Dreamweaver part one

1.0 Project requirements

1. Identify purpose of website, the target audience and the audience needs

2. Identify website content appropriate to the target audience

3. Make websites accessible

4. Project management tasks and responsibilities

(Purpose)

Online presence

Increase profile

Standardise

(Target audience)

Potential employers

Potential clients

Other designers

Like minded people

Education

Stochists

(Audience needs)

Your identity - who you are

Your work - portfolio

Contact details

Prices (look like it's an offer)

Feedback proof (show full project for client with feedback from client)

Organisation is the key

(Identify appropriate content)

Look at other designers websites

Ask target audience what they would be looking for in a website

Ask other designers for advice

Accessible - needs to be online - Available to everyone, sound, legible font/ typeface, needs to work on a tiny screen as well as big monitor.

Not DVD's they get binned

Examples

www.ollymoss.com

(to blank, looks unfinished, not a good finish for first impressions, however you do want to click on something. When links are open it looks really good, Content driven site, Looks really good when opened, clear and legible. navigation is simple)

www.standardimage.jp

(Thought it was still loading, slow, bad use of colour, bad layout, bad typeface, links are not standardized, navigation jumps round, being fancy doesn't do it justice)

www.contrast.ie

(Personal, doesn't work on all screens, interesting interaction, quite complex, what do they do, image based website is intreaging but it doesn't navigate clear and simple)

www.circofrafico.com

(doesn't work at all)

www.jet-pac.org

(Looks like a template, very clipart, un aware of who they are, what they do? just looks like a blog, unclear navigations, interesting designs and pdf layout, takes a while to understand)

www.cabanonpress.com

(clear, good navigation, to much text, unlegible, gallery = photos not text that you can't read, hand rendered effect achieved, the menu is fun, background is to dark. Clear what it is)

www.leeds-art.ac.uk

(Tabs are unaccessable unless you use the scroll bar, navigation shoots around, takes ages to get where you want to go, i.e. emails. VLE. It is to much hard work, hard website to design with amount of pages)

www.news.bbc.co.uk

(Big website, easy navigational menu, huge content, easy to control, simple design, works effectively)

Navigation at the top, covers up the content,

Navigation at the left doesn't cover up the content.

The exception is www.apple.com, combination of navigation, categories and sub categories.

4 princibles of web design:

LAYOUT

basic layout, balance, flow, alignment, resolution, work with grids.

TYPE

fonts, font size, standard fonts (system), font stacks (when you replace a font with another font),

COLOUR

colour gamut, RGB, contrast, web safe, hexadecimal code - #fff, #ooo, #ccc

NAVIGATION

clear, simple, fixed place/ consistent, stay to the left, in context with website

Maximum screen size - 800x600

Fixed scroll

w=80%

Position?

pretty damn scary if you ask me..

Development

As I thought it wouldn't take me to long to make a digital example of what I meant by the two examples of previous development I produced them really quickly.

I found that they looked quite funny and interesting but did not advertise to the market we planned. So these images were nothing more than a bit of a fun side idea.

Male versions and female versions to avoid sexism.

even a little collage.

I liked this idea below as a simple guide to promote smiling. I think it was an interesting concept but again it wasn't a competition piece at all.

Although these are not to relevant I think that it was vital to get the ideas out of my head so I could then progress with the work, otherwise I would of just had these images giving me a designer block.

Ideas

Anna and I did some illustrations based on the answers that were given in the questionnaire. We found that the words said so much more in images and made it seem a lot more interesting to us.

We also produced a few ideas based on some of the quotes which we found on my design context to do with smiling.

The above image basically states that it doesn't matter what language you speak as everyone smiles in the same language.

Some of the ideas were stating that a smile brighten ups the darkest of days. My idea for this was some spot colour photography where everything in the line of a smile was in colour and the rest was black and white.

One image was a thumbnail that says that a laugh is a bursting smile which I thought would be a cool example to use some vector shapes shooting out of some ones mouth, happy shapes. very photoshop orientated.

My final images are development stages of some of my thumb nails. I chose two I found interesting and thought I would pitch to Anna as a funny idea. These were:

The 4 stages of smiling

and you are never fully dressed without a smile.

