. All the requirements of the assignment was fulfilled, and I am fully satisfied myself with what I am turning in so I guess that takes it that I'm serious.
Anything in particular I'm proud off? Well I guess the sheer effort it took to make the portfolio and that it functions properly is something to be proud of, considering that it's the first assignment and we barely know what we are doing yet :)
Did I learn anything new? I learned to make a site (okay, semi-site), I got some reflections of myself in order to try and market myself. It's not perfect, but I generally dont like the prospect of promoting myself since I find that somewhat self-concieved. Guess it's just something that I'm gonna have to get used to in this line of business.
That's it for the reflections for this time.
