Today I learnt a really useful feature by looking at an on line tutorial, the feature I learnt was how to create an animated button, this meant that when the viewer scrolls over the button that the button would change colour and also slightly move. This gives the button more character which makes the feature more interesting, so therefore I intend to use this feature in my website design. 

Research

Today I have been looking at other websites for inspiration, I found a lot of inspiration to say the least, I found a feature that I liked on a few websites known as a light box. This feature on websites looks really professional and presents images to a high standard. By looking at these websites I feel that I now have a solid idea of how I will be presenting my work on my website. I intend to look into how I will be able to create this effect on my website by looking at some tutorials on websites given within the brief, and also I will look at other tutorials that I feel will benefit my website. 

Screen based communication 2

Today I was given the new brief which is based on creating my own portfolio for the web. I have been looking forward to this project as I will finally be able to upload all of my work that I have produced onto the web. I studied the brief carefully and thought about what I need to consider when creating my website.

• I have to think about why people use the internet, and how they will be able to link to my site. 
  
• I also need to consider how I will be presenting my self to the intended viewer, this is basically who I am and what I do. To create an identity for my self I will be looking at the style of my work and then incorporating this particular style into my website design. 
• I need to consider what the viewer wants/is looking for, I mean obviously this will take part within my work presented on the website but most importantly the design of the site itself. 

Animal packaging reflection

I felt like I have worked really hard on this project but didn't achieve what I hoped, I think that the idea for my packaging was really good, I just feel I didn't exicute it well enough. I felt it was hard to design the final outcome for my idea as there was no way of creating a net for the packaging as the shape of my packaging wasn't a box. Its a shame because this could of been a strong piece of work to put in the portfolio. So I intend to design a net for a simple box with the graphics that I designed to present in my portfolio. Saying that I do feel that I produced a solid amount of development and research for this project. 

I feel that the graphics I designed for the packaging works really well which I am most pleased with, and I think that the choice of colours that I used for the packaging looks strong, as it was aimed at snowoarders I feel these different shades of blue were appropriate and worked really well. I would like to actually made the packaging for the watch as I feel that it was a really solid idea that I had it just didn't look professional drawn up in illustrator.

Live brief

Today I looked through the D&AD briefs with Robert and Alistair, we found a few of them interesting and found it quite hard to decide on which brief to chose. After a strong discussion we all decided that the PJ smoothie brief was the brief that we would work on as a group. I am excited about being able to work on such an interesting brief and am looking forward to working in a group, and believe that we could produce a strong outcome.

Look Again/Think Again reflection

Its been a bit of a struggle with this project as I kept going back to it and completly changing the design, but after all of this development I have finally came to a design that I am pleased with. I feel this design works a lot better than the previous designs that I have been working on, the message is clear, the type works well and I also think that the choice of colours I have used look strong. Black and white always looks strong against one another due to the contrast between the two. I feel that if I were to do this project again I would of started of by choosing a social issue to design a poster for rather than designing something which is personal to me, I just found it hard to design the poster because there are so many differernt views on wether vinyl sounds better than the average CD/MP3, so really I was designing something that was my own opinion, this made it hard for me to come up with a tagline for the poster. 

Overall thought I am pleased with the final outcome as it puts the message that I intended to put across to the viewer. I also feel that it works well as a poster as it has an impact on the viewer to make them look again and think again.

Greetings cards reflection

I have to admit I don't like these greetings card designs at all, I feel I really stuffed this project up. I don't like anything about them, infact there bloody awful. This is my opinion and I designed them, I suppose you can't be proud of all the work you produce. I feel the main reason why I felt that these designs turned out the way they did was because I admit I started this project way to late, simply because I was trying to finish my Look Again/Think Again poster. Also I spent a mojority of the time creating the stencils that never got used for the cards, I should seeked some advice from a tutor before going off and designing these stencils. This was a bad mistake but hey this is all part of being a designer, you learn from your mistakes. This is what reflecting on your work is all about I have realised so much by looking back at these greetings card designs such as where I went wrong and what I should have done. 

As I said before I feel the end product was really bad, but again I feel that in the end I put a lot of work into this project.

Hand in

I managed to complete all of my work for each project in time for the hand in date and feel that I completed my work to the best of my ability. Handing in all my work felt really good and now feel that I can have a well deserved break over the weekend, After the weekend I intend to start working on the live briefs which I am excited about as this will benefit my chances of gaining a job in the industry, once I have started on one of the briefs I will then start thinking about my website design when I get the brief on thursday.

The deadline is getting closer now and I feel my work is getting closer to completion. There are a few final touches that need to be made on my work so this week I will be planning out what I need to do for each day. Now that I have finished my poster design for the Look Again/Think Again project I intend to create a booklet showing my development throughout this project as I feel that the poster has developed a lot more since the last critique, so I think I will produce this booklet first as I am more up to date with the other projects. Once I have completed this task I will then start working on the other bits of work that I need to do to complete all the projects for the final hand in.

