Paul's Blog 07017421: 9th Entry

Friday’s lecture was about design techniques and basically methods to get your ideas down onto paper. It fills a nice gap since we did a lot on analysing and thinking about that the user wants but until now we never had any idea how to translate the ideas onto paper in a correct format.

A structure chart is a hieratical chart showing how different elements in the chart are linked. For example you could list the employees, managers, senior managers etc with a small amount of important people at the top going down to the relatively large amount of employees in comparison at the bottom. Their basic format and layout means they’re easy to read and create.

A flow chart has a start point and an end point, between them being the things you need to do to get there. There may be multiple roots and part of the design process involves writing down all the possible roots and seeing which one is best. Flow charts are very commonly used in the design process as it is one of the most effective ways to see how you can get from A to B. The only downside is that since some flow charts use different colours and shapes to mean different things you have to have some knowledge and understanding of them to be able to create and read them. Some of the more complex ones can look very daunting!

Wireframes are basically pre designed templates consisting of different boxes for you to write down your ideas in and maybe even include small diagrams. Each wireframe layout is different allowing you to design it yourself to get the full use out of it. Wireframes can be very good for items that can’t be easily translated into a structure chart or flow diagram and is a lot more effective than writing down notes on a plain piece of paper. Since wireframes order information, they are very easy to read and very easy to create.

A storyboard consists of lots of different pictures to represent the final product. This is very good for designing films for example or even flash animations – anything where pictures would be better than words. The only problem is that storyboarding can take quite some time to complete and you need some drawing skills but when done correctly they can be very easy to read and translate into the final product.

Checklists can also be used as a design tool. Checklists are good for noting what has to be completed when creating a specification. They are best used for making a few points on a specific item since no one likes to read though pages and pages of checklists with no indication of the key points.

And that concludes Fridays lecture, a brief yet thorough look though at the different design techniques. Businesses take a lot of care in with their design techniques since it is such a crucial stage of the development, so much so companies even sell expensive software for creating them. This lecture will definitely come in handy the next time I need to design something and get my thoughts together.

For my independent reading this week I’ve got a link to the BBC GCSE Bitesize design and technology area. I know it’s for GCSE but it’s actually really good!! (see bottom of the post)

This week’s tutorial was about “nesting” symbols within one another. This