John's Multimedia Blog

Sunday, 13 May 2012

Evaluation

This will be my final blog entry.
Upon looking back at the past year many thoughts pass through my mind the foremost of which is how much I have learned. Since the beginning of this course I have learned the methods and steps involved in design from beginning to end. I learned about clients and their role in the design process. I have learned much about editing and compiling information, sound and images and then how to present them. I have learned to follow a design brief along with how to prepare one. I have also received a tutorial in HTML coding, which I found fascinating.

This year however was not without its challenges:

From the beginning I found it difficult to keep to deadlines, this was due to my unpreparedness in how much would be expected of me. However I never missed a deadline by dedicating myself to my work and ensuring it was completed on time.
Another challenge I faced was creativity. This has always been a weak point of mine. However with the aid of my fellow students and my tutor I was able to overcome this and I feel my creativity has improved dramatically over the past year and I now feel much more confident in my abilities.
The final challenge I faced was working as a group to complete an assignment. This was a new experience for me. I found it difficult relying on others to complete work in the beginning, however I soon overcame this by learning to trust other people more and after that I thoroughly enjoy working closely with my teammates.

Wednesday, 2 May 2012

Awkward date by mcloughlin123 on GoAnimate

Make a video easily. Powered by GoAnimate Video Maker.

This is the video I made on GoAnimate

Thursday, 22 March 2012

Thursday 22/03/2012 (bit of a catch up)

Since i last put up a new post a lot has been happening in our multimedia class.
We have completed an assignment based around designing a logo for a garden centre. In preparation for this we studied different design methods and techniques. We discussed good and bad points of different designs in class and prepared a design for an Italian restaurant called "Scungilli" as a practise assignment. I learned how to properly research and prepare drafts for a design presentation along with gaining more confidence in my design skills before working on an actual assignment.

Also since my last post we have started learning basic HTML code.
We started on a basic HTML involving three football clubs. We made basic pages for each of the clubs using the doccument type definition (DTD):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">.
I learned how to link them using the <a href="(page location)"> tag.
On each of the pages I placed an image using the <img src="(image location)"width="(width)" height="(height)" alt="(this is the text displayed when the mouse hovers over the image or if the image fails to load"/> tag and a paragraph of text about the football club using the tag <p>.
I also learned how to embed videos through HTML using the tag
<iframe width="(width)" height="(height)" src="(web address)" frameborder="(border width)" allowfullscreen></iframe>.

I learned to use image maps to set up hotspots.
The tag to set an image up to use an image map is <img src="(image location)" width="(width)" height="(height)" usemap="#(map name)" border="(border width)">
Then to set up the image map I used the tag <map name="(map name)">
This is then followed by the tag to set up the dimensions of the hotspot, there are 3 shapes that can be used to outline a hot spot; these are: a rectangle, a circle (center and radius) and a polygon (6). Each of these shapes requires different data to work properly.

Rectangle: needs the top right hand co-ordinates of the hotspot and the bottom left co-ordinates.
Circle: Needs the co-ordinates of the center point of the circle and the length of the radius.
Polygon: Needs 6 sets of co-ordinates

I have only learned to use the rectangle tag so far:

This can be repeated multiple times to create multiple hotspots on a single image.

the map must then be closed with the </map> tag.

We also began our collection of work which consisted of several projects, tasks and assignments we have done so far this year. which has since been completed.

Thursday, 19 January 2012

Thursday 12-01-2012 (retrospective post)

This week in multimedia we handed up our photo kiosk assignments and began work on two different tasks.
The first project was to create a short movie made up of the letters of our name with backing music.
The second was to create a design brief for an assignment. We were put into groups to complete this task. I teamed up with Seán Cooling and we came up with a design brief for cakes in the form of popular flash games.

Thursday, 8 December 2011

Multimedia class 08/12/2011

Today in multimedia we did a mock assignment of an assignment we will be doing next week. The mock we did was preparation work which needed to be completed and handed up today.

We had to choose and evaluate an email application, I chose Hotmail.com.
We had to evaluate the email website under the Ten Usability Heuristics, which are:
1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. user control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

When I completed my mock assignment I saved it, printed it and handed it up.

Thursday, 1 December 2011

Multimedia class 01-12-2012

Today we learned about user centered design.
User centered design focuses on; usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks, workflow.
We took notes on the usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks and workflow individually going into more detail.

Briefly....
Usability goals: Effective to use, efficent to use, safe to use, have good utility, easy to learn, easy to remember how to use.
User characteristics: Gender, age, disabilities, left/right handed, height.
Environment: Where the product will be used, indoors outdoors, personal use, office use.
Tasks: Tasks they preform and tasks they would like to preform.
Workflow: The stages involved in order to complete the process

User centered design (UCD) should provide answers to:

What is important to users
The task users do,the order they do them and the frequency
Users work environment
Problems and constraints that affect the user
Users expectations
Output required
How can the design facilitate users to achieve goal

Who are the users?: Users can also be described as stakeholders.
They can be considered as any person or organisation who are directly or indirectly
with the product.

Thursday, 17 November 2011

Multimedia class 17/11//0211

Today in multimedia we selected a music video of our choosing and created a video for it using windows live movie maker.

The link to the video is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pyp1S6KSsc