Paul Rickard 4670

Nothing really to report this week.  No further work will be done with my client until next semester (or possibly longer now that her grant money may be coming sooner than expected, pushing ahead other projects).  I finished putting together my final PDF book for the most part, just a couple minor changes to make here and there.  Otherwise just getting other final projects completed this week.  Hope everyone has a good finals week!

So, class is winding down and I’m not going to lie I’m a little relieved.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy this class, it’s just that this semester turned out to be way more stressful than I anticipated.  My client is in the process of writing a $500,000 dollar grant for the library (I’m actually in charge of quoting new video and photography equipment with $7000 to work with), so HueTunes is a bit on the lower end priority level for her right now.  I’m not entirely sure when our web developer will get the chance to actually work on HueTunes, so for all I know development won’t begin until the summer (which seems likely).  By then I’m sure we will have made more changes to the design, but at least we will have more time to get promotional pieces created (which were a goal but not completed for this project).  If you haven’t seen my Project Presentation with my final designs, I will embed it below!  Hope everyone’s semester is coming to a great close!

Had a very slow week actually. Been very busy with many other projects and my client had some stuff come up.  Just been doing some tweaks and designs to the interface and I am working on designing the contact and about pages right now.  I made sure to get the other pages that already existed on HueTunes done first so they could see those and how they transformed before I go ahead and create totally new pages, so that’s what I’m working on right now.  Otherwise for the week I finished up my Module 5 evaluation stuff and got to working on my portfolio site.  I’ve actually been in the middle of creating my own Brand Identity, and it’s nowhere near being completed, so my portfolio website I put up now is just sort of temporary until my official one is done being designed by next year.

Slowly but surely getting the design for the interface completed.  There are some elements I’m still trying to decide what I want to do with so I don’t really want to post them until they’re finished (I have a bit of OCD when it comes to people seeing my unfinished work).  Apart from that I’ve been hard at work trying to finish the next module, and I have my questionnaire all done and ready to be filled out by a few more individuals.  I already had various people fill it out while at home this weekend so I could get a good mix of different demographics, despite the designs obviously not being finished.  I have lot of different projects due this week so it’s going to be a push finishing the module, but I think I’ll be able to get it finished by the end of this coming weekend.  The other good news is my client is done with her conferences for awhile so things should move along quicker now with the project.

Didn’t make much progress this week because my boss was gone at a conference friday and was very very busy all week preparing for it.  I hardly ever saw or spoke to her actually, so it was hard to make much more progress than I already had on the interface without being able to check in with them and give them and update and hear their review suggestions.  I’m just going to keep making minor adjustments until I get to see and speak with the client later this coming week so I can get things figured out better.  I’m not too worried because there are still a few weeks left to get a design done for the interface, and the promotional images I won’t be designing until the end and they won’t take very long at all to get done actually.  Not breaking too much of a sweat yet (hopefully it can remain that way).

Just getting through designing the interface of the site.  The logo is pretty much completely finalized and so now just trying to work with the client on their ideas on the interface.  I’m starting with the main, color choosing page because it’s sort of the whole focal point of the website, so any design choices there are going to influence how the rest of the pages (about, results, etc.) look.  My client has a couple conferences over the next couple weeks and is also working on completing a grant for LITS, so I’m a little worried that things are going to get behind because she’s going to be very busy and away from the office a lot.  I knew about this before, but I wasn’t aware of the extent of the time she would be away and busy, so I’m growingly increasingly worried that this whole thing won’t be completed by the end of the semester.  This is okay because I work there anyway so it’s not like I won’t have time to work on it after, but it is a bit frustrating.  But we’re making good timing for right now so I guess I can be happy about that.

Right now just tweaking the new logo to make it fit their specifications.  We had a review meeting and there have been some changes but nothing entirely too major.  It should be completely done very shortly, and I’ve started some preliminary work on creating the interface.  The idea for the interface and design is to be very modern, sleek, and minimalistic, so it won’t be entirely too painstaking to create the interface (just as with the logo), the problem I see facing is that they just won’t be able to make up their mind about final design choices and stuff like that.  It would be different if it weren’t a student situation, and I think it’s hard for them to look at me as a professional instead of as a student worker, which is where they feel as if they can go back and forth a bit more than maybe they would with a professional freelancer.  It’s just a tad frustrating.

So, I’ve definitely been feeling the pressure from all my classes (and my current co-op right now), so the stress is slowly rising, but I finally got the first draft of the logo done! They already seemingly love it at lot, and the only major tweaks that will be taking place will be with the circle illustration.  We’re still trying to decide if circles are for sure going to be used in the final interface, so we want to make sure whatever shape we go with is incorporated properly within the logo.  Otherwise I’m just hard at work on both the interface and tweaking the logo no (just trying to make up for some lost time at the beginning of the project..and also because I have about a hundred other things going on right now).

So after getting pretty far on the logo for the site, my boss came back to me and said that they had an epiphany about how they wanted it to look, which actually isn’t too far off from what I was doing, but it was just easier for me to restart from scratch design wise, and unfortunately I haven’t had time to actually start that yet.  I wish I had something visual to post, as I like to be able to physically see progress, but seeing how there hasn’t been a whole lot yet, it’s kind of hard to do that (and I refuse to post sketches and thumbs, mostly because they’re awful/I can’t draw haha).  My goal is to have pretty much the whole logo designed and posted on here by the end of this coming week.  It really isn’t that complicated of an idea, and seeing as it’s a text based logo, it won’t take me that long, and it’s my highest priority to get it done this week.  Other than that, I’ve gotten some of the proposal done, but items like that don’t take me long to complete, so I’m making good time on it.

