Sk-etchbook

The project as a whole has gone pretty well. I’m not yet at the final point however there has been an incredibly steep learning curve incorporated into this brief so even though I haven’t has time to finish all the assets I had planned or to organise the documents into a more consistent presentation I feel the time has been well spent.

Time Planning

I’ve done quite well in terms of diary management this time. The first month or so was devoted to researching, browsing, reading, scribbling down ideas and generally playing around. This wasn’t time planned but at Easter I spent a week refreshing and cementing my project management skills then went about drawing up a project timescale breaking everything down into segments. This plan was followed surprisingly well the main issues being caused by lack of experience or technical problems. Initially I had planned the time up until the end of the year, so I re-planned the time when I realised the deadline was sooner. The diary was then reassessed half way through May and amended to correct the deviations and meet the most urgent of needs first.

I did stray from the path a little in terms of unaccounted for requisites. The reseller account setup was much more time-consuming than anticipated, this has taken several days to configure, familiarize and integrate and is still a working progress. I spent a whole day setting up social networking accounts and have learnt a bit about Swift 3D and CS4 which I hadn’t planned. PHP was allocated nowhere near enough time, not because it is complicated, it is actually got a reasonably plain English simple structure but I had that many problems getting things to work locally I spent a day on that two days learning then had to backbench it. The main error on my part was due to unfamiliarity and learning new aspects as I completed the project. I most certainly underestimated the content (copy) creation as I do not normally do this part and as I had been learning SEO & marketing best practices on the fly I kept needing to re-write and change the flow/structure/wording and also had to increase the number of pages for SEO purposes. I do think I’ve done pretty well considering how many roles I’ve played, looking at the project with hindsight I would say I was optimistic with time planning, in a professional environment you would probably be looking at 2-4 weeks lead time for the just the finalized copy.

Strategy & Theory

When it comes to planning how to communicate a message, values or ideas I now seem to have an armoury of methods spanning the fields of design, marketing, psychology, usability and technologies. This is extremely good in some ways as I can look at a project as a whole, knowing how a design could be achieved with certain technologies and what needs to be done to avoid complications at later points. The problem is I have learnt a great deal over the past few years and they are in need of more application. At the moment it is like a box of puppies, raw knowledge yapping at me all at the same time. Now some of these yaps seem to contradict each other and conflicts arise. Should you create a strictly semantic document or should you rearrange it to suit SEO purposes? Should you place an important element on the page where people are going to look first or should you put it where it looks better? All these issues can only be resolved by personal judgement, there is no right or wrong answer and as I do not have much basis to reason myself out of the predicaments it is a case of guesswork and experimentation at the moment.

Design, Technology and Learning

Sometime I feel I’ve reached a puddle in the road. I stop for a moment and invent a bridge, a helicopter and a catapult to get me to the other side. Then I realize I can just step over it.

I do have a tendency to get bored fast and multitask things to death. Looking at the project planning I have a heap of notes and scribbles which all need consolidating, digitising and tidying up to make any sense. I did some of the design work, before finishing the planning and did the content at the same time. This seems very random but it works for me. I’ve read books on how to do things before, read a few chapters, got the gist and then guessed the rest. I think I apply this approach to projects too, enhanced tremendously by not having any external direction (client).

I shall annotate my design process more thoroughly in a separate post however it went something like this. After the planning and research it was a matter of playing to create various options and logos. I developed the “cube” route and then decided to favour a alternate route. I had drafted out a site and stationary but was missing that spark of inspiration. I like both the “cube” and the “basic blue” logos the latter needing some development. I decided to progress with a basic site design and to focus my attention on the structure and functionality after all a working site is more important as it can be easily re-skinned.

Technologically I’ve really tried to get myself involved, I’ve played with PHP, AJAX, JavaScript and CGI scripts. This was perhaps a little foolish but I think it is vital for me to have at least a basic grasp of PHP and JavaScript to compete at a professional level, the internet is getting more and more complex, customers want more functionality as standard so if there are timesaving ways meet demand you need to know them.