Time Plan... March

I have had a busy week after the hand in of my digital skills module I still had a lot of work to do for my DandAD entry.
I have also been working on some rewards cards and promotional posters for the Village Hotel Newcastle Starbucks franchise, I was asked to come up with a rewards card that would fit in with the Starbucks look but, as the store is a franchise, there were certain restrictions on what I could actually put on the card, we were not allowed to call it a 'starbucks card' so I opted for 'my rewards'. I also produced some illustrations of coffee cups and muffins which I have used on the card. I came up with a range of designs for the card and after a meeting with the manager, we decided on this one...

I have been working on several posters and promotional pieces for the store along with the card, I have kept the colour scheme and fonts the same throughout to ensure continuity. 
Initial feedback has been good and hopefully my designs will be going in to production this week.

Website Development... CSS

Introduction to CSS... 

Today in web design we covered the basics of CSS coding, Gemma explained that CSS is like the icing on a cupcake, I like this analogy as it sheds some clarity on the whole web design process...

                                               

HTML forms the basis of the page, CSS is the styling and PHP/JQUERY would be the extra fancy bits on top.

CSS rules have a selector, property and a value
e.g:   
        p {                                          - this is the selector (in this case paragraph) it states which 
                                                         section the rule applies to.
colour : #000000;       
font-family: Arial;                        - colour, font-family and font-size are examples of properties
font-size: 14px;                           - #000000, Arial and 14px are examples of values for those                  
}                                                        properties.

This helps to break down CSS coding and make sense of it, I found that I was able to alter all of the above properties in code view by the end of the session, although Dreamweaver makes things a lot easier than this, It is beneficial to be able to understand the code should there be a problem or alterations to be done.

This website is really useful, it is designed for kids but there is a lot to learn for beginners too...
Lissa Explains Website - HTML for kids and beginners

Portfolio Website Development

I have been gathering layout inspiration for my portfolio website over the past week and I came across this collection of '50 Fresh Portfolio Websites', there are loads beautiful designs to spark creativity in this collection...

50 Fresh Portfolio Websites for your inspiration - Smashing Magazine

Popular trends in web-design 2013...

20 Hottest Trends to watch out for 2013

Portfolio Website

I have started web development evening classes at college with a view to boosting my skill set and creating an online portfolio. In the first couple of sessions I planned the layout of my website and got to grips with the basics of DreamWeaver, creating containers and divs and adjusting fonts etc. I am looking forward to the next few classes where we will be taking a look at coding. I think that a basic knowlege of web development will be highly beneficial when applying for placements and jobs within industry.
This is a link to a really useful website with tutorials etc for web development...

w3schools.com

Editorial Design

This is my final outcome for the last module, two double page spreads for my typography magazine 'TypEd'...

I used these images of Peter Crawley's beautiful typography artwork as the feature of this spread,

the idea behind the layout was to have one page dedicated to the artwork, un-interupted by the body copy which is positioned in frames on the opposite page, each equal in size and position to their corresponding image.

             I love the bold use of colour and shape in Alan Kitching's work so decided to dedicate this spread to it. I looked at the golden ratio a lot during my research and the principles of editorial design, the golden ratio, when used in editorial design, can be used to find the perfect position for the content of the page while leaving room at the bottom to hold the book or magazine. My magazine layout was square so I was unable to apply the Van De Graff canon to work out the ratio but I did adapt the principle of 'holding space' to my design which has worked really well and also allowed for the perfect place to position page numbers. I was keen to design the pages of my magazine together so that the spread worked as a whole, for these pages I followed a reverse symmetry theme, the copy steps up on the left and continues in to the air on the right, I balanced this idea by placing the image content in opposing corners. The final rule I introduced was white space, this was helped by the 'holding space' and added to the balance of the layout, I don't like to overcrowd a page and feel that there should always be 'room to breathe' when working your way around an article.