CYFLE-D10-TGARNE

2007-03-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-02-26T07:02:00.001-08:00

Visits

We have had a few very interesting visitors so far this year. Leo from Sequence popped in to show us some flash games he had been working on for the BBC and Dr Who. Having visited the BBC at the beginning of the course it was very interesting to see a project from another angle, as a client the BBC seem to be quite particular about what they want. My current work experience at sequence has given me yet another angle of the same project. I think that I would definitely enjoy developing flash games in the future. Leo seemed to really enjoy his work; the only thing I worry about is if I would be able to get a job/career as soley a flash developer. I doubt it unless I worked in a very large company and I would then probably be churning out the same stuff night and day. Also it would be risky because if flash fell out of fashion I would be out of a job.

We also had a visit from greenfields, a blue tooth broadcasting company. They travel to events with a load of blue tooth transmitters; the event organizers hire them to broadcast advertising or multimedia content directly to customer’s phones. They had had some impressive results and although I usually keep the Bluetooth on my phone turned off I would switch it on to get a free animation or something useful like a map of the event. The advantage of using blue tooth over traditional paper based flyers is large, there is no waste and you know that your message has been read. I don’t know what greenfields charge but I imagine that at a big enough event it may even be cheaper to set up a few transmitters rather than have to pay for the printing and distribution of hundreds of leaflets. If the content you send out is good enough people my end up forwarding them to their friends which you probably wouldn’t do with a paper flyer.

2007-02-20T01:40:00.002-08:00

Contraction and Convergence

Since christmas a lot of people at D10 have been working with James Cook on a student campaign on a mission to stop climate change. I was charged with creating a game to put on the website, idealy it would be viral and the kind of game which people would send to each other and tell people about.

It was a great project and i really enjoyed the chance to try out new things and work on a project on my own. here is the finished game:

here is the link to the original site
http://www.climatejustice.org.uk/media/emissionsimpossible/

From the project i learnt a lot about managing my time, we had 2 other briefs at the same time. I put a lot of hour in, mostly in the evening but it never felt like a chore, i really enjoyed making the game. It i not the most oringinal game but because of the time constraints i felt i couldnt risk making anything to blue sky. I would like to say a big thank you to james for giving the final game his designer magic.

2007-01-14T06:57:00.001-08:00

Monday 4th December - Friday 12th December - bp alternative energy + christmas

I was very exited when this brief first came through, it was a chance to develope my flah and action script skills and i was looking forard to working with carol. The brief was to make a game for bp's alternative energy web site. The game needed to show different forms of energy generation and the pros and cons of each one. The website seems to be a bit of green washing by bp but at least its something. We decided to make a sim city type game where the player is given a country and has to add power stations too it creating enough power but without creating too much C02.

It was a pleasure to work with Carol and we encountered no real problems with the brief, we just go on with it and tackled any issue as soon as it cropped up. I like the finished game we produced, here is a small version:

for a larger version please go to full size version which is currently on carols blog.

i will stick it on my portfolio at some point but i probably wont have time for a while. The hardest and most time consuming thing about this course at the moment is keeping this blog up to date though it is helping my typing speed.

i had a nice relaxing time over christmas and was given Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, i was suposed to be reading a copy of the google story that james gave me but im now hooked on snow crash. Its a great book and an interactive media clasic, it was written in 1992 and has alot of elements of the modern web in it mainly second life. im about half way through and i dont want it to end at the moment, im kidding myself that reading it counts as study. I will stick it in Amazon when ive finished to see what they can sugest at what else i should read. I really like the dystopian future vision, very H G Wells.

Apart from alot of reading ive also been looking int what makes a good flash game, ive been looking at all the best games on the web and trying to work out what makes them good. Having an ineresting style and clean look apeals too me but i think more important is the quality of the animation and physical realism, thing in the game have to behave as you would expect them to. If something dosnt behave as you would expect in real life then the illution is broken and the magic is gone. In the next game i make im going to study my animation books to try to capture som real phisical reactions in objects and charectures within my game.

2006-12-04T02:24:00.000-08:00

Monday 27th November - Friday 1st December - Flash

I was really looking forward to a week of flash training, I've done quite a bit before getting some solid training was very useful. Here is a small movie I made during the week.

It was great fun and I learnt a lot during the week and understood more of what I had done in the past. Our trainer Neil Jenkins, his site is devoid.co.uk. He was a great trainer and we got a lot done in the short period when he was here. I spent most of the week experimenting with game ideas which was great I hope I can make time to do more.

On Friday a father and son team came in to give us a talk on their site chatfinder.com. It was an interesting talk although it must be hard work for little reward, setting up your own company didn't seem like an impossible task.