So I’ve finally begun production on the logo section of the project.  I’ve got about two to three sketch options signed off by them, so I’m now working on getting those completely worked out.  I’m really excited about the options they chose, and I would post them but I currently nowhere near a scanner 🙁  It’s a real simple, minimalistic design that’s really professional (especially since it’s for an academic research application…you can’t really get too crazy with it, nor would it be very appropriate to anyway).  Because it’s called “hue” tunes it will have a splash of color to make it pop, but I’m toying around with a couple different options on how that’s going to look.  Otherwise, I’m getting a good start on the proposal, which I don’t think will actually take me too long at all to complete.  I’m working on a proposal for my advanced interactive media class at the moment too, so it won’t be too hard to get the one for this project finished as I’m already kind of in that mindset.

Hey everyone!  Just uploaded my annotated bibliographies and module 2 pdf to myfiles, so it feels great to get those things out of the way.  Haven’t really gotten started too much on the proposal yet, mostly because I’m in VCT 4820, and we’re working on our proposals in that class right now as well.  In terms of production of my project, I’m still doing some research stuff right now and meeting with the client to get things in order before I start full in.  They’re still going back and forth pretty heavily trying to make decisions on colors and design elements they may want (they’re taking a little longer than we had originally discussed), and I know that a few other people are going through this same thing, so I’m not worried too much (yet).  I kind of know exactly where I’m going to go visually with everything though, so it’s just a matter of them giving me the final word before we take off on production.  Let’s hope we get going soon, because I have projects for three other classes to work on as well and a couple of those are behind schedule too.

Hey all! Not much to report at the moment.  Just going over some simple design options for the logo for HueTunes, but nothing has really gotten out of the brainstorming and sketching phases yet.  I’m really excited to delve deeper into the project, but client scheduling conflicts and other classes has been making it a bit more difficult than expected. However, things should be clearing up soon so that’s a positive.

I’ve been all finished with Module 2 for about a week now, so that’s also given me plenty of time to be working on designing the logo for HueTunes.  It was really interesting to sit down and specifically work out the number of hours and rate of pay that would be going in to each section, as I’ve never done that before.  I suppose I should get used to it considering I plan on going into freelance high end retouching, but it’s just something I’ve never had to quite do before yet in the very early and juvenile stages of my career.

Hey again everyone! Just blogging again to give a little update on the progress of my project.  Sat down and ironed out some more specifics with my client this week, and I’m really super excited to get to the actual production side of things (isn’t that always the funnest?).  I finished Module 1 on Monday and I’ve already posted it onto the VCT 4670 server on myfiles, so I decided since I was pretty far ahead (I’ve actually had the whole draft done last week), I thought I’d get to work on Module 2, which I actually just finished this evening as well! Since I’m in a couple other classes with large projects that make up the entire class, I’m more than enjoying the opportunities to get ahead in my work to make sure I have enough time to get everything completed with quality.  I have to say Module 2 was pretty tricky mostly because trying to figure out pricing while you’re still a student in college is really difficult and confusing, but it was good to be able to sit down with a professional and get their opinion, and it turns out I wasn’t really far off at all in my estimates (well, my hourly rate anyway).  That’s it for this week! I hope everyone else’s projects are going smoothly!

Hey all!  Just wanted to write this post about the progress of my project for this synthesis class.  I’m just beginning work on Module 1, but working daily with my client has made it easy to discuss this project freely and openly and efficiently (my client is also my co-op boss for LITS in the library, however this project is unrelated to my co-op duties).  Because my client is the coordinator of Library Internal Technology Services, she is a little busy, so we haven’t got to sit down and discuss in detail the exact goals and requests for the project, but we have discussed enough that I have already begun research.  The meeting for details about the project will be completed by the end of this week (8/28-9/3) or very early next (9/4-9/10).  I’ve completed certain sections of Module 1 as well, but as previously stated, because an in detail meeting has yet to take place, I can’t complete it until that has happened.

I’d also like to take this time to post a little more about my client.  The project I am redesigning is an experimental online data collection application found online and was developed by Gwen Evans (Library Internal Technology Services Coordinator) and her partner Susannah Cleveland, head of the Music Library here at BGSU.  The idea behind this application was to further exploration into an intriguing body of research about connections between color and music, color and mood, mood and music, etc.  Essentially how it works is a user is provided with a color grid with spots representing the color spectrum.  The module then plays a random song, and the user is supposed to tag the corresponding color that they think represents the song.  They can do as many songs as they want, and once they are finished, they can click “done”, which brings them to another page which allows them to select the songs they rated and via a bar chart, see the choices of the other users and which percentile their choice fell into.  You can try it out here for yourself!:

http://ul.bgsu.edu/hueTunes/

It’s really quite interesting!  The obvious flaw with the whole thing is the design interface, which is a major portion of the project.  I will be redesigning the interface, making it more aesthetically pleasing all while increasing the functionality of the interface.  I will mostly be in charge of the design and look of the application, mostly because my office just hired a full time (and former VCT graduate) web developer who would probably be able to implement a lot better flash integration and coding than I could (the back end deals a lot in Linux Apache MySQL PHP databases [LAMP servers]).  I will also be in charge of creating some sort of logo/brand identity, as well as some promotional pieces to get the word out there a little more so they can start collecting more data.