Refining Look Again/Think Again Project

This week I have been refining my projects, as I feel compfortable with how I have progressed with the Animal project I decided to go back and refine the Look Again/Think Again project. I started by looking back through my sketch book and reading the notes that I wrote down from the critiques. I then thought about the correct message I wanted to put across to the intended viewer, the message that I wanted to put across was that vinyl is special and is the best to listen to. So I started to come up with some visual images of how I could show that listening to vinyl is how music should be listened to, to create the images above I have used a photograph of both a vinyl and a pair of headphones with a lead going from the headphones to the vinyl which shows the vinyl is being listened to through the headphones. The lead has been created out of type by using the pen tool to firstly draw the lead and then this enabled me to use the type path tool which allowed me to type along the line that I created for the lead going from the headphones to the vinyl. I then developed the tagline for the poster which I think fits the image well as it puts the intended message across to the viewer and will make the viewer look again and think again.

Final critique

Toady was a good day as I had my design completely finished and ready to present, the critique went really well as I felt I presented my design to a professional standard. I got positive feedback about my design which made me feel good after all the work I have put into creating my packaging design. The only thing I was told to do was to test out what the graphics would look like on the material I intended to use (Paper pulp), so I will try to find a flat piece of paper pulp to print my graphics onto, apart from that I was told my packaging design was complete.

After the critique I started to think about the materials would be most suitable for my packaging so I looked at a website called Chameleon packaging, the website contained lots of materials that were recyclable which I would be perfect for my packaging. As my design was in the shape of a snowboard I had to think of how it could be made, I tried drawing a net for my design but as the shape had lots of curves in it I found this hard to make. So this is why this website helped me, I found a material called Paper Pulp which is made from 100% recycled paper, it is designed so that you can mold a shape into it. I found that this would be perfect to use to create the box for my packaging so using Illustrator I drew up what my box would look like in a 3D perspective. 

Critique

I thought this was my most positive critique so far, I found this because I knew exactly what I was doing and felt that I explained my idea and everything to go with it really well. I had everything to back my idea up as  I researched into what materials I planned to use for the packaging, what graphics I planned to use etc. There was only a slight thing that I was told about changing, which was the shape of the price tag. I created the price tag so that it was in the shape of a snowboard boot, but I was told to think about different shapes to use as some people may not realize that it is a snowboard boot. I agreed with this suggestion and intend to use a shape that would be recognized to snowboarders. Apart from that I was pleased with the feedback I received about my designs and was told to keep developing my idea to create my final packaging design. 

Research

I started of this week by researching further into Animal and there products my self after our group presentation and started to think about what sort of watch would be suitable to use for snowboarders, so I started by looking at Animal's watches which are waterproof and designed for extreme sports. I also looked at different companies which produce products designed for extreme sports, I looked at there products and compared them to Animals products. After reseaching into the product design I decided to look at the work of David Carson, I chose to look at this particular graphic designer because he has a great interest surfing which comes under the extreme sports that Animal design for, I thought his work could give some inspiration of what type of graphics I could use on my packaging design. 

 The next step was to research into snowboarding itself, so I wanted to gain some some knowledge about the history of snowboarding. Whilst reading about the history of snowboarding I was reading about a snowboard designer called Jake Burton Carpenter who is the founder of Burton snowboards. I had never heard of this company as I don't have much knowledge about snowboarding, so I decided to look into this company by looking at there website, turns out that Burton is one of the largest snowboard designers in the world, they had a lot of incredible snowboard designs to look at including different designs for male and female boards. 

 The next day I decided to go and purchase a snowboarding magazine, this particular magazine was called Document Snowboard. I found a lot of interesting pieces in this magazine including some Animal adverts. I also thought it would be a good idea to look at some packaging books to gain some inspiration, so I went to the library and found some interesting books on packaging which started to give me some ideas of what to produce to create my own packaging design.

 So after looking at other packaging designs I started to sketch out some ideas in my sketchbook, the main idea I thought would work best for the packaging of a watch was to have the packaging designed into the shape of a snowboard, I thought this could work well as the shape of the snowboard is a similar shape to a watch when it is laid out flat, this could then give me a lot to work with. 

Animal Project

Today I was given a new brief that requires me to produce a packaging design for a new watch which has been designed by Animal, this brief has really got me interested straight away. The first part of the brief was to split up into groups and produce a presentation between us to show our concept and ideas during this process that we will each move forwards individually. 

 So I went into my group and started of by finding some research about Animal, this helped us brainstorm ideas and thoughts of what we could do, and from this research we looked at the different types of extreme sports that Animal focus on and decided as group that snowboarding would be a strong area to work with. After agreeing this we went of individually to gain more research about designers marketing etc, we then met back after lunch with all this information and started look at who we were going to aiming our packaging at. So we knew we were aiming at snowboarders but from our research we looked at we started to notice the differences between the male and female watches and also the adverts, this was shown through use of colour and also the images themselves. So our concept was to aim at snowboarders aged between 14 and 35, which could be male or female, or even create a uni-sex packaging. I felt this was a strong concept to work with and felt confident about our presentation. 

 There were a few mistakes during our presentation, one of them being there was to much text on the spreads to read, we were told that the presentation should be mainly images with just a small piece of text by them so we can talk about the images more rather than the viewer having to read the text. Although we told this, we were also told that we had a strong idea to go off and work with individually, so although we made a few slight mistakes with the presentation I am pleased that I can now go and start working on some ideas based around this concept.