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.
Posted by Wulf on June 11, 2009, 10:14 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Changes in Web Design
I've been working on one of my old portfolio pieces again of late, Write on Time. I've been updating it and making things even easier to use than they were before. Going over the code I've noticed two things.
- My coding skills have improved a great deal since coding the site.
- The capabilities of web design have changed vastly in the months since I coded the site.
What's changed things so much? From where I'm looking at things it's from the increased use of javascript libraries, such as mootools or, in my case, jQuery. The capability of these libraries is somewhat immense and I'm already putting new functionality into the site for the clients.
I've always been one who has shied away from using anything too fancy, or that will "break" when the functionality behind it all (javascript in this case) is turned off. But some of the functionality provided by these libraries is a must have, and a lot of it breaks in functional manners, leaving little reason for at least some of it to be left out...
Posted by Wulf on May 8, 2009, 10:05 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Designing for Students Part 2
So... to follow on from my previous post on the topic of design work for students.I got some feedback on the designs that I had created. The bands all loved their logos. The poster for Cat Attack received no criticism, whilst the main group poster for all groups received some. Apparently the background was "too nice". I'm not exactly certain how the teacher that came to this conclusion actually came to this conclusion, but I won't argue. They also weren't pleased with the logo placement on the poster... having the Revolution logo so close to the event details pulled the eye away from the details. Looking at the design now, I'm inclined to agree.
In addition to this, I also received requests from the bands that I hadn't designed posters for, asking if I could produce designs for them too. When I'd designed the logos for these bands, I had already decided that I would enjoy working on a poster for Revolution, though I wasn't too sure about Animals in Dangerous Situations. I didn't see any easy way to come up with a suitable poster for them that would match up to what they wanted. It turned out that I was spot on with this concern and, after two or three hours of looking for suitable material, I had to throw something together. I liked the design, but it's woefully inappropriate for the type of band they are and the type of music that they play.
After completing the new band posters I turned my eye back to the original group poster. I shuffled the logos around and filled out the details to have a greater level of detail, based on extra information I had been provided. I liked the background and whilst I didn't think it was "too nice" I will admit it was lacking something... perhaps it was "too clean" and that's what the teacher meant? In the end I went with applying a grungy effect to the background of the poster. It toned down the background from a plain white to a (for me) much more appealing colour, and provided a texture to the whole poster.
Finally I turned my eye, once again, to the Cat Attack poster. Whilst it had received no criticism when people had first seen it, it was now looking rather plain in comparison to everything else that I had produced. Some details needed updated to reflect the information on the other posters, which was done with ease. Finally, I applied the same grunge effect to this poster that I did to the main group one.
The Pieces that I provided them with today can be seen here:
- Group Poster/Flyer
- Animals in Dangerous Situations Poster/Flyer
- Cat Attack Poster/Flyer
- Revolution Poster/Flyer
Posted by Wulf on May 8, 2009, 1:36 pm with 3 comments - Permalink
Designing for Students
So with me busy as all heck you would think that I would have no time to do graphicy work for other people, wouldn't you? Potentially laughably, this has not been the case. I was approached by Write on Time recently regarding some printed designs for an upcoming event of theirs.
This ended up entailing producing logos for three bands, not all of which had solid (or even vague) ideas as to what they wanted for their logos. I also had to put together rough concepts for flyers for a group event as well as an individual flyer for one of the bands. I have received some feedback on the flyers and will be adjusting them for the end of the week, as well as requests from the remaining bands to produce flyers for the other two bands. The following is how things are currently looking:
It's been fairly hectic producing these around my own busy schedule, but I've enjoyed some of them. I really like how the Revolution logo turned out, can't wait to give their poster a go.
Posted by Wulf on May 6, 2009, 1:07 am with 1 comment - Permalink
Using the last.fm API
A friend of mine, Will McNeilly, over at glasgowpodcart mentioned to me that he was looking for some way to pull data from their site using their API. In particular he was interested in pulling out events related to specific groups and artists. After looking over the last.fm API I decided to give it a go, using the artist.getevents method, which generates an XML feed. From that it was a simple case of parsing the XML into a site using, in this case, the simpleXML function in PHP5. The code looks something like this:
<?php
$s=simplexml_load_file('http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=artist.getevents&artist=Disturbed&api_key=b25b959554ed76058ac220b7b2e0a026');
foreach ($s->events->event as $event) {
echo 'Event Title: '.$event->title."<br/>\n";
foreach ($s->events->event->artists->artist as $artist) {
echo 'Performing Artist: '.$artist."<br/>\n";
}
echo 'Venue Name: '.$event->venue->name."<br/>\n";
echo 'Venue City: '.$event->venue->location->city."<br/>\n";
echo 'More Information: <a href="'.$event->url.'" target="_blank">'.$event->url."</a><br/>\n";
}
?>
What this code does is pulls the XML feed into the page listing the latest events for the band Disturbed, and pulls various aspects out of the feed and displays them in a very rough and ready form. I've left it like this so that Will can slot it into the glasgowpodcart site and theme it however he sees fit.
View Result: Disturbed's Upcoming Events
Posted by Wulf on April 17, 2009, 7:43 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
