HTML

Lecture
This weeks lecture was again taken by Daniel, he started the lecture by talking a bit about the coursework we will be receiving soon and that we will be starting Dreamweaver next week. The topics in the lecture were XHTML and CSS. We started by looking at Mark-up language, giving definitions and things you need to take into consideration. Following this Daniel talked about the 4 step process, which us used to decide which time of mark up language to use. We then went on to HTML. We then went onto CSS, “In web development, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS)

External Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML

Tutorial
This week’s tutorial was an introduction to Adobe Dreamweaver and setting out our webspace via mapping a drive. To start we had to map a drive, to do this we went into My Computer and followed instructions given to us on a hand out. Following this we were asked to start up Dreamweaver and manage a site, this is to choose where you want your documents to be saved and what the URL of the webpage is, by doing this it will automatically upload pages to the internet once they have been saved. After doing this we started doing some work on CSS, we were set the task of creating a style called BigRed, we had been given instructions how to do it in a few ways.

Reflection
I enjoyed both the lecture and the tutorial this week. I thought it was good that we were moving onto HTML and the use of Dreamweaver. I have done a fair bit of HTML before and used Dreamweaver several times, but I had never really used CSS, so it was really interesting covering that in the lecture. The tutorial was really straight forward to begin with, carrying out basic functions in Dreamweaver, then as we moved on to using CSS it became much more interesting. There were some of the methods of how to make your own style that seemed pointless but the last method on the hand out was really precise and worked well.

Graphics

Lecture
This week’s lecture was again taken by Daniel Cunliffe, and we were again covering topics of multimedia, this week we were going into more detail about graphics. The lecture started with covering the topics pixel depth and resolution, “Image resolution describes the detail an image holds. The term applies equally to digital images, film images, and other types of images. Higher resolution means more image detail.” Following this we went onto information about different graphic formats such as BMP and GIF. Finally we last topic we covered was colours, during this we talked about colour depth and different pallets such as the RGB pallet.

External Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_resolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

Tutorial
This week’s tutorial was yet again a Photoshop one. We were again set the task of merging files to allow for the creation of a final document. To start we had to adjust the width and height a new file we had created, we then had to type some text and drag it onto our original document. Following this we had to download a file from blackboard and make the background of the new image to be exactly the same as the image we downloaded. Near the end we were set the task of creating some buttons by following instructions given in the hand out.

Reflection
I found this week’s lecture fairly interesting and what we were taught will help with the up and coming website coursework, allowing us to format images properly will be a great deal of help, also using the colour palette will allow us to match colours precisely. I found this week’s tutorial really boring, the work we are doing in the tutorials is still pretty easy, I’m looking forward to getting onto some more complex Photoshop work, or moving onto designing websites, as I enjoy working with Dreamweaver. The basic copy and paste and edit slightly tasks are getting a bit tedious.

Multimedia

Lecture

This was the lecture of the first week back after the chrismas break, it was taken by Daniel Cunliffe and it was based on multimedia."Multimedia is media that utilises a combination of different content forms." as defined by Wikipedia. The lecture started with the statement "Multimedia is about communicating." and how the effectiveness of some media to communicate certain topics is better than others, and that the combination of several types of multimedia can also be more effective to communicate topics. Following this we went on to the decision making part of the design, such as what type of media is going to be used, to decide this we need to take several factors into consideration, such as technical issues, client requirements, target audience and skills required. We were then shown a "Multimedia Palette" of static vs dynamic multimedia. To end the lecture we went on to a specific type of multimedia, which was graphics.

External Reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia

Tutorial

This weeks tutorial was another photoshop one. We were given three images one of which was a finished product and what we were expected to make from the other 2 image files we were given. To start this we had to download the files from blackboard and then open them in Photoshop, to start I moved the images on each layer of the main image that contained the background to the desired locations, i was doin this by using the magic brush tool. Following this we i created a new layer for which i was to copy an image of a clock onto, the clock image was in the other file we had been given. Once i had coppied the clock over to the new layer i had to move it to the location and rotate it via the free transform command. I also had to make the layer that the clock was present on opaque so that you could still see parts of the other layers.

Reflection

I found this weeks lecture quite interesting, the topic of multimedia is a really interesting topic and the amount of things it can apply too is huge. We covered graphics and i think that getting a good understanding of graphics and different types of graphics will help with the up and coming webpage coursework assignment. This weeks tutorial was really easy, i have not really used photoshop before as i stated on the previous weeks blog, but this week it was a fairly boring and what seemed pointless exercise, it was pretty much the same as last week but with making one of the layers opaque and adding a gradient to one aswell, apart from these too simple tasks it was a simple copy and paste exercise

Happy New Year

Lecture
I had miss placed my notes from the lecture and since it was almost a month ago i couldnt remember much about it, so i looked on blackboard and decided to write my lecture on the project managment powerpoint that had been uploaded for the last week of term. This powerpoint covered several topics of project managment, starting with information about the team. This told us different roles of people in the team, such as Project Manager and Designers. The presentation also showed us the phases of project managment, these were analysis, design, develop, implement and evaluate. It then went on to explain differnt stages of the design procedure like pre-production and production itself.


Tutorial
This weeks tutorial was really interesting, we were set the task of creating an image out of pieces of fruit and veg that we had been supplied. To do this we were using Photoshop to copy and position images we started off by being handed out a brief introduction sheet on how to use photoshop. We were then given a booklet showing us step by step and explaining the different methods we would be using to produce the image. We were given instructions to use a few different kinds of selection and movement tools such as the lasso and magic brush.


Reflection
This weeks tutorial was really interesting and quite fun. I enjoyed working with a new program, i had never really used photoshop before the tutorial. I had used programs like Paint Shop Pro, but from what we did i can tell that Photoshop is going to be a really interesting and useful program to be able to use. It was only simple tasks that we were set but it was still quite confusing because i always seemed to end up on a different layer than the one required. As i said above i couldnt really remember the last lecture so i read through the project managment power point, i found the information that this gave really interesting, it suprised me how many different members of a team are required.