NMS 504 - Final Project Report
— What were your specific contributions to your project team this week?
I finalized designs for the tomato sauce label and recipe cards. I’m glad I got the opportunity to present the label to Andy, and he seemed to be pleased with our work. I’ve reached out to the City Farm Sales Rep to hand over the recipe card template, but haven’t gotten a response yet.
— What’s going well?
With a team of designers that didn’t have a ton of experience and a video team with almost zero video editing experience, I thought we turned out some really solid work. I was especially impressed with the YouTube video. With access to only basic resources, they put together a very professional-looking video.
— What’s not going so well?
I feel like our signage team wasn’t as prepared as our St. Joe’s counterparts since we didn’t have a physical product to hand off to the visiting client. It would have been nice if we were more prepared for the presentation last week, but Susanna is going to compile the final versions and burn to a CD or DVD, at which point Brad can hand off to Andy.
— Any final project reflections?
This was a good simulation of real-life design work. We had a client that was sometimes hard to get a hold of, and there were quite a few organizational struggles along the way within the group. These types of situations, though not ideal, often occur in business, and if we spent all term listening to lectures and writing papers we would have missed out on these types of experiences.
— Finally, if you can comment on Basecamp as a Project Management platform—thumbs up? Down? Ambivalent?
I thought it was great for uploading files and keeping track of the latest versions. My one complaint has to do with the staggering amount of emails I received, even for projects I didn’t work on. It would be nice if the messaging feature only sent out emails to the group if the user specifies he/she wants it to be an email.
NMS 504 - Project Report, Week 8:
—What were your specific contributions to your project team this week?
I focused on refining my designs for the sauce label and recipe card as much as possible (pictured above). The card in particular took quite a bit of time in InDesign to find a font size and baseline grid that would work together given the relatively small 3” by 5” size of the card. To wrap the text box around King Onion required using the pen tool, which I’m still not exactly a wiz at using. This was good practice for me, and I think we got a decent-looking recipe card out of it.
—What’s going well?
In our team we’ve each had the opportunity to hone in on one or two projects. This has allowed us to take some personal ownership and pride in our work as we go through the entire revision process, from first draft to final product. The feedback from classmates and our art director has been valuable.
—What’s not going so well?
Our print design team seems to be in a good place, but I’ve overheard some squabbling from the video team. Since the final deadline is fast approaching, I find myself wondering if they’ll be able to pull everything together by week 10.
—What are your goals for next week?
Hopefully get some client feedback on our mockups and work with the art director to make the necessary changes for the final products.
—What resources or help do you need from your project team, class, or instructor?
Some final guidance and executive decisions from our art director should help us put out a cohesive print design package.
NMS 520 - Project 2 Update
The great hosting mystery has finally been solved. After a call to the Technology Contact Center, I was given a password. Then after reading the online tutorial .pdf, I was able to use CyberDuck to get my files up onto the DePaul student webspace:
http://students.depaul.edu/~jandruka/index.html
Back to the coding, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on the CSS positioning, and after some trial and error, I finally got the JQuery Lightbox plugin to work the way I wanted it to on my portfolio page. This was a good challenge for me, since I’d never really worked with JQuery or JavaScript before.
The lightbox is working fine, but I’m not sure if it’s the best way to present the web portion of my portfolio. Clicking on the thumbnail brings up a screenshot of the website, but there’s no opportunity to include a link within the description. The way the lightbox generates the description is by reading the title of the link, and as far as I know it would be impossible to include an <a href> within a title that’s already within another <a href>.
I’d also like a little more room to describe what I did on each web project since none of these were my original designs. I may want to give each web project its own page that could include a detailed description and a link to the live website, but this would be beyond the scope of Project 2, which is only supposed to be 3-5 pages. This might be something to look into for the next phase of the project.
NMS 504 - Project Report, Week Seven
-What were your specific contributions to your project team this week?
I’m in the process of converting my tomato sauce label to the dimensions of the original label. Also, I’m working on the back side label, which will include Susanna’s “King Tomato” and tell the story of City Farm.
I saw that Sarah was having some trouble with fonts, so I’m also going to see if I can replicate her recipe cards in InDesign and incorporate our standard fonts and colors.
-What’s going well?
Our internal reviews have been successful for the most part. By getting some input from classmates outside of the print design team, we’ve gotten some good comments and ideas on how to move forward.
Last week’s rapid-fire brainstorming session was good for establishing some tagline ideas, but it also just for getting everyone thinking creatively and shouting out the first ideas that came to mind. Our challenge will be to sculpt those raw ideas into finished products.
