Ambient Styling

This week had its ups and downs as I received the grades for my last two assignments. One of the things I was really frustrated by this week was the fact that I didn’t realise before I handed in the last assignment that the website doesn’t look finished. I created an image saying that an image was coming soon. I suppose this was only my fault as I was trying to take the easy way out instead of finding the images. In the future I will make sure that I am using all the images I intend to use or create designs that will work with few or many images.

On the upside the other assignment I handed in was a lot better as I managed to get all the work together and not make any silly mistakes as I did in the last assignments before. I suppose this was mainly because all of the work was done in timed assignments instead of been lots of academic work. Some of the things I need to try and do in the next assignment are to push my grades up slightly as I’ve yet to reach the higher grades I should be achieving.

One of the tasks that have been set for me in the upcoming week is to find out how long I spend doing tasks in a week and make a record of this. John believes this will show me where I can do more coursework at home, and I think this will also show where I can do other things so I have a more structured week while at college. I believe this will be an important task for me but I could have really done with doing this earlier in the year.

One of the main tasks of this week was to get the logo finished. I was quite happy that I finally got the logo together as this was one of the main tasks of this assignment. I am really happy with the final design as I have spent a lot of time creating and tweaking the design. I believe from this I have developed my work a lot better than I have done in the previous assignments. I have also realised that you cant just jump from A to B there is the little stagers in between this showing how you came up with the design and what you changed to get their.

Another task for this week was to start work on the style guide. From the screen design I originally designed for the site, I have totally changed the layout. I found that there where too many colours incorporated into the design and the vertical navigation didn’t work on that design. So I decided to lose the blue bar and come up with a new idea for the header part of the page. I feel I have come a long way since the first site I created as this site appears to look a lot more professional and also is really simple to use. On of the things I made sure I didn’t use for this site was buttons. I feel hypertext works better as its easier to use and works better with the design.

Ambient Logo

The main task of this week as been working on the possible logo designs for Ambient World. I started off this week by getting feedback on the rough designs I produced over the weekend. I was quite happy with the choices I got from the feedback as they left some really good ideas to look further into. From the feedback I received I started looking further into some of my designs, which gave me a chance to try and tweak a few things in the design or totally change the idea.

Something that I found a real task was starting to use Macromedia Freehand as this was the best software for creating vector images. At first the software really frustrated me as I was finding it really hard to produce the simplest of shapes. But the more I used the software the easier it became to use.

After a while I knew what I was doing with the software and started to create the first of my designs. Something that I found really challenging was getting the line of the letter “W” to follow the slant of the reverse on the Logo. I solved this by slanting the letter slightly to the left. The next task was to get the letters “A” and “W” To follow the same slant so they could be put side by side. Something I need to make sure I am doing in my vector designs is seeing which geometric shapes I can use to make up the design I am creating.

Next I started work on the second design for my logo which started off with the idea of the companies name with a planet orbiting around it. A got this idea as the music was a lot different to what I’m use to, so it was as if it was from another world. One of the things I found really challenging in this design was finding the right stroke width to use on the orbit. The problem was it stroke width was ever too thick or thin compared to the weight of the text. Eventually I found the right font for the design, which was Arial Black, and I used a stroke of 10pt. This part of the task was really frustrating as nothing seemed to work but I was really happy with the design that came out at the end.