Questions and image

(I have accidently posted this back to front so the images are in reverse order)

I created another poster which people could then fill in with whether they wanted to or not, I made 5 and placed them up around university and on on notice boards outside. Unfortunately every one was immature and wrote stupid remarks which were dismissed from all of our work and the ones in town were either destroyed via weather or ripped down. (fail)

However after completing the other questionnaires we got a series of interesting answers some use full and some not. i.e. lucazade, starbucks and mc donalds are other rival brands = no go?

answers we liked was smile. slinky, natural history museum sports etc, they are cheeky, fun, active and smart. Everything we want to show for the feel good drinks company.

I drew some little icons to get a little visual iconic idea on how some things would look. some of the images work very well and would look great in a poster.

Below are the results that we correlated on a piece of paper to find out which had the most tallys and which was more appropriate.

I circled in red the things which would look good on the campaign which again are good qualities in a person which make them happy and others around them.

Smile and the whole world smiles back at you

After we had circled the things we thought were appropriate and then in the bottom right we wrote down the words we wanted to use.

below are images of the questionnaires we produced, I chose to make them in different fun colours to help inspire the people who were answering the questions to be more positive and happy about their answers. I think in the long run this worked a lot better than any old black and white questionnaire would of.

As an end result of the questionnaire we correlated a series of over 150 different answers which at the moment was enough to work with.

I re drew the logo and made a questionairre

So I could get a feel for what the drinks company were all about I thought it would be a great idea to trace their logo on illustrator to get a better understanding of what they want to communicate, I discovered a few interesting little factors when going over the logo which actually made me smile with how subliminally cheeky there are, for example the 'g' of 'good' if you look closer at the descender there is a little curve which makes a dimple of a smile in the counter space around the shape and the counter in the 'g' is an eye. straight away a simple character, the typeface works very well to preserve what they want to be, which is outgoing fun and happy. The curves of the letters make it very happy, ask for the stick man 'Feelix' he is in a yoga position which makes the drink appear to be healthy and good for you as yoga is very important exercise.

After I completed the logo we decided to make a questionnaire targeted at three different audiences all between the ages of 18 and 35:

- Healthy people (exercise a lot) we thought a good place to hand these out would be outside the gym at the light or at exercise classes such as Anna's dance studio.

- Average joes, people who are either going to work, college or university (hand these out around town or out side Leeds uni for about 08:45am

- General public (random people) in the city center mid day saturday, just to get some stronger results.

The question we chose is simple. What makes you feel good? an object, place and activity. This keeps the answers broad and fun and will give us good statistics and a good background about what it takes to make people smile. With knowing this we can then help to incorporate this into a design with which creates a scenario in which feel good drinks can be involved.

The brief

Rationale:

Action plan - I beleive that this action plan is a great little contract which we are both confident with and are sure that neither of us will have to get our suing books out.. well yet


Good brief - we chose this brief die to the Economics the final product/ products will not be as expensive to produce as say the merchendise for the Hovis brief.
There is a lot of space to take a wide approach with this, all though they want one thing they havent stated a certain way to do it, of course this can be a bad thing as it means they don't know what they want. We wouldn't have chosen it if we were working independently I would of happily chosen the monster munch brief. We believe that it has Most achievable outcome and that we have a good chance of winning as well as it feels great to have a hands on approach to something after the digital brief in the last module.

Bad brief , This was the cartoon network brief, the problems this brief had was they were asking for a hell of a lot, the reason we didnt choose it is due to the fact it was much more after effects related and looked to be a real digital approach to this module which neither of us wanted. We found out that cartoon network are very broad with what they want, and who they want it to relate to.

Overall I think Anna and I have chosen an interesting brief to get us back in the swing of things in the hand rendered world of design, as well as it being a brief we are both confident with, so confident that we can get on with other briefs around it without having a panic attack.

Evaluation

In this module I believe that knowing the audience was vital to developing my work appropriatly. I began this by looking at different Idents and different channels also looking on different sites such as ESPN and NBA. By looking at these things I discovered how I wanted to approach my subject, the tone and audience.