2006-11-27T01:36:00.000-08:00

Monday 20th - Friday 24th November - Sound design

The first few days of the brief were used to catch up on bits and bobs, I used the time to work on my individual reflective commentary on the Dreamweaver brief. I also clean up some of the group work. It was good to have a few days of more relaxing work but by the end of the week I was ready to start something new.

On Thursday and Friday we had John-Paul Jones in to teach us about sound design, The first day was Audacity and the second day Reason. Audacity can be downloaded free at:audacity.sourceforge.net. Its a great program which I was introduced to a couple of years ago, I used it to record audio streaming from the net. The program is easy to use and quick to learn, on Thursday we used it to record the first paragraph from "Moby Dick" and then chop it up and alter it .It was quite good fun but as we had all used audacity in our digital stories and our 3D work I didn't feel that I learnt much I didn't know about the software. I did learn a lot about sound formats that will probably be very useful.

2006-11-24T02:12:00.000-08:00

Monday 13th - Friday 17th November - Industry Brief continued

The final week of the Dreamweaver brief went well, getting and inputting the content took more time than I thought it would but I had made a good template so there were no problems. The content was fake anyway so it didn't really matter that it wasn't quite all there.

the project was hard work, I put in a lot of hours but im happy with the result. It needs a redesign but it looks better than the last site I made so hopefully the next site will be an improvement again.

Handed in the Dreamweaver brief and my Mock up on Friday. The mock up went well, my sketches were a lot better than I thought they would be. Also, im getting the hang of illustrator though I still prefer corel draw.

2006-11-23T01:44:00.000-08:00

Monday 6th - Friday 10th November - Industry Brief continued

we discussed a lot last week but this week was got on with the fun bit, I really enjoyed coding CSS and XHTML and although it was frustrating getting the pages work across browser it was very satisfying when they finally did. Used Google Map Api to stick a nice map with some markers into a page, it was fairly easy. But I did face a problem with my address, goggle map keys only work within one directory on your site, this can be easily over come by getting different keys for different directories. The problem arose because the site is currently on the same server as my portfolio and the linked path has capitals on TomGarne. The google key only works on tomgarne:

www.d10dev-studio.com/tomgarne/location.asp

www.d10dev-studio.com/TomGarne/location.asp

I tried to fix this problem by redirecting to the lower case version using JavaScript at the top of the page but I couldn't get it to tell the difference between upper and lower case. In the end I fixed the problem by making sure every link I had to the page was lower case and although that hasn't fixed the problem, the only way now to get to the upper case page is to type it in, which no one would do.

2006-11-17T07:56:00.000-08:00

Monday 30th October - Friday 3rd November - Industry Brief

On Monday 23rd we were given our Dreamweaver briefs from industry. The idea was for us to build upon the dreamweaver training we had from steve fones the previous week. My patner for the brief was Gareth and the brif we were given was from Sequence, a large company who have done quite alot of Dr Who work for the bbc. The brief we were set is for a tourism website promoting Cardiff Bay, it seemed like a fairly dull brief , but also hard to get too wrong and considering this is our first real brief i would prefer to something simle but well done rather than a half finished site with nothing actually working.

We also have to finish our interacive media mock ups. I chose to do a flash game based on "whats the time mr wolf" the classic play ground game, i thought it would be easy to link it too an educational element. There are not many telling the time games for chilldren and i think its an important skill (analogue watches look much better than digital watches).

The first week was mainly planning and discussing what the client (sequence) actually wanted, the brief was fairly self explanitory but we didnt want to assume anything or limit our options later on. To start with it was hard going, The more we discused the brief the larger it became and i was worried we wouldnt have time to include everything we wanted to. Also, i had no experience of back End systems and althought i had heard of a content management system and didnt know how much work it would take and asumed it was beyond the scope of this progect. Gareth however was adimant it would work and as he had experience at writing back end systems i had to trust him. If it worked it would be great, but when you are used to working on your own you know what you are capable of and can therefore plan much easier.

With this project i large problem for me was the fact that i didnt know how long it would take me to write the XHTL and CSS, I had used both before but never so intensively to a strict brief.TBC...

2006-11-09T01:44:00.000-08:00

Didn't realize you could embed you tube videos. I do now so here is my digital story. I found this brief very hard, although it was useful to learn Adobe premier I didn't enjoy using the package. I found it to prescriptive, a bit like power point for videos, but im sure there were loads of features I didn't use. Also, I had to make my film twice due to premier being very slow and I couldn't render my project.

