Rapporten kan findes i PDF-format HER

Time for another sketch collage!

This collage displays sketching over 2 different ideas.
The first is just something i’ve been playing around with, drawing it in my sketchbook.
The second is related to our Sketching and Prototyping project; the twitterido-coffe-mug!

The drawings are originally drawn in my sketchbook, but for the collage i’ve redrawn them with my digital drawingpad. – No scanner were available.

The collage can be found HERE

So, it’s time for me to post my first sketchbook collage.
The past few weeks i’ve been trying to take notice of any thoughts and ideas that i might come across, as well as to capture any inspiration i’ve gotten.
Basicly, this have resultet in a huge amount of different drawings, photographs, newspaper-cutouts and much more. – Most of these is in no way related to the concept of Twitterido, nor related to eachother.

So the collage is a selection of my drawings, photos and a few things i’ve found motivating and/or inspiring.

The collage can be found HERE

Today i finished my report on the designproces our group has been through this past semester.

The report can be found HERE.

The pdf has active links.

Now i just need to hand in the printed copies tomorrow, along with my blog-discs.

Almost Christmas!

ChangeLog #6
Final changelog before blog hand-in wednesday the 16th of december.

I began working on a new videopresentation of my blog. The video was supposed to feature me talking about the three FPW posts we were asked to do before handing in the blog for examination. After meddling with it for awhile i decided that i would rather explain it through text in the posts, as there was quite a lot to explain, and i was afraid i would just end up reading a sort of manuscript in front of the camera. Therefore the posts are thorough, but there is no video.

The following changes have been made recently:

- I decided to remove the diary section of the menu, as i felt that the posts might just as well be posted in the Portfolio (see screendump below). Apart from that, removing the diary would make the menu even simpler to navigate, which is something i have been aiming for ever since i redesigned the blog.

- Ever since i started the blog, i’ve recieved a lot of spam-reply’s to my post. Comments simply containing links, which i dare not click (and noone should). I talked to Camilla, who gave me a link to a wordpress spamfilter plugin. I installed it, and im not sure how but it seems to be working as i am no longer getting nearly as many spam-comments. The plugin can be found HERE.

- Fixed a few issues with links that would suddenly become unclickable.

- Finally i had some trouble with my old videopresentation featuring wireframe, mock-up and such. It seemed that it would sometimes dissapear from the post, leaving it blank except for the text. I think (and hope) i managed to fix it by re-uploading the video and correcting the youtube link. At the moment it’s working again (fingers crossed).

At the beginning of the semester i had very little experience with blogs, and none with wordpress.
I wanted my blog to be different and noticeable, ensuring that whoever visited the blog would come back for more!
I soon discovered that it was’nt as easy as i had assumed at first, and in my attempt to reach the goal mentioned above, i came up with the OLD DESIGN, based on the Arras-Theme. – A flashy ‘in-your-face’ design featuring a slideshow on the front page, as well as a gallery-like display of all the most recent posts.

At first i liked the design – except the coloring, which i had a hard time trying to change – but i quickly grew tired of the flashy picture-dependent layout, which also took a lot of work in terms of finding/making pictures for every single post. The post-thumbnails needed to be the exact right size (700×300), which required me to rescale most of the pictures i used, as the theme/wordpress was unable to resize them automatically.

In terms of navigation, i felt that the flashy layout did’nt appeal to the viewers intuition, resulting in a somewhat irrational way of clicking your way around the blog. The thumbnail for every blogpost was clickable in the gallery-view, but NOT in the slideshow. Here you had to click the textbox at the bottom of the slideshow. Fixing these issues simply surpassed my php and css skills.

Ultimately i decided that my blog needed a complete makeover.

I wanted a completely different design, that would be simple and intuitive. I wanted the viewer to always know where he/she was on the blog, making navigation nice and easy.

I considered starting from scratch and make my own theme. However, after browsing themes for awhile, i came across the Feel Free Theme which i found very interresing. The theme had a far simpler layout than my previous theme.
I downloaded it, and applied it to my blog. I was’nt quite happy with it’s original layout, and with a little help from Morten and Marc i managed to redesign a lot of it. The coloring was changed amongst other things.
What caused the most trouble was the menu. In the original theme, the menu was part of the main coloum and positioned below what was posted on the blog. I managed to narrow it down to the width i wanted, and then to position it left of the main coloum. Finally i pinned it, so it would always follow the view when scrolling up and down on the blog.

At the moment i am quite happy with the design as it is. I feel that it is simple and easy to navigate and that the colors are “easy on the eye”.

At the beginning of the semester, we were assigned into groups for the subject: Dissemination, Project Work and Webdesign (BFPW).
At first there were are few assignments for the group to carry out ‘as a group’. The creation of a group blog, as well as a videopresentation of the blog-layout we decided upon.  (Blog can be found HERE)

However it became rather unclear to us what the actual purpose of the group was, and for months we did nothing as a group. Sure, we sometimes helped eachother out with technical stuff such as our individual blogs, but mostly the groupmembers were scattered around the school during the BFPW lessons getting help elsewhere, if needed.

Finally we decided to break up the group, and with that “freeze” the group blog, which basicly had been standing still for months anyway. This was done simply because we felt that the group had no purpose.
Since then we have been working on our blogs individually, and we’ve still been able to help eachother out if needed.

We had a hard time figuring out a reason for the group to excist, hence the decision upon terminating it.

As i also explain in my post about my ambitions with the blog, this final blogdesign is based on the idea of a realy simple layout, which would also be easy to navigate.

I started my search for a theme to use as a sort of template for my new, simple layout. I found the Feel Free Theme, which had only ONE coloumn. This was a great starting point for me, however i wanted the menu to be seperated from the main coloumn. Through a lot of meddling with the sidebar php as well as the sidebar settings in the stylesheet, i managed to seperate it from the main coloumn, as well as make it follow the view when scrolling up and down.

To begin with the menu had a lot more options than it does now, as it had a diary for each subject. However i felt that what was posted in the diaries would fit just as well in the portfolio, so i decided to remove the diary and move the posts to the portfolio instead. This means that everything related to a specific subject can be found in the same category.

I think this layout stands out by being so simple, yet has all the functionality needed for a study-related blog. You won’t get lost on this blog.

For the presentation of our Bandpromotion project on monday the 23rd of november, we have put together a few powerpoint slides.

The slides can be found HERE