Portfolio Log Book-ness...

These pictures are all from my logbook I did to design my portfolio... :)

^Wireframe design for my layout... This is pretty much how it turned out too! :)

^First designs of what the site would look like!

^More designs...

^Cloud button designs...

^Developed ideas...

^Picture I drew to copy from for my flash I wanted on my home page...

^More developed ideas for other pages... Saying I want things to look like they're stuck in with masking tape and post-it notes...

^What the final site looks like... ^_^

Rediscovering: Graham Sutherland

I was first introduced to Graham Sutherland when I was in college and I really loved him then, but I recently watched a program on him and I found out that he used to pick up random things off the street, beaches or in woods and bring them home with him to draw, and anyone who knows me well knows that I have bags of things I have found around places, from broken bits from mugs to strangely shaped stones... This does explain the attention to detail that he has and I like to have when drawing or painting...

[An East End Street] I really like all of his war pieces... With this one especially, I love how the fronts of the houses look so real and the part of a brick wall showing looks almost crude and like it has been done by a child... Is that nasty to say?

[Road at Porthclais with Setting Sun] I just put this image up as it was in the program I watched... But to be honest I'm not a massive fan of this one or the other ones like it, I'm not going to lie... I wonder where Porthclais is? Shows how much I was listening doesn't it?



[Mountain] I think the reason Graham Sutherlan really appealed to me in the first place is the fact that he uses all kind of media to create his art... And as a lot of his work is based on Welsh landscapes, it reminds me of the Manx countryside...


[Thorn Structure] I have always liked this piece and I think it's because in some ways it reminds me of the intricate designs by Archibald Knox...

Website Evaluation.

Above is a screen shot of the home page of my website. Being the first ever website I have created I decided to keep it simple and keep the original logo and colours that the shop (COW) already had, which was mostly a light blue, but I thought I would change that to a patterned vintage wallpaper, as it is still sticking to there colours, but adding more character. I also decided to make up a little tag line for them being, 'We are not sheep.' Which I put on the footer so it would stay in the same place and be on every page. I wanted all of the pages of the site to have the same set up with different content.

COW do not have a website at all at the moment and claim to not want one as they have a blog... So I could pretty much put anything I wanted onto the site.

I added some jQuery and JavaScript routines to my website including pop up boxes and used the mouseover routine on the image on my front page, I think this adds to the site and draws you in as it's on the first page.

I think my website is a good representation of the shop in Nottingham as it has a vintage feel and is simple, easy to navigate and not too high maintenance.

Portfolioness

This is what I have done of my portfolio so far, when in action the bumble bee flies across the screen and all the clouds are buttons... :)

Simon Lewty

I really like this guy... His work is not dissimilar to my pictures I drew on the squiggly lines worksheet... His stuff is really quite strange and I love the way he mixes text and images... I used to do that all the time at college but got told off for it... I think I shall bring that baby back!

This one reminds me of the animation from the children's show, 'Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids.'

The Site So Far...

Ergh... I am so bad at coding, probablys because I've been off so much, I really am sick of being sick though... Badness! But anyways, I've done a design in photoshop of what I'd like the web site to look like, and what I have actually done so far... :/

What I'd like the site to look like... But with a different background that I have made myself not just a random picture...

And this is what it looks like so far... Hmm... There's room for improvement to put it nicely... I really want to make it so the blue background stays in one place and the white strip just scrolls down, but, what a surprise, I have no idea how to do that...

My Portfolio Design...

I think if I could design my portfolio anyway I could, I'd pretty much just have a big Flash file... I really like little carttony style websites that move, like in mine I would have bees and butterflies buzzing around and the cloud buttons moving slowly in the wind... :)

This is a quick wireframe for my portfolio... Everything in a box... :)

What do you see, you people gazing at me?

I really liked doing this little exercise thing... But when I had finished I realized that mostly I drew fish and women's body parts... Deary me...

First Wireframe...

These are my first wireframes... I did them quite a while ago, but I have no scanner so I had to photograph them...

Design History...

Debbie Millman...
Designer, artist, painter, writer, author...

Pictures from her book, 'Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Like and Design.'

I really like the style of all these... They're pretty weird but I like that they just look like she has been scribbling on a black board or picking at the paint on her walls... I chose this artist over all the others because, this is probably really bad to say, but it was the only one that actually stood out to me... I also think I like her work because it's pretty much just random illustrations which is what I seem to do, even if I want to draw a whole picture, I just go off in my head and start drawing bits of everything...




















These repetitive ones remind me of doing lines at school... I really like that everyone will see a different meaning to them all... Kind of like a song with weird lyrics that everyone thinks are about them...




































This could be taken in a manner of ways... And considering she has pictures like the next one down...




















This is titled 'Trouble'... Strange... I really like it though... It's hilarious... It's the type of thing people (including me ;)...) used to draw on other people text books at school when they wern't looking... So good...





















I hope this is a real letter that someone has wrote...
















I like this quite alot... I can't say I think this is 'art' though, becasuse I used to do pull the wallpaper off the walls all the time in my room when I was little and I got shouted at not called an artist...





















I think this one is a valentine's day card... It reminds me of what I did for my Art GCSE mock... It's really cute and quirky though... I like making cards for people... And I love how it looks like it's been done in auqa crayons, I love them...

Moodboard About Myself...

Complete Beginners Guide To Interaction Design...