-What’s not going so well?
In my design group there’s a wide variety both in terms of design styles and even what software we all have access to. This has led to individual pieces that don’t have much of a uniform look and feel.
-What are your goals for next week?
In accordance with Piush’s milestone on Basecamp, I believe we should be ready to turn in all of our print deliverables to the client by next week, 5/20. At tonight’s meeting we should make plans to contact our printer and find out if that goal is actually feasible.
-What resources or help do you need from your project team, class, or instructor?
I think the design team could benefit from a meeting in a room with CS3/CS4-loaded Macs where we can finalize our designs and have our Art Director apply some unifying guidelines to each piece. Maybe we could try meeting in the lab at 1150 W. Fullerton?
NMS 520 - Project 2 Update
Well I’ve put in some serious time trying to learn the ins and outs of CSS positioning, and I think I’ve almost got it. I watched and rewatched some video tutorials at lynda.com, and while it looks like some of their example pages are out of date, the basic concepts remain the same. I had a really tough time at first with the whole relative vs. absolute positioning thing, but one of the tips on a video tutorial made it simple: use relative only once when you’re making the container, then use absolute for the rest of the divs. I don’t know if that’s an actual rule of thumb, but it worked for me.
It took a lot of trial and error, but my index page looks pretty much exactly like the Photoshop sketch I started with. I altered some of the spacing once I saw the way it looks in a browser, but I’m sticking with the design concept.
For the images on my portfolio page, I’m experimenting with using a jQuery Lightbox plug-in. I’m not sure if that’s out of the scope of this assignment, but I wanted to give it a shot. I messed around a lot with the lightbox style sheet to get it to work the way I wanted, and so far so good. I’ll wait and see how well this lightbox works once I test my site for every browser. It may end up that I have to scrap the whole thing and go to a more traditional “click thumbnail->go to image” set-up, but it was a good experience to at least play with the jQuery stuff.
As far as hosting goes, I still haven’t been able to figure out the god-awful documentation of how to use the DePaul webspace. In my Text and Image class, Michael Moore brought up the fact that the online directions are totally wrong and when he called IT Services there wasn’t much more help. I may be able to temporarily use some webspace at work, which would be great since I really don’t want to drop any money on hosting before I absolutely have to.
NMS 504 - Project Report, Week Six
—What’s going well?
Personally, I’m enjoying the design challenges offered to the print/design team. I especially liked trying to reverse engineer City Farm’s existing design aesthetic and apply it to a tomato sauce label and t-shirt (pictured above). I found the font Poplar Std to be a close proxy to whatever the ad agency used when designing the logo. Also, to give the text a distressed look, I found a very easy-to-use Photoshop tutorial. So far, this has been a great opportunity to flex the Photoshop muscles.
—What’s not going so well?
I’m still pretty optimistic about the City Farm project as a whole. My only nagging concern is not being able to complete our deliverables on-time. I’d hate for the farm staff to put in their time to meet with us and have nothing to show for it.
—What are your goals for next week?
By next week, I’d like to see some client feedback on our mockups if our Account Manager can get the materials over to Andy or other decision makers at the farm. After getting their notes and some input from our Art Director, I’d like to have my design projects ready to go to print.
—What resources or help do you need from your project team, class, or instructor?
I’d like to know our budget, if any, for these two projects (label and t-shirt) and would like to see our Project Manager to make some logistical decisions about which vendors we are going to use to produce all of our print materials as well as a timetable for production.
NMS 520 - Project 2 Update
I’ll admit that I’m running a little behind on my own Project 2 timeline. This may be obvious since I’m writing this blog post about 20 minutes before leaving for class, but the time I was going to set aside during lunch breaks and after work seems to have disappeared. But hey, that’s life.
I’ve begun with a very rough sketch of my layout in Photoshop. The plan is to use the Photoshop file as a guide when creating my HTML/CSS. By arranging my elements in Photoshop first and using the rulers as guides, I can get a general sense of what size my divs will be and how all the elements will fit together. Of course I won’t have any real idea of how it’s going to look out on the web until I start writing some code. I also won’t have any idea of how different browsers are going to treat my code.
The basic design, which now lives in the relative safety of Photoshopland, is nothing earth shattering, but I wanted to start with something clean and simple, reminiscent of my page layouts in Intro to Graphic Design last quarter. I think what I’ve sketched out above is enough of a start that I can move to Smultron and start bringing the blueprint to life. I need to stay on top of this thing and write some code ASAP.