Im happy with the result, the hardest part was writing the script, I found it very frustrating and spent a few late nights working out what I wanted to say. We had a script writer in for a day and she was very good, and incredibly interesting but I felt extremely frustrated at the end of the session. I didn't have enough time on my own to and I couldn't concentrate on writing in an busy open room, I would have preferred it if she had of come back the following day after I had had time to think about the advise she had given.

In terms of the voice over, as always im speaking too fast and its a bit unemotional but you can here the words although the final cut is a complete mash up of 4 versions I recorded.

So overall, I found the brief very hard and it caused me a week of stress and late nights but I learnt a lot and if I had too do it again I know I could create something better.

2006-11-09T01:18:00.000-08:00

Here is my finished Maya ident. Im happy with it , I achieved much more than I thought I would at the start of the project. I really enjoyed using MAYA and some of the things it could do were amazing, I hope to use it more in the future.

2006-10-31T02:10:00.000-08:00

Monday 23rd - Friday 27th October - Dreamweaver

this week was scheduled for Dreamweaver. Steve Jones taught us all week covering the basics of HTML CSS and the Dreamweaver user interface. I had already had quite a bit of training and practice using HTML and basic CSS so I found this week fairly straight forward. But it was still very useful and it helped me to refresh my knowledge especially with CSS layouts.

The relatively easy week also gave me time to catch up on my Maya work which I worked on all week. I endlessly tweaked my project but I am very happy with what I have achieved in what I consider to be a short time. I think my previous experience with another AutoDesk product - autoCAD helped me , I have used quite a few CAD programs working with maps and buildings.Once I have finished the modeling and animation I need to work out how the music will fit in.

Using Dreamweaver was much better than I expected, my previous experience has been like using MS Word. The package assumes the user doesn't know what they want and constantly tries to help out, normally with un wanted results. But this week I really saw the benefit of using Dreamweaver above just typing your HTML and CSS into a text pad. It was much quicker to write code in HTML and I made less mistakes with spelling and missing off closing brackets etc. So I will be using Dreamweaver from now on to wright my HTML and CSS. Steve Jones was very helpful this week and it will be great top have him around for the next few weeks as we complete our neat assignment.

2006-10-31T01:42:00.000-08:00

Monday 16th - Friday 20nd October - Maya

This we were taught Maya. Matt taught us this 3D package for 3 days covering a lot of the content of the package including:

- Rendering
- Particle effects
- Animation
- Modeling

The package was vast and it was easy to become confused by all the menu's, the biggest problem was finding the feature you wanted. I spent a lot of time hunting through menu's and tables as well as the help trying to find what I was after. Matt was a great teacher and he was very clear and enthusiastic. He was inspiring and the first 3 days went by very quickly even though a lot was packed in.

The last 2 days were concerned with getting on with a brief. The brief was too complete a 10 second ident for a fictional music channel of our choice. I have had a few ideas but decided to base mine on a rock channel called BOOM MUSIC. I had the idea of starting with a wire and following a buldge up its length until it enters the back of the speaker. The camera then spins round the speaker and revels that the wire links the speaker to some large words- boom music. A tag line also had to be include. I really enjoyed this brief, it was sometimes frustrating but I think I have a natural aptitude for working in 3D, possibly something to do with my dislexia.

I got the majority of the modeling done in 2 days which was great. It was a good idea to stick with a simple idea and do it well. One obstacle when starting the brief was knowing how long it would take to model and animate. As I had never used the program before I had no idea how long things took and in that respect my solution to the brief was a good one. I was able to add detail or remove it depending on time.

2006-10-23T03:34:00.000-07:00

Monday 9th - Friday 13th October - Digital Story's

Digital story's are 2 minute long, first person story's with accompanying images. My chosen subject was the cycling trip I took across Wales last year. It was a great experience and I have loads of photos to accompany it.

Monday and Tuesday were centered around writing the script. I found this very hard, IM not a confident writer and I got extremely frustrated with myself. But I eventually got a script down and recorded it on Wednesday. I have written my script in 3 parts - The first part explains what im doing and is very calm, the sun is shining and the landscape is very flat. The second part sudenly jumps into a first person list, is was trying to capture the feeling that the aurdience was actually there with me at I struggled in the rain. The third part jumps back to Cardiff and sums up how I felt about the experience. I Will atempt to add my final video to U-tube later on in the week.

I found the whole experience very difficult but I have learnt a lot and produced something which im quite happy with. If I did it again tomorrow I think I would be able to create something much more stylized and with a lot less stress.

2006-10-23T03:03:00.000-07:00

Wednesday 4th - Friday 6th October - BBC

I have just spent 1 hour updating this blogg, tried to spell check it and lost the lot, I think I will stick to bad spelling in the future.

