Show

Our grad show was last Wednesday evening, it went well. There were a lot of people there and the response seemed to be good. I had a complete disaster at the beginning of the night, just before it started i thought i would check my site one last time www.tomgarne.co.uk only to discover a big red message saying the site had been disabled! I hurried back to D10 and then couldn't log on to my provider of reach them by phone. Eventually i realised that i must have run out of band width due to all the uploading and downloading i had done in preparing for the show. I was then forced to upgrade my account to get some more space. But this took time so i was left with a temporary URL during the show.

It was just typical that my site has been up for the last year and a half and will be up for the foreseeable future but it was down for the duration of the show. rubbish.

after i fixed the site the show went well, i chatted to a lot of people and people seemed impressed with my work.

law and money

We had some usefull presntations about legal issues and accounting in the last week. THey were very interesting and although there wasnt time to go into depth about specific issues i did get a sence of what to look out for and be aware of.

One thing i learnt was what a P45 and A P60 was for, i cant belive i never really wondered before, i used to just stick them in a folder. i never questioned why i was always put on emergency tax when i sterted a new job. fool.

The legal advise we recived but a lot of it was going over old ground i had learnt before doing my engineering degree. I was quite good at, i remember scoring 95% for a question on web crime.

nwther the less both guys were very knoledgeable and the presentations were informal and interesting.

Nearly finished

Thought i should write a general post about the fact that my time as a D10 student is nearly over. Its going to be a busy last couple of weeks with a lot of writing to be done as well as cleaning up all the work i have done over the course ready for my portfolio.

I have learnt a great deal from the course and it has ended up being beter than i could have hoped, In a lot of respects i think that i have learnt more from the course than any one else, i feel that i started off with very little knowledge of the interactive media industry but now i feel very confident.

CSS Training

Today we had CSS training from Jake Rayson, he was a great teacher and like a lot of people i have met recently strainge familiar, I'm not sure if its because I've now met every kind of person in the world or that i have genuinely bumped into him in the past somewhere. Anyway, it was very interesting and although most of what he talked about was going over old ground i did pick up a few interesting bits and pieces which made it very worth while, for instance; i have always used float when laying out colums and he prefered just using margins. It was very useful to see how a professional works and hear all the little tips he has picked up on his way. I didnt agree with everything that he said but i think that he wasnt trying to preach that his way was the best way, it was just the method which he found was the best for him and others who may have to follow his code.

During the day i realised that a lot of the things he as showing us i had picked up at sequence during my work experience, it was great that there was a corolation between what Jake was saying with good practice and what i had experienced in industry.

Overall it was a great bit of training, i would have liked to have done a couple more days, I'm hoping to use z levels for my portfolio site and it would have been useful to pick his brains and avoid any pit falls.

Work experience

For my work experience placement i went to Sequence, a web company here in cardiff shamim was placed their as well. Sequence are quite large and it was a great opportunity for me to experience all areas of the web development process from initial concepts and meetings with the client through design and development to testing and support. Two weeks was a nice amount of time to get settled and see what really went on, the first week was mainly testing and getting to know the people and structure of the office. We attended a scoping meeting with Phil Murphy about a text message based quit smoking system which was very interesting, we also got to see a lot of projects as they were being signed off and tested.

In the second week i got a lot more involved in CSS and HTML for a new project sequence was starting, i got a lot of support and advise from the designers and developers, the team atmosphere was very apparent and not what i as expecting. The company seemed like a great place to work with a lot of friendly people, i was quite sad to leave at the end of the 2 weeks.

I think that going to Sequence was hugely beneficial to me, it aloud me to see a company where people specialise and are able to concentrate on their strengths. A broad knowledge base is very important but i would like to think that in future employment i could skew my time quite considerably toward the things I'm good at and enjoy.

Promo cymru

The second major project which we have compleated recenly is the 2 person client led brief. Carol and i chose a brief from promo cymru to construct an add on for a cardiff youth web site they were constructing. The brief was interesting and gave me a chance to have a go at PHP back end programing a well as xml with flash.

The solution we decided to go for was a flash map where the users to the site can upload their images and link them to areas in cardiff. This worked well and we are very pleased with the result:

clicardiff

I rally like the design carol came up with and the although the concept isnt particularly original i think we acheaved what we set out to. The finished product does work but more so than any other briefs there is a lot more we colud do if we get any time in the future, the posibuilitys for the product are almost endless.

Mygo

Just realises that i have forgotten to post much regarding the two major briefs we recieved this year. The Mygo 5 person brief was the first, D10 was split into 2 teams, on my Team were Carol, Rob nick and Gareth. Our brief was from a company called MYGO, they wanted us to build a "casual" flash game for their bluehyppo game zone. The brief was very open and proved to be a lot of fun, we worked very well as a team and produced a great piece of work at the end. The game we made was called Orball, it was important to us that we produce a game which was unlike anything else yet would be easy to pick up and play. This brief was a chance for us to create something which could be very personal and reflect our personalitys yet still fullfill the brief. We took a lot of influence from locoroco on the PSP, we liked the fun and simplicity of the game as well as the style and sound. Here is a link to our finished game hope you like it:

orball

I am very pleased with the result and a lot of people have said very nice things about it, the only complaint is that it is too hard, but that just seems to keep people playing longer.