Throughout the project I have done quite a bit of development although I believe I could of done more, I think that experimentation has worked to my advantage on this project and helped me get the tone and approach I wanted. However if I had the chance to reproduce this, I think that I would try a lot more test pieces on my final video, and I would deffenitly be more ambitious with my DVD functions and contents, I wish I had documented some of my storyboards propperly but I hadn't and lost the work which is my fault and I should of learned from it prior. As regards to the introduction I think it hit the tone I wanted and I am happy with the outcome, Although I can see many lines of improvement that I could take due to learning how to actualy use after effects. In a way there is a lot I wouldn't change about the project because of the amount I learned on after effects and due to the stages I took I learned things that other people didn't actually know as others did. I struggled with this project but found it very rewarding as I learned so many new things.

I believe my final product met the brief although I do think I could of made it more interesting, I am happy that I learned about research for digital, storyboards are very vital to the production of any digital i dent or so. I believe that I could document my work so much better and in more order. I think if I design for digital again I could make it make a lot more sense as I actualy know what I am doing and where I would want to take it in future.

rationale

My project is about advertising a top ten introduction to a top ten basketball players. The audience is based around 21+ American sports fans and will be shown on ESPN sports channel, as it is an appropriate channel which is relevant to the target audience and the subject.

The scenes in my movie mean different things, the start is a basic introduction of the sponcers, channel and introduced the intro. From there the photography stop motion character resembles reality and when the ball is bounced off the screen it is linked into hyper reality where the model becomes vector and red to symbolize Air Jordan (M. Jordan brand) which is relevant to the top ten basketballers, this is done to show that anything could happen.

I chose the Travis Barker and Game remix of Dope Boys because of its relevance into the culture and inspiration most famous basketballers relied on in their youth when all they had was the hoops and a ghetto blaster. Hip hop has been voted the most relevant genre of music to fit with basketball. The travis barker remix of this is a lot more sharp and brings hip hop into urban hip hop rock which is much more relevant to 2010 and shows something new.

The video was around 32 seconds long for a reason (not that it is the easy way out of doing 50 seconds but) that the audience is more interested in things short and snappy, which is the kind of tone I wanted the film to have. The video is relevant to a lot of the old NBA commercials short snappy and in your face corny.

The video will be seen on April 15th 2010 at 7pm on ESPN as it is the day after the league finishes and the players can be truely assessed.

Technology is not reliable

Dvd setup finished, toast is loaded, the Dvd begins to burn. but wait? a pop up. oh. the mac has decided to reject the dvd mid way through burning, you have no money for another disc, it is 4:10pm no staff are available in the mac suite. you have 3.32 GB of folders you need to save in order to keep that 7 straight hours of work from losing files in the labyrinth that is your desktop. your memory stick is only 1gb. Oh no.

It's times like this that you should be happy that you are 5 working days ahead of yourself in order chaos like this happens. I think that this was as good an example of any about technology being a loser when you need it at the most. To my advantage I happened to save my work to the scratch disc and a member of my courses hard drive. just to be safe. But these times do give you a slight mental breakdown and have a little tantrum...

My father had by chance sent some money in my account for my reading week trip... which I had to break into to get a new dvd. I successfully uploaded the documents onto the dvd and tested it on a few different macs. This time it worked. I have learned that I need to have a back up plan no matter what is to happen just to fall back on in case a disaster like this happens.

Final storyboard

These are my final screen shots of my final movie. my movie was around 46 seconds long, but I believed that it was far to long for the kind of effect I wanted, which was fast and snappy! I don't think that I wanted a long video due to the fact most NBA introductions are around about a similar timeline to what I cut it to - 32 seconds. Which answers the brief.

In a crit it was mentioned about the change between photography to vector, which is what I expected would come up. However the reason I made it like this, is because I have been reading a lot of Baudrillard lately and thought about making a skip from one reality to another. Now it starts with a player in stop motion and from thumbnail 26 (the star) is where it skips from (one reality) to Fantasy, hence the player turning into a solid shape. This resembles the way that people look at that player and think. That could be anyone? Which gives the introduction a form of secrecy, which is exactly what I wanted in order to keep the top ten a secret to secure the videos.

