Web development 1 is quite self explanatory, our first foray into actually building a website.
Digital Imaging was our first taste of using PhotoShop, one of the most integral tools for a web designer. And to add to that a new learning experience, instead of being given a task and a few ours or a week to complete it, we were given all our tasks together and it was up to us to plan our time for completing everything.
On the first day we started with ‘Hypertext Markup Language’ [HTML], which actually turned out to be quite easy. Very straight forward and logical. I seemed to be a little slower than most in the class, but when we came to check our code to W3C standards I always seemed to have very few errors, and often the few errors I had were simple omissions or spelling mistakes.
When it came to the ‘Cascading Style Sheets’ [CSS], it started to get a little more complicated. Again I always seemed to be behind the rest of the class, but always caught up when it came to validating our code.
I struggled to start with, but gradually began to understand why I was doing what I was doing. My website was built, everything seemed to work as it should, and again all my code validated with the W3C standards website.
Although basic it is now on the Internet and working just as I designed it. I’m now really looking forward to the next site, and feel confident enough to design a more complicated site. Obviously I’m not an expert yet, but quickly learning you can find out how to do anything just by Googling it.
The second thing I was contending with was a 3GB download allowance on my Internet connection, I was frightened to download anything or even freely surf the net because I kept reaching my download allowance.
Between Sky not being able to fit me a line and going back to Virgin Media it took me almost a month to get a new Internet connection.
By this time I was falling so far behind with my work and beginning to panic. The Web development was simple, the design was done and we just had to learn how to code it. But for Digital Imaging we had to be creative and I was really struggling.
On top of that I had barely even looked at PhotoShop and couldn’t even carry out the simplest tasks to put my creative ideas into practise.
Eventually I got my new Internet connection, our seminar group had a tutorial on animation in PhotoShop from Steve, and I went into college one Wednesday morning when the second year students were in. I learned just a couple of tricks from the second years, they’re always so helpful, and spent most of the week watching tutorials online.
Finally I was putting my ideas into design on PhotoShop, if I got stuck I just watched a tutorial on You-Tube, everything fell into place. I even changed one of my designs at the last minute, my lack of confidence had completely gone.
However, I was still playing catch up, and as the deadline approached spent yet another weekend working through the night. With a 4pm deadline I set off from home at 3.30pm and just made it in time, but at what cost. Looking back at my work I can see so much more I could have done, if only I’d given myself more time.
Inevitably I should have foreseen most of my problems, not illness of course, and planned for them, then I wouldn’t need to put so much pressure on myself to meet my deadlines, and could produce much better work.
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