Assignment 2 - A Day In The University (Part 2)

After the critique session, I saw that there were many ways to present the pictures. Some of my fellow classmates had rollover effects, used css or discarded colour information from the pictures to decrease the file sizes.

From this critique, many commented that my 3rd picture at the Yong Tau Foo stall was not significant enough. I had removed colour from the rest of the picture, except for parts where I want the audience to focus on. In this case, the coloured part that remained was less than 20% of the picture and the focus was lost. So I've taken another picture, this time with the coloured section about 70% of the entire picture, with the focus clearly set on the food.

In addition to the picture change, I've also used another html formatting in Dreamweaver to layout my pictures. The final file is very small, compared to what I had previously. Quality was not compromised and yet I managed to get my pictures and captions to fit. This was with the help of some css formatting. I was lucky to had found a book from the National Library that taught web design layouts and I learnt this method of displaying pictures from this book. For this module, one really needs to do alot of individual learning, and the library is your best resource for this :]

Assignment 3 - Ken Burns Effect (Part 1)

I guess everyone from the monday nm3208 class should be doing their assignments now. I already have a concept in my mind, but don't have the pictures. Which means I will have to come up with the storyboard with sketches. I'm still trying to decide whether I should use Illustrator to sketch or should I use pencil and paper. I prefer pencil, of course, but I need it to be clear enough to be seen when I present it tomorrow. And on another note, I hate drawing. Stick figures are about the only things I can draw.

I'm actually quite excited about this assignment, where we have to bring still pictures to life through the use of the Ken Burns effect. However, I'm very worried about the execution. I'm still not very sure how to use AfterEffects despite attending the workshops. This software is so alien to me, compared to Illustrator or Photoshop. Even Illustrator was much easier to pick up than AfterEffects, honestly.

Ok, I think I shall go with pencil and paper. I will update my progress on this blog tomorrow!

Assignment 2 - A Day In The University (Part 1)

Oh my goodness. I've done my assignment 2, with all the compressing of pictures to gif and using only 32 colours, everything fit under the allocated 180kb. But when I checked the folder, it says the file size is 211kb. Removed caching of thumbnails, still 211kb. But when I select all the files, the size is only 169kb!! So where did the extra kbs come from? I really don't understand! Need some help here!

~edit~
I managed to solve the problem by selecting the files manually and cutting and pasting it to the assignment folder. Suddenly the file size dropped back to 169kb.

Will update again about the critique session in class.

Assignment 1 - MDL Website Revamp

First assignment for this module, and there's alot of crazy things happening.

First of all, this was a group assignment. Initially, Yiting, Audrey and I were in one group. We didn't want to, since we were all from arts and worried that it would be too tough for us to handle. But no one else was left and we weren't that willing to split up, so we remained as one group. Then audrey decided to drop the module, and our group was left with only Yiting and I. There was no way we can do everything ourselves, that's for sure, so we had to ask Dr Julian for help to make arrangements for our group. He got me to join Ben's group, and Yiting to Mei Yuan's group. However, due to some reasons, we switched and I joined Mei Yuan, Guo Sen and Guan Jie for our 3208 group.

I think it's really unlucky for them to have me too, as I had to break the news of me going overseas during the period when we were supposed to work on the assignment. So no choice, we did what we can before I flew off to Taipei. So, sad to say, I had to leave most of the work on the three guys.

Another problem was that my CSS and web skills were not very good. I only knew basic html and the guys being from SoC, were speaking in a language that sounded so foreign to me. Really felt kind of useless and a liability to the group. Luckily they were really nice and helped me alot along the way. Really need to apologise for giving them so much trouble.

Back to the website. We used CSS to redesign the website, to make it easier to edit and make changes in the future. We were not allowed to change the header and footer, so the colours we chose for the main body of the site needs to complement the NUS orange. We chose grey and blue as we felt it most suited the orange colour. We also cleared up some orphaned links, links which trap users at the site, and made invisible links appear (these links can only be found on certain pages). There was also a problem of the arrangement of the graphics in the page which showed the different equipment available for loaning. Guanjie edited that part, making it look much neater and organised. Overall, our final website looks similar to the previous one, but looks much, much neater with a cleaned-up interface. The menu is also more intuitive compared to the previous one.

From this assignment, I learnt that it was important to improve readability on a website and it was essential to keeping visitor traffic. Navigation was also another aspect that users would appreciate as it will help them find what they need quickly.