Todd Fraser’s Blog

http://www.silicon.com/jobs/0,3800014560,39422428,00.htm - could be an idea for after university?

The webite is done and fully functional, the business cards are printed and cut, the CV is printed and cut and the portfolio is all working!!!

I managed to code in a feedback form aswell on the contacts page which i would appreciate any form of feedback from! The last thing to do whilst i have an hour before i can hand in is to perform another browser check and post the results here. Before i made my site live again last night i performed one of these tests and the website appeared to work on most of the latest machines and browsers. This is something i do before i make any website live on the internet. http://browsershots.org

Here is a screenshot of browsers the website is fully compatible with;

after a long hard think…ive redesigned my business cards…again!! i wasnt happy with the layout of the front and the image quality was really poor. So tonight ive redesigned them to go with the theme of the CV and to stick with the colour theme and font of the website, they are also a much higher quality (3000dpi) !!! They are ready to be printed tommorow morning!

Ive managed to get hold of a cable for my phone tonight so i can upload some pictures of my design processes that i took a while ago, ive also got a couple of test samples of my business card i did before i went ahead with the design and material. The first few pictures show intial sketches i made of my website, before i design i like to put pen to paper and formulate the ideas into easy diagrams, this is so i remember everything i have to include and can see roughly how it will look before i jump in and begin designing.

Next are some pictures taken of two different sample materials for my business cards. One is a glossy finish, whilst the other is a textured soft card.

tonight ive been adding some finishing touches with css….ive been following many tutorials from sites such as www.tutorialized.com . After learning how to make words and images appear where i wanted, i decided to add this feature to most of the links to give the average user some idea of what some of the links will take them too.  I also started coding a cool feature wereby a character covered the ‘about’ link and the user would have to click the close button before they could find the link underneath. The sign that would be closed read ‘employers click here’ as it then lead onto my CV….unfortunately i couldnt get the code right in the final stages and unless i can figure it out tommorow i will just leave it. A picture of how this should look can be seen here:

this is something i wish to learn when i finish university, images like this are the kind of standard that i hope to be using for my future client made websites.

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/04/08/beautiful-and-creative-high-speed-photography/

Ive finally sat down tonight and re-designed my CV, im pretty happy with it! im gunna leave it now until the morning to amend when im not so tired…! I took inspiration from the game tetris which i played in a 10 minute break earlier on at lunchtime today, i wanted and old school game theme and its turned out pretty well! The thing im most pleased about is that ive again been able to keep with pink, light black and white so as to correspond with all of my otherwork. Any feedback is more than welcome!

Over the last few weeks in particular, when i havent been designing or researching for university work, ive been researching into the industry of web design in order to prepare myself for when i leave university. Here is a small selection of some of the articles i have read, some are more helpful than others as some just state the obvious, but nevertheless its good to keep going over the basics again and ovoid overlooking anything. All of my work produced for the CPLAT unit has been created for what the web design industry appears to expect based on my own research.

http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/000099.php

http://www.independent.co.uk/student/magazines/graphic-design-is-a-hugely-competitive-industry-but-its-worth-the-effort-760043.html

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/professional_body_for_the_web_design_industry/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/webdesignsurvey

http://www.freelanceuk.com/ms_design/routes_into_web.shtml

My main hobby involving computers is designing and coding. My strengths lie in the inital design and i consider myself to be an advanced photoshop user. Im also good with illustrator, after effects + flash. The design of my porfolio, website, CV, blog and business card have all been created solely using photoshop, this is in order to reflect to anyone who comes into contact with these things that this is where my strengths lie. I feel that this is neccessary to do in order to get the right message accross to my intended audience (web industry).

Inspiration for the common running theme of pink in my website/cv/portfolio and business card has come from a recent revolution in the design industry of pink being seen as a very ‘cool’ colour and hard to design with , it can also now be used despite your gender. By using standard, duller colours for the rest of the website (pink/light black), the pink really stands out and looks very clean. This worked particularly well when using pink for links as it has allowed me to leave the links unlabeled, making the user have to explore the webite and design in order to get furthur information. Examples of where i drew my inspiration for the colour of pink from can be found here;

http://www.pinkelephantdesign.co.uk/ 

http://www.teamworx.ie/ 

http://www.sofiaregalo.com/ 

http://www.encina.se/ 

http://www.hyperdog.se/default.aspmode=flashed 

http://www.venusmed.com/ 

http://www.hotdogandmustard.com/ 

http://www.pinkincdesign.co.uk/home.html