The Fat Of The Land (25th – 26th April)

It seemed like a lot longer than three weeks had passed by the time it came to Wednesday morning. We were given a lecture on the CD cover designs and then had a general question and answer session.

In the afternoon I continued to work on the style guide I hoped to get that finished this week. I designed everything in Pagemaker but to get a good quality image I designed the letterhead and continuation sheet in Photoshop also. Wednesday was a productive day for me and I was able to get everything I wanted to be done by the end of the day. On the night Steve emailed us all with a question about if we wanted to know the groups we would be in next year. I told Steve I wasn’t really concerned either way because I will be busy over the summer. I don’t mind who I work with for the group assignment I think everyone works hard in the group, obviously some have more knowledge on the subject through experience than others but were are all trying to achieve the same goal on the course, so I think some people will have to raise there game (especially me) for that task. But I see this as a good thing.

Thursday I spent creating a email template and touches to the business cards and letterhead. In the afternoon I got some good feedback from Steve, Craig and Julian about the look of my site. The main one was the use of the links on the left, if you were on a specific page away from the homepage a user would not know which link was for each page. This means poor usability and I want to keep the site simple and easy to use so I made those changes in the afternoon. Also in the feedback I found out that one of the album covers I had been looking at for inspiration was a particularly good one. It is an album by Prodigy called, “The Fat Of The Land”. I bought this album nearly 10years ago and its given me an excuse to annoy the neighbours with it all over again.

After the feedback I was able to show Steve my referral work for the Back 2 Basics assignment. I was nervous about this because I honestly thought when I handed the assignment in the first time that I had finished it probably and that I could achieve a pass grade at least. Steve seemed fairly pleased with the new look if the site however so I was pleased with that. He also game me some feedback about adding information to the bottom of the site so I added this to my current work in the style guide. It does make the site look more professional.

http://www.richardfoley.co.uk/Style_Guide/index.html

I still need a press release but I am going to do this after I have the CD cover designs digitised. Over the next week I will be developing my CD ideas and hopefully creating something that looks professional and suits the target audience.

Manchester Art Gallery

This week I hadn’t planned to do much work. On the agenda was to gather more sketch book work and draw business card sketches. I have spent most of the week in Manchester. On Sunday walking around to find sum where different to have dinner I walked passed the Manchester Art Gallery and decided to go in for a look. I wasn’t expecting to find anything relating to the course but it would be a good opportunity to get some inspirational art work for my sketch blog assignment.

The gallery was completely empty (except for the very bored looking employees stood in every room). After looking around the rooms on the bottom floors I wasn’t really that inspired because it was mostly based on very old religious paintings.

I wasn’t until we went upstairs and looked around their numerous “please touch” exhibits that I began to get inspired. The exhibits upstairs were a lot more modern and I managed to sneak a couple of Photographs from the exhibits.

The one that really appealed to me is called Zephyr by Bridget Riley. It immediately court my eye because it was an optical illusion of waves using contrasting colours. It reminded me of my logo design and something I could adapt to recreate a CD cover.



I am glad I went into the gallery because I was stuck for design ideas for the CD cover but I now think I have several ideas that I can start the design process with next week.

This week I am going to be changing my Back to basics work to try get it to a pass grade and concentrate on my sketchbook work.

Inertia, it doesn’t stop

Over the past week I have been focusing on the ambient world style guide and listening to the CD. I have also altered my time planning sheet to work from a Wednesday to Tuesday basis ready for the last couple of weeks at college.

I have created a website template for this assignment something I failed to do on the last one. This saves me a lot of time and effort creating each separate page and hopefully I would have to worry about the pages staying consistent throughout the site. I have tried to make the navigation fool proof by having two links to each page on the homepage and two links to the next page if the user wanted to travel through the site one step at a time.

http://www.richardfoley.co.uk/Style%20Guide/index.html

I still need to work on the sites aesthetics but I wanted to get something up on the net for feedback before we go back to college, because this is on the agenda for our next feedback meeting.

When listening to the Inertia by Glitch I find myself writing things down that are opposite to ambient for the majority of the CD. I can’t stop thinking of Wipeout, the old fast paced futuristic racing game for the Playstation. I am worried about the target audience for this assignment because my opinions and interpretations of the music wouldn’t match theirs.

I have also researched the definition of "Inertia",

“The property of an object to resist changes in velocity unless acted upon by an outside force. Higher inertia objects require larger torques to accelerate and decelerate. Inertia is dependent upon the mass and shape of the object.” www.servomag.com/reference/glossary.htm

I can only think of a spiral galaxy image with bright colours because it is constantly moving, but even that would be pretty obscure to the target audience.