TO DO

WRITE ON YOUR DESIGN CONTEXT, COMMENT POSTS IN MORE DETAIL.

WRITE ABOUT THE TIME LINE

WRITE ABOUT FRAMES

Layout

I tried to do my DVD on illustrator (the layout) which was just a bit of a bug as I had been staring at after effects all day and night, It seemed I forgot exactly what a pen was. However now I decided to get a sheet of A2 and just go crazy. Which was the best thing I could of done at that point in time. I believe doing this gave me enough confidence and an idea in what I want the design to look like. It was then time to develop my work. and play around with different ideas.

I need to get these videos for content of development:

here are the videos I am considering having on my interface. However I am not entirely sure about putting all of them on, perhaps three? Just because They are already included on my blog and have a statement explaining why I have chosen/ filmed them.

Working out

So I've been attempting to workout how my dvd is going to work but well its getting a bit annoying as when I seem to be getting somewhere with it it goes wrong?! But I have been working out what exactly I need to have and where:

Evaluation Focus Development part 2

So now my problem is creating the DVD setup. I have been focusing on an NBA All-star styled approach and plan to be using shades of red, white and blue as my colour palette to stick with the whole theme of my project. I have been looking at different dvd menus on my dvd's at home in order to get some kind of idea of how to approach this with my movie.

I basically have all the research I need form my last project as it is relevant and works as a set with my top ten. I think that I have worked out that I have worked out with my remaining time on the module I still have enough time remaining to produce a successful dvd interaction screen and still have plenty of time to sort out any glitches that it may have. I have roughly a week on this maximum all though I would like to of finished this by tuesday. I plan to evaluate this by asking other students their opinion on what they think of it and if anything could be changed/ be made better.

I need to make sure that my work is presented in a clear fashion where it can be assessed in a way that the tutors understand why it is in there and what I am trying to communicate/ how I got to the conclusion. I just had a thought that maybe I should change the background of the title menu after the 5 click idents are clicked as they have nothing in particular relevant with my final product. In other words they are basically like another dvd. I have identified a few problems already with lay out but I think as long as I draw it out and work out what is going to do what and what is going to go where it should be a lot easier. Then I have to work out what I think about the whole dvd designs. I really want them to match with the design on the case/ cover of the Dvd its self.

Visual

So I started to get a bit confused with all the lines shooting out everywhere and going places so I thought it may be easier to try a more visual approach. This is when I included a few boxes which showed what would be on screen, and when a certain button is clicked a line taking you to a new thumbnail (of what the next page would look like) and so on and so forth. Still a lot more needs to be developed and I need to analize my previous work in order to work out what will be going on the interface and what will just remain on my blog account.

Dvd case

For some reason I tried to be complex and smart and make the navigational layout on a disk.. This was just silly but yet again this is a more detailed concept of the layout from the dvd menu

Title

This is my first attempt at working out what is exactly going to be happening on the DVD now I know there is a lot that needs to be done/ thought about although. This basically is going to be the navigations.

with sound

I am very pleased with the final outcome of this video and believe it works very successfully in regards to being relevant to basketball and Espn/ the channel. I think that the sound and music choice was a great decision and compliments the footage that I produced very well. In all I think that anyone can watch that introduction and understand what the program is about and who has sponsered or been promoted in it.

almost there

As regards to designs I think that I have got to a point where I am happy to hand in this video introduction as my final although I still have enough time to change any glitches etc if need to be. All I need to do is add sound at the moment.

Dvd case

Nw with a bit of work I made my case seem a bit more interesting. I incorporated the ESPN logo at the top left and also added the basic information on the side such as the Module and year of brief. Also with the title of what the dvd is about.

On the back I added a star just to make it seem more american (stars and stripes) which I think looks really good, But could appear as though it is based upon Orlando Magic. I may have to get rid of it due to that.

I added dvd content in there and other standard dvd information I added logos of brands which the dvd is formed around and also a barcode with the module code added at the bottom.

I think that I am close to the final draft of this. and I believe it works really well.

I think I want to make a leaflet on the inside with information about my work on it if I have the time. I think that would be pretty cool and help out.