We worked on our digital story's Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and 4 were presented on Friday afternoon. These were-

Vannevar Bush - An American who developed a link between scientists, the government and the military during the second world war. This led to a lot of technological advances being developed for the military. These have subsequently filtered down into the public domain (eg the internet).He also designed a machine called the MEMEX, which allowed a user to store links between documents.
Ted Nelson - coined the term hypertext, thinks that bereners lee's web is a gross simplification of his hyper text idea.

Douglas Englebart - Performed the "mother of all demos" in 1968. demostrated the first mouse and user interface so a user could interact with a computer. The screen was 20ft high and 1000 people turned up.

Alan Kay - American computer scientist who pioneered the graphical user interface and object orientated programming. Currently working on clockwork laptops for the third world.

Our Visit to BBC interactive was very interesting this week. We were given presentations from a variety of people from the department including project managers, developers and designers. It was a very friendly environment and people obviously enjoyed working there. I hope to go back in a couple of months when im a bit more settled.

2006-10-09T01:25:00.000-07:00

Monday 2nd October - PhotoShop

Most of the day was taken up with photoshop training. I think like me, everyone in the group had used photoshop before. But luckily the training was quite fast moving and I picked up a few useful tips and shortcuts. There were also a few features which I was aware of but had not really used, for instance, in the past I have always fiddled around with the contrast, hue, intensity etc of the image straight through the menu bar. But I realized the benefits of using adjustment layers, its useful to work in a non-destructive way, always retaining the original image.

In the afternoon we were free to use the skills we had learnt to alter an existing image. I was quite pleased with my attempt although the monk in the door way still doesn't quite fit, I think he is too bright.

Before

After
the monks are from some photos I downloaded from flickr.com, our trainer Ben Griesley (sorry if thats spelt wrong) provided the original doorway image. The training enjoyable and useful.

At about 4pm we went to visit S4C (channel 4 Wales), they had a regular team of 3 people working on the channels web site. Their biggest design problem is the need to make everything in both English and Welsh, If they design a page in English and then translate it the design can be destroyed due to welsh having more and often larger words. This is an issue with all company's in Wales who have to produce dual language material in everything they do.
It was an interesting visit, S4C don't actually make any programs, they are all commissioned or they use English channel 4 programming. This creates a problem with copyright, and getting permission to promote programs though the web. In the past a programs web site and presence on the world wide web has not been considered until after its was completed and all the crew had gone home. This makes it hard to gather material for the web site. There is now a move toward producing the web site whilst filming so that extra material can be produced and the site is not just repeating what the program has shown.

Tuesday 3rd October - illustrator

The whole of Tuesday was taken up with Adobe illustrator training. Its a great package but I found it harder to use than another vector graphics program I have used - CorelDRAW. The benefits of illustrator are that it has a layers system similar to photoshop and transferring things between photoshop and illustrator is easer. Also, having the same shortcuts on both programs is very useful, If im not concentrating I sometimes try to use photoshop tutorials within corelDRAW. The main drawback with illustrator is the very large and confusing menu system, things seem to get lost very easily and for a novice user you spend a lot of time hunting through menu's trying to find the tool you need. The other problem I have with illustrator is working with curves and lines, You have too be very precise with your clicking and always keep an eye on which type of tool you have selected. CorelDRAW seems too be more forgiving and use fewer tools to achieve the same ends.
But, I will switch to illustrator because it seems to be the industry standard and IM sure that as I become more comfortable with the software I will find it less frustrating to use. I played around with a few ideas but I was generally felling uninspired. Here is an orange and a cup, sorry not very exiting.

It was another useful training session and I don't hate illurstator as much as I did.

We were also given a new brief today, to produce a mock up using graphics software of a game or website with the theme of lunch hour. School dinners spring to mind with an educational element inspired by Jamie Oliver but maybe that's a bit dull and obvious.

2006-09-29T05:54:00.000-07:00

Wednesday 27th September - On-Line Media

Today we looked at on-line media, four websites were evaluated:

www.ownyourc.com

www.billyharveymusic.com

www.flymetothemoon.es

http://demo.fb.se/e/if/badluck/

Each was assessed and consideration given to: ease of use, target audience, type of product (ie commercial, educational, entertainment), how it was made and whether or not it was a satisfying experience.

