Wednesday 21 January 2009

The start of a new tomorrow

Having just completed my first semester of the HND Interactive Media course I am still wondering where the last fifteen weeks has gone. Looking back I feel that I have achieved a substantial amount of technical knowledge from some of the modules that I have completed. The worry for me about beginning this course was my spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPG) was not that great and I thought it would cause major problems for me when actually writing up documents and making sure that they were readable.

When we first got given the A2: A Journey of 1000 Miles assignment brief I was not particularly confident that I would pass this assignment and knowing it was a core module it worried me. With preparation lectures on how to present the document and how to correctly reference different mediums it all started to take shape and I began to become less worried. With only a few days to go before the handing in date of the A2 assignment I made sure that I had proof read the entire document at least three times and I also gave a copy to a family to check before submitting it.
When I got told I had referred the assignment I wasn’t surprised, but to be told it was on the referencing and not my SPG that gave me a confidence boost of a thousand. With the minor adjustment to make on the references I finally passed the module.

Now that the first assignment was passed, with little time to let it all sink in we were given our third and fourth assignments; A3: Sounds like a Plan and A4: Typecast, which if I calculated it correctly they had to be finished within an eight week timeslot. This was a big step up from the first because not only we had to do two assignments back to back, we also had to focus more on them and be able to switch the focus from one task to another.

After reading both creative briefs I was more enthusiastic and pleased that we were going to building and designing a web template and plan for a British Olympic medal winner of our choice. Not doing a web plan before but having made enough templates I wondered what it would be like to actually plan it all before getting straight to work on the design. Given time management sheets to fill in helped me split the tasks up and look at what I needed to achieve to be on schedule for the submission date.

However the A$: Typecast was a whole new level of understanding for me not only did we get mini assignments that had to be completed in a set amount of time, we also looked at font identification and typecast methods. This was a really good experience for me because not having the knowledge previously gave me the chance to learn something new and what I need to know for the Industry. From my previous blog you will see the different types of mini tasks I had to do and my finished screen design for the A3 assignment.

........... Let’s hope that semester 2 is going to be as good as the first.

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