Designing for Students Part 3

Things have been entirely too quiet on my site for a while now. Between finishing up my placement and responsibilities to others I haven’t had much time to actually sit down and write any new content for my site. Today I’m finally able to do something about that, and I’m going to start by writing the final installation regarding the posters I have been designing for Write on Time’s end of year Musical Event.

My last post on this topic finished off with me saying that I didn’t feel that the Animals in Dangerous Situations poster really matched up to the image the band wanted and the members of the band. This resulted in a complete redesign of the poster to bring it more in line with the image they wanted to portray and also to blend it in better with the rest of the printed media that I had produced for this particular project.

Revolution also required very little change, and most of it was done to ensure that the actual content was more noticeably visible against the background of the poster rather than blending in too much, which I believed was the case.

In contrast to this the Cat Attack poster required virtually no modifications to the design. The group poster was modified slightly to differentiate it from the Cat Attack poster. Previously both had been using the same background and I felt that should change. I also reorganised the order that the band logos were portrayed, as it was apparently misleading people into thinking Revolution was the main selling point of the event.

The hardest part of this set of final tweaking was getting the flyers to people to get the OK for them to be printed. This involved a rather hefty amount of uploading of files. Media designed for print really doesn’t transfer quickly, and I had to make minor alterations to the pieces and re-upload them before they were given the OK.

The final pieces can be viewed below.

  • Animals in Dangerous Situations Poster
  • Cat Attack Poster
  • Revolution Poster
  • Write on Time Group Poster

Posted by Wulf on June 11, 2009, 10:14 pm with 0 comments - Permalink

Friday 5th May, Final Day

So today was the final day of my Work Based Learning Placement with Thriftway Travel. I've spent this week performing minor tweaks to the site to get it working as smoothly as possible. Today saw me working on something with a bit more substance to it, getting the Blog section of the site up and running for use in the future. Turns out that it was a LOT easier than setting things up with flutter was, probably because Wordpress is meant to be used as a blog.

I've learnt a lot during my placement at Thriftway Travel Will has helped improve my graphical work and typography a great deal in the time I was there and I think I've helped him with his PHP, even if only to reaffirm his hatred of coding.

So with my placement having ended I'll find myself with a lot more time on my hands... I'll be using this to actually put some updates on the site, I have some stuff to talk about that I just haven't had the time to site down and work over. I'll also be working on my own Admin Panel/CMS section to get the functionality I need fully functioning and then work on extra extensions to the code that I know other people will want to use.

Posted by Wulf on June 5, 2009, 9:09 pm with 1 comment - Permalink

Friday 29th May

Yesterday I worked on finishing up some more of the little details of the Thriftway Travel Site. The Round-the-World fares layout has been finished off, and a few changes to the front page have been implemented, in a manner that alerts the user that there are more deals than just those listed on the front page. I also added some flight deals to the site, something that has been lacking for a long time.

I'm thinking that I'm going to try and wrap up my placement over the next week. I honestly don't have much to do and most of it will be completable within a week. The main thing left needing done is some way to rotate deals displayed on the front page. I'm thinking I should be able to implement that in some manner using some smart php coding.

Posted by Wulf on May 30, 2009, 10:51 pm with 0 comments - Permalink

Wednesday 27th May

Today was spent doing not a whole lot. Late in the day I had a bug brought to my attention by a member of staff. He had noticed that the text in the categories had gotten rather big in the majority of the posts. The browser in question was the dreaded Internet Explorer. Most people who work in web design that I know dread bugtesting sites in Internet Explorer, especially Internet Explorer 6. It can throw out errors for the most silly of reasons. As a result of this I went in expecting it to be a fault with the browser rather than anything else.

This was not the case however. It turns out that I had managed to leave out a / from a span tag, so rather than closing things as I had intended, I had actually opened another instance of a span. Firefox seemed to deal with this just fine, but Internet Explorer rendered it the way it read the code, and horror ensued. I swiftly resolved the error and everything works fine once again.

After this I was given some Round the World flights to add to the site. They're proving to be quite the pain to handle because of the whole Flutter thing. There was a shiny new update to it today though, so maybe I'll make some progress when I'm back in on Friday.

This will be the final entry in my Placement Log as the hand in is tomorrow and I won't have any additions to make to it before submission date.

Posted by Wulf on May 27, 2009, 6:59 pm with 0 comments - Permalink

Thursday 26th May

Today was spent without doing a whole lot of work at all. The Thriftway site is all but complete and I spent the day ironing out as many bugs as possible as well as helping Will get to grips with how to use the site to add new content.

Aside from this I spent most of the time I was there ensuring that as much of my Work Based Learning material was in order for completion of my Coursework.

Posted by Wulf on May 26, 2009, 9:05 pm with 0 comments - Permalink