D&AD

Busy busy busy... today the team met up and continued working on the D&AD - PJ's smoothie brief. Individually we have all been really busy with live briefs and the screen based communication unit we have just completed. We've got a week now till we are handed our final brief of the course (our professional project). This is a great opportunity to get cracking and finish the live brief i have and the D&AD brief i have been working on as part of a team. We spent a few hours brainstorming our ideas again, just so the project is fresh in the mind and our goal is clear. We spent a while drawing out sketches and making mock ups in illustrator and photoshop. I have made up the idea i spoke about in my last D&AD blog post and it looked OK- still in much need of developing and expanding. To give us the best chance of handing in a successfull outcome we need to keep pushing and pushing our ideas- A few more suggestions that were made;

• Using washes and splashes of colour to make poster vibrant and exciting.
• The use of soft curved type to carry on the companies style.
• Showing the fruit thats in the bottle.
• Humorous taglines- stick in the mind
• Show sport and leisure activities to make brand more apealing to target auidence.
• Fruit and colour exploding out of the PJ's bottle.
  

SBC2 - Online Portfolio - Evaluation

The module Screenbased communication required me to show my understanding of webdesign and branding. I needed to come up with a branding identity for myself " Robert Houliston design " and create a website (online portfolio). I feel this project went reasonably well, i have managed to create a simple yet effective website that communicates my work in a professional manor. I started by researching into the world wide web and varouis different ways that you could make a website. Different software such as text wrangler, dreamweaver and flash. After doing this i spent some time re learning the programs, it has been awhile since i had used flash or dreamweaver and i needed to get back into them. I selected Adobe Flash as the programme to create my site. After Working this out i started designing my personal identity. I did this by looking at the work i have done and i found commonalities in my work, such as the use of greyscale, my love for helvetica :) and strong contrasts throughout my work. I designed my identity which now looks simpliar to the one at the top of this blog. With this 'logo' the colour scheme came quite easily.

The colour scheme
The reason i deiceded to use CYMK and Greyscale is becuase most of my work is very simple and often uses dark greys and blacks and occasionaly alot of blank space, I thought by using this colours and the layout that i went with it would contrast the work that i have to show in my porfolio.

Gallery&Contact&Biography
Getting my gallery right is esstentail to the website. i wanted my work to shown off inthe best possible way.Due to file size restrictions( because i didnt want to take forever to load) i used the thumbnails as a little divider from the menu and where the full sie images will be. This works quite well i think, but i dont think i should have left the blank thumbnails there. The contact and biography pages are kept really simple, a short paragraphy about myself, and my contacts details - its as simple as that! I want to focus of the website to be my actual work so i have kept everything else really plain and simple.

What i am going to change.
Things that i need to change and reconsider before making it a fully live website with my own domain name (www.houlistondesign.com): Adding a copywrite,changin the gallery slightly so the images can be bigger and the thumbnails need repositioning. I am going to be remaking the website in HTML and CSS. Something i have noticed since handing in my webdesign is that my flash document is quite diffuclt to change as their is action script all over the place. I think i will be spending some time at my fathers design studio to re make it on Dreamweaver or Textwrangler. I will still include some flash.

SBC2 - Online Portfolio - Final Critique

Final critique for the website today.

• Personal identity needs to be readdressed.
• Bring back splash page.
• Name needs to be clear - Pretty important.
• Contact page - Change Email and Telephone to (e- and t-) everyone will know what the letters mean, the whole word isn't necessary.
• I need to also put a stop after the personal identity appears - It should only progress to the next page if it has been click on.

I've still got loads to do, the pace of this unit has really slowed down for me , which isn't good as it is horribly near to hand in. Tonight i am going to work out what i need to do and spend all my time working on the essential things i need to get done.

SBC2 - Online Portfolio - Interim Critique

Had another presentation of my work today, Kit Johnson lead the critique. The feedback i recieved is as followed:

• Speed up animation with my identity
• Home button. Load back to homepage- increase navigation. Should it go back to the splash page or the main page with the menu?
• I need to change 'Gallery' with 'Portfolio' - Porfolio is a much better and professional way of naming my work. And this website is my online portfolio so it would be more relvent.

I'm really happy with the way my website is starting to look, however, it is in much need of development and i need to push my ideas further. This website is a key part of my communication to clients and professionals that i will be asking to employee me. So it is vital i make i good impression with my online portfolio.