Design

Lecture
This weeks lecture was taken by Geenen Stubbs and we were talking about design techniques for multimedia. We started the lecture by covering what types of designing there were in use, such as structure charts, wireframes, flowcharts and storyboards. As the lecture carried on we started to cover these types of design in some detail, starting with structure charts, these are diagrams that describe the way the content is organised within an application. We then went on to flowcharts, these are also diagrams and describe the way which the user interacts with the system. For flowcharts you can use specific software to allow the creation of correct flowcharts. Wireframes were next and these describe the way the content is layed out. The last thing that we covered were storyboards, this is the most popular way of designing and it represents a visual design of the project. To end the lecture we watched a youtube video on Bill Clinton being controlled by a voodoo doll.

External Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowcharts
http://webstyleguide.com/multimedia/design.html

Tutorial
This weeks tutorial was another flash problem to solve, we were set the task of creating target paths. This involved using what we had learnt in the previous week, which was how to create a tween in tween and implementing buttons on it to allow control of separate parts of the animation. This week we were introduced to the term nesting, this is the technical term for placing a symbol inside another symbol. Once we had nested the desired parts we were then given instructions on how to create different types of web movies. The first of which was a static image, the second was the nesting symbols working together and causing one animation and the third was creating a tween in a tween using the nested symbols.

Reflection
This weeks lecture was really informative and i found it interesting, I think this is all leading on well for the production of a website for the second piece of cousework for this module. I think that the methods of design are all good in their own way but you need to use more than one type to get a really accurate design, such as a combination of a storyboard and a flowchart, to allow the visual appearance and how the site will navigate to be described. I enjoyed the flash work set for the tutorial this week, it is getting slightly hard and I'm looking forward to having to figure out how to do parts of the flash animation on my own in the near future.