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.