In terms of style, my personal favorite was flymetothemoon, a promotional website for a Spanish PR and communication company. Using minimal colours, concentrating on black, white and blues they created an uncluttered and clean experience. The website has experimented with navigation elements based on a simple vertical scrolling, top down shooter arcade game (but unfortunately without the shooting). The user control's a space ship, docking at intervals to reveal information about the company. The ship looks great and as well as having a 3D feel, it gains upgrades after each docking. The main problem with the site is its speed, you cannot change the rate at which you travel up the screen and you have to dock and view information in a very linear way. I enjoyed the interface but would have liked to have been able to have more control over where I went and what I saw. This was availiable as an accelerator on the introduction screen but the controll of the ship was entirely lost.

The other sites were interesting but I wont go into too much detail. Billy Harvey's web site was flash, again with an experimental user interface. The user could zoom in and out of a set of Polaroid photos, clicking on them to listen to stories and songs from Mr Harvey. The cleverest thing about the site way the way Billy followed you from picture to picture, his lips in sink with the songs. A very nice site, but needed a HTML alternative or at least some text, it relied on audio which would make it unusable in a quiet office environment or for people with less than perfect hearing.

ownyourc was an American anti smoking site disguised as a forum and resource site. It was slow and confusing but the graphics did have a certain disturbed charm. It utilized a lot of different software packages, combining vector graphics with digital video and animation as well as sound but I was left confused and unable to navigate effectively. Having to load each section did not help with exploration of the site.

Carried on with research on Tim Berners-Lee for the remainder of the day, there is a lot of information on the web about him (unsurprisingly). I cannot decide whether to focus my presentation on his actual inventions (html, url's, http, the web) or his philosophy. I feel that someone would have invented the web sooner or later but what makes TBL important is his continued commitment to keeping the web accessible to all equally. The presentation is next Friday (6th October) so I will have to decide which direction to go in soon.

Thursday 28th September - Off-Line Media

Off-line media is simply Media which is not net based. This includes DVD's, CD roms and computer games.
We evaluated the Heuristics (Jakob Nielson's usability rules of thumb) of a number of products: 2 DVD's, 2 CD roms and the Sony IToy. The iToy was entertaining and scored well, a lot of its appeal was due to the unusual user interface and chunky graphics. Some of the other products faired less well. The John Malcovich DVD had a button system which seems to have been enforced on it by the stodio. It sat uncomfortably with the look and feel of the menus and navigation would have been clearer without it. The CD roms were both poorly designed in terms of usability, in alot of cases the user was left usure were to click, buttons were frequently indistinguishable from other graphial elements

Heuristics are a very interesting and important area and one which I will consider when creating my presentation for neat Friday. A status bar at the bottom of the screen may be useful to allow the audience to know far through the presentation I am, and that I wont be talking all day.

Carried on with TBL research for a lot of the day, most articles are now repeating things I already know but there are occational gems. I need some sound or video footage to create a richer experience for my audience.

Friday 29th September - Health and Safety

Spent the whole morning at a health and safety work shop, mainly common sense general information about manual handling and computer use. Some good BBC videos about camera work, not as cheesy as most company H+S films.

More TBL research and blog writing this afternoon. Will try to get some structure to my presentation by Monday.

2006-09-27T01:35:00.001-07:00

Monday 25th September - First day, First post

Started at Cyfle in Cardiff Bay as an interactive media trainee, there are 10 of us who have 6 months of intensive exposure to all Cardiff bay can offer. The Scheme is called DIMENSION 10, its a full time, 9-5 course run with a large input from the industry.Up until Christmas we will be studying:

Flash

Dreamweaver

Photoshop

Illustrator

This is just a basic outline, im sure we will have random thing chucked at us throughout the next few months.

After Christmas we will be working on real briefs from industry leading up to the completion of a portfolio of work.

It has been nerve racking having to quit my job in order to pursue this course and I have not allowed myself to get too exited or optimistic about starting. But now in here im really looking forward to getting stuck in.

Today was mainly an introduction to the course - filling in forms and ticking boxes.

Tuesday 26th September - Intro

A pile of information came our way today, We had a "Primer" lecture, it gave us an overview of multimedia, its creation and distribution. Getting a place on the scheme assumes that you have at least a basic knowledge and interest in the digital world, But it was very useful to start from scratch with an concise overview. A brief history of the web was very interesting, Its nice to know that is was started as a non commercial entity.

We were given our first brief, a 15 minute presentation on an interactive media pioneer. I got:

Tim Berners-Lee

I had not heard of him but most others seem to have. If you are as bad at remembering names as I am he was the man who invented the Web. I have had a search around wikipedea and google as well as the W3C website (he is the founder) and discovered among other things that he seem to be a very nice man. There is a lot of relevant information out there which should make a good presentation, and powerpoint is always fun to use.