NMS 504 - Project Report, Week 5
Last week’s on-site meeting at City Farm was very enlightening. Of course it was worthwhile to see the actual farm and get a feel for what they do, but our just being there prompted Andy to come up with a few more design projects for us.
Aside from the originally identified need for signage at the farm itself, Andy mentioned the possibility of designing a t-shirt for City Farm employees to wear while they work at farmer’s markets. This could help them promote consistent branding if customers begin to recognize their colors and logo from week to week. Andy also said he’d like a City Farm-branded t-shirt to wear on volunteer days. This could help him stand out as the man in charge on those days and help him represent the farm even on his days off.
Another design opportunity presented itself in the City Farm Tomato Sauce label, which in past years has been fairly simple and hand-drawn. I’m not sure if we want to include the “King Onion” logo on a tomato sauce jar, but a well-designed label that incorporates the City Farm colors would also help with brand consistency.
Andy was happy to hear about our forays into social media with the Facebook and Twitter pages. These present a great opportunity for the organization, but the challenge for us will be handing these projects off to the right person who will keep them from falling into disrepair.
My main concern at this point in the project is that there are a lot of great ideas, but we haven’t really nailed down any timelines or deadlines. I’m worried that there’ll be a mad rush in the last few weeks to produce our materials, which may not yield the best results. By next week, I’d like to see our Project Manager assign some tasks and deadlines to each individual team member to make sure we stay on course for finishing this project by week 10.
NMS 520 - To Host Or Not To Host?
In preparing for Project 2, I have to consider what exactly I’m going to do with the project once this course is over, and more importantly, once I no longer have access to DePaul’s web space. For this assignment, I intend to build an online portfolio for my work both within and outside of the NMS program. I don’t have a super impressive portfolio yet, but for starters I’m going to include the print designs I created in Intro to Graphic Design as well as some of the websites I’ve worked on at my job.
I plan on purchasing a domain name immediately, but the question of where to host the site in the future is a tricky one. If I use GoDaddy to secure the domain, I could also sign up for their “Best Value” hosing plan at $6.64/month. This would be an easy option since all I’d have to do is upload the files to GoDaddy’s server without changing a thing. But even though $6.64 doesn’t sound like much, it’s still a lot more than free.
If I want to opt for free hosting, I’m going to have to give up some control. One option I’d like to explore is hosting my portfolio right here on tumblr. This would require a bit of work up front, since I’d have to take my HTML/CSS design and somehow convert it into a tumblr theme. I have no idea how to do this yet, but I’m sure it’s possible, and this could be a good project for me once school’s out for summer. The one upside of hosting a site on tumblr is that after the initial grunt work of creating a theme, posting updates will be ridiculously simple. I can add text, photo, audio, or video from any web connection in the world (and I’m pretty sure I can update via a web-enabled phone).
A few examples of personal websites hosted on tumblr that have inspired me to host my own site here are azizisbored.com (comedian/actor Aziz Ansari), petewentz.com (Fall Out Boy bass player/mouthpiece Pete Wentz), and felldowntherabbithole.tumblr.com (Glee’s Diana Agron). I figure if these Hollywood people (and their publicists) can do it, why can’t I?
NMS 520 - Personal Technology Toolkit
Present
Right now I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the basic concepts in HTML/CSS, but I’m not putting them into practice often enough to consider myself an expert. I came to my current job thinking I’d have a chance to pick up some design and development experience, and while I’ve taken a few projects from Photoshop file to finished project, those experiences have been few and far between. My work duties have been more on the business side of things lately, and I’m looking for whatever web projects I can get my hands dirty with some code.
Upcoming
In the projects for this class, I’m hoping to take my basic understanding of CSS and expand upon it to build a site that looks really “kickass” at first glance. I’ve picked up the concepts of divs and positioning, etc., but I need to get out of my comfort zone by building something that doesn’t look like the standard run-of-the-mill small business website.
Future
I’ve got absolutely zero experience working with Flash, and I’ve heard that the NMS program’s Web Design II is focused completely on Flash. Although some design purists might think the use of Flash on the web is an unneccessary distraction, the fact of the matter is that it’s out there and it’s being used. If I want to have a well-rounded design portfolio, I’m going to have to prove that I know how to work with Flash.
Another area I’ve been looking to dive into is PHP. A lot of my company’s development projects are written in PHP, and if I can get at least a working knowledge of the programming I’d like to transition my job function into more of a design/development guy than a business guy. As I understand it, PHP is out of the scope of the NMS curriculum, so I’ll need to use an outside learning source like lynda.com to get myself started.
