Sounds Like Music

Last week we had 2 days training on creating sounds and music. The first day consisted of an overview of Audacity, which I had used once before when we created our digital stories. It was good to have a more detailed rundown on how to use this software. We were also given a general overview of the different file formats for music such as mp3, wav, aiff, oggs and midis. I hadn't previously realised that midis work abit like xml files, in that they are a way to store information and a 'container' for music. For instance, on the second day we had a look at Reason and imported some music midi files. I used the track 'Men in Black' and assigned different instruments to e.g. the drums, guitar etc on the track. It sounded similar to the original, but not the same. On the first day on Audacity we all recorded our voices with reading out lines of a section in the novel Moby Dick, and then saved them as wav files. We then imported them all into Audacity and tried to alter the levels of each person's file to obtain similar sound levels. We were also taught about 'clipping' which means when the sound that has been recorded or imported is too loud and 'clips'. You can then then use the effect of 'normalising' the levels to sort this out.

It was a helpful couple of days, although I think I will need to practice making music in Reason to become more comfortable with it.

Dreamweaver Brief Mission Complete

The Dreamweaver Creative Brief has now been completed. We have finished testing, and the final version is now on the web. The website can be viewed at:

www.d10dev-studio.com/NicolasFinch/factory

I am pleased with the final outcome. We had a meeting with Martin at Atticus last week which went well. He said he liked the design, which was in keeping with the style of the magazine, and that he thought we had done well to get as far as we had in the short space of time.

This week has entailed writing self-evaluations of our performance on the project, and a joint team document logging all of our research and stages of the development. I think that for this website, if we did further development, it would be good to have a fully integrated content management system, and for the video showcase, a dynamic page where when you click on the thumbnails of the video it loads the clip in the same page.

Overall, I think that it has been a rapid learning curve. I have learned CSS, some basics in ASP.net, and what is involved in the design mock up stage.

Website mock ups and build

We have completed our designs of the website. It was good practice to learn to create a mock up in Photoshop. We created a few samples, and emailed them to Martin to choose and comment on which one he liked best. We tried to keep the design in line with the style of the magazine, with an emphasis on photos. The site will have a random image appearing from the magazine as a background to the site everytime a user loads the page. This will help to give a fresh look to the site. There is simple navigation and a feature is the ability to download archive PDFs of previous issues.

Martin came back to us and decided that the design below is the one we should go for, which we were pleased about:



So we have started to build the content of the site using Cascading Style Sheets. My role has mainly been to build the template using CSS, and to create the Access databases, mailing list, subscribe and contact forms. This has been really useful for me, as I am new to CSS and ASP.net for the databases. It has been a steep learning curve. Nic has been looking into the News blog and tweaking the CSS and formatting, which has been important to get the site layout correct.

I was pleased with my first go at CSS as we ran it through the W3C Webstandards validation and it came back validated and error free.

For the rest of this week, we will finish placing the content into the site, checking the layout, testing it, for the Friday deadline. We have a meeting with Martin at Atticus tomorrow to discuss the progress of the brief, and next week we will present it to the client.

Dreamweaver Brief

This is a bit of a blog catch up. We have had some training on Dreamweaver, and have now started our first brief. The training included the following:

Navigation and file structure.
A tour of Cascading Style Sheets.
ASP.net and the creation of forms linked to Access databases. This is useful for mailing lists and subscribe forms.
A mail form for contact details.

I found the training on ASP.net helpful as it gave me a start to learn something I have always wanted to know how to do. Having used Access before, there was some element of familiarity. However, ASP.net is completely new to me.

We were given our briefs and put into teams of two. I am in a team with Nic and we have the Factory Magazine brief. There are 2 teams that have this brief, and the 4 of us went to see Martin at Atticus Media who set the brief. He outlined what we needed to achieve, and some background to the client. The website needs to be in keeping with the style of the magazine, which is stylish and has a strong emphasis on photos.

It was outlined to us that, taking into account we are trainees, some aspects of the brief are to create mailing list and subscribe forms using ASP.net, download PDF options for archive magazine issues, a video showcase using Flash for movie clips, and a news update page. Also on the brief was the creation of a website to download to mobile phones, however, it was stated that we have to just understand how this would be done.

It is a challenging brief for our first one, but I am looking forward to learning ASP.net and how to design a magazine site.