First three weeks back

Week 1 was straight back into work. I new the first assignment would be another CSS assignment. This time however I would really have to develop my CSS skills and design a CSS website from scratch and not just download a template from the net and alter it to suit my designs. This task would come later in the assignment because our first task was to write a report on the way CSS has changed the web design industry. I new very little about CSS before I researched for this report but I have found a lot of advantages to why a web designer would use CSS appose to tables and cells. This task was in the same mould as so many we had done in the first year so I was pretty confident of doing a good job.

The following week, I had my report read by John and he made sum crucial points to where I was going slightly wrong. I was repeating myself in different paragraphs and talking about the same kind of thing but put differently. This is something I need to look out for when proof reading and I need to set more of a structure for my reports. John did seem quite pleased with what I was writing about, so with a little restructuring I think I will have written a decent report.

The second part of this assignment was to create a CSS webpage. I had spent most of the morning designing a Graffiti style website that would use a lot of images and looked quite good on paper. I had an image of a brick wall as a background image that went all the way down the page. I hadn’t taken into account that this file size would be very large so this would need to be changed. Realising this made me feel disappointed in myself because I have done a number of website plans now and I should have realised this at an early stage. I have altered my screen designs now and it looks a lot cleaner than my first but still has a graffiti feel to it.

Our A8 Assignment has been similar to those we had completed in the first year. We would be given a lecture, told what needs to be done and then basically get on with it. Our A11 assignment however was nothing like this.

Assignment a11 started off with our team (Me, Ben and Marc) trying to assign team roles. We decided on Project manager, Designer and Developer. We all published a skills profile and had a long discussion about who would suit each role best. I think myself and Ben both decided that Marc would fit into the designer role because everything on his skills profile was geared towards this and this is the role he wanted. We then left it up to Marc to decide who would be Project manager, I didn’t mind either way about being Project Manager or Developer as both roles required me to learn a lot of new things. Marc chose Ben to be Project manager because of his time keeping and organisation skills. This left me as the developer. I new if I was going to be the developer I would have to learn CSS to a fairly good standard in order to create the designs. I left that day fairly happy with the team roles and fairly confident we could create a good website for our client.

The following week we were to create a website screen design in order to show Steve and try and win one of the clients he had found for two of the teams. Our designer Marc had worked on the designs in self study and managed to upload a couple of them onto his blog. I think we weren’t as prepared as the other teams when it came to presenting our ideas to Steve on Thursday morning. I think our designs would have looked good with the right images rather than images represented by colours and roughly drawn vector shapes. I didn’t tell this to Marc at the time however so I am not blaming him. After seeing all the other teams’ designs after the break I wasn’t confident of our team being given a client. Just before dinner Steve took the Project Managers into his office and told them who would be doing what, we weren’t given a client which meant we had to go out and find our own.

I knew a small playhouse/nursery and both Ben and Marc new hairdressers that wanted a website. So finding a client wouldn’t be too tricky our problem would be arranging the team around to suit the project more. That afternoon we changed the team so I was Project manager, Ben would be the Designer and Marc would be the Developer. I and Ben seemed happy about this but Marc was less sure. I think this would be a good change for me though because it meant I would be more hands on in the development and meeting the client which would give me a great experience that I would hopefully learn a lot from, for the future.

We decided to go with Bens Hairdresser client (Caroline) at first and I arranged a meeting with her the following Monday. I had looked through the web redesign book about scope documents and found their own scope document on the net. I realised after developing my scope document that the client being a hairdresser probably wouldn’t know what I was asking her about when it comes to things like bandwidth and screen resolution. I altered this to be geared more towards target audience and competitors. I feel we gathered a lot of information and the designs should go down well on our next meeting.

The first three weeks back to college have been good to get back into a work environment and have made me realise I do still want a job in this industry. I just hope that CSS “clicks” sooner rather than later, as most people I talk to say it will!