Web designers used to be similar to graphic designers in a way that they both worked with presentation, but now websites are more interactive, that's where the web designers stray from the layout of things and concern themselves more with the responsive aspect of sites. Interactive design, being only a couple of decades old, is relatively new.

Interactive Design- The study of devices with which the user can interact.
Experience Design-
Human- computer interaction- Being only concerned with the interaction between users and computers.

IxD Concepts

Gold- driven Design
Using research to see what the user wants to get out of the site to make it more successful.

Interface as Magic
Making interfaces so good the the user simply has to 'see' them as an extension of the underlying system. 'Less is less' giving the user just what they need.

Usability
The ease that the user can use the interface to achieve there goal. Web designers should always have this in mind.

Affordances
The quality of the interface and how straightforward it is for the user to perform an action.

Blog To The Future ||

Right... So I got a little confused about the 'write on your blog about the future' thing... It was actually, 'write what you want to get out of this year'... So... I'm aiming to get quite a lot out of this year because I didn't do too well last year... To say the lease... :) But I think I will get a few things out of it which I really didn't think I would, or never would have done unless I would have came to university, like... Work experience... I thought the only work experience I'd ever do was the 3 days I did at Lloyds Pharmacy on the Isle of Man, where basically all I did was mess with the tester make-up all day because they didn't trust me on the tills... But no no no! I'm going to go to a big company?! Crazyness! I still have no idea where I want to go yet though... Not even if I want to go to somewhere here or on the Island... But to be honest, the thing I'm most worried about is that no one will probably want to to do work experience at there company... Bad times! But I'm sure I'll find somewhere... Ahem... :)
Another thing I'm looking forward to is not dreading some days of the week, (no offense film and 3D people) because I'm only going to be doing things I want to be now... I don't really know what else I want to get out of this year yet, because we're still right at the start, I just want to get as much as I can! ;) Haha...

Blog To The Future...

Simon told us to write on here about what we want to do in the future... I don't really know what to write that I haven't already said in class... But I'd like to be a teacher after this course so I'd have to do a teaching course after this one, but I'm thinking of not coming back to NTU, (not that I don't love it here) But I think I'd rather do an open university course at home on the Isle of Man because I would love to work at a manx school to bring a more computer based approach to art lessons and give students more access to interactive media and technology instead of just drawing and painting. I'd also really like to make silly children's books and online games on the side, just because I really enjoy doing it... :)

Reviewing Websites...

I think my sites are going to be a bit different to everyone else's, but here it goes...


The Flower Fairies website...


http://www.flowerfairies.com/home.html

This is probably one of the cutest sites I have ever seen... It's so good when you first get onto it, there's magical music and all the menus pop onto the page. The actual content of the site isn't really that good though, which is a bit disappointing, but there is a 'Meet the fairies' menu and it is great! There is pictures of different types of fairies and a poem for each of them, I really like kids poetry, and if I have kids I want them to be more into books and climbing trees more than TV and the internet like I was when I was younger. I also just love the drawings on this website, because it's not just coloured shapes made into a character on a computer, it's actual intricate drawings and paintings that have been scanned in. I really like this site and if I was going to make a children's site, I'd want it to be all wonderful and girly like this one... :)


The CBeebies website...


http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/

The rest of this site isn't that good, but the 'Make and Colour' bit has the best making idea's I've ever see online. It's like Art Attack online! (It's 'Mr. Maker now though isn't it?) I also found this show on there...



How weird?! So, yeah... The site is really colourful and quite educational really, and I love that it has a 'Story Time' menu, for all the kids who have parents like mine who couldn't be bothered reading to them, haha! I do really like the design, but it's a bit computerized... I mean, most of the characters on there are just yellow blobby triangles... And I know that they're the Cbeebies logo characters, but I just think they could have made them more stimulating for kids... And they've had them for ages now, I think it's about time for a change! ;)


The Thomas The Tank website...


http://www.thomasandfriends.com/uk/Thomas.mvc/Home

This site isn't even that good, it's just absolutely hilarious! When you move your mouse over the menus it says the title of each of them out loud, like, 'Activities'. And if you go over the Thomas the Tank logo it says, 'Home!' (All though it sounds more like, 'Hoe!') And you can make him say many funny things from, 'Ho, Activities!' to 'Gay, Videos!' When you put your cursor over the games menu and then quickly move it to the videos menu... Yep, I really am that immature... :)
But any way... I do really like this site, I used to love Thomas when I was little, (more when Ringo Star was the narrator though.) I really like the background of the site, I'm pretty obsessed with clouds... Especially cumulonimbus, and even though it's more of a boyish website it gives it more of a girly tone. The games on the site are really fun, (The colouring one is my favourite) and well designed and the whole site is pretty easy to navigate and there isn't too many advertisements either, which is always a plus! :)

Second Year...

Well I finally got back onto my blog... I forgot the password... Again! :) But anyways... This is the first post of year 2, I'm actually amazed (As I think are many others) that I actually got back. I'm really looking forward to making sexy websites and learning lots of new and lovely things though... :)

My Lovely Quiz...

Quizz by ~bunnieskydiamond on deviantART

My superhero layer so far...

It's in the shape of a bunny... I hate 3D max pro... no matter how 'easy' other people think it is...

...jklhh

I love the Robinson's bird house advert so much! It's so cute! And it reminds me of my ideas for the superhero layer with the cat on the bird news, like my bad Mr. Fox villain for Super Bunnie! The man clock is really silly too... ^_^

My ideas for the superheros layers... I designed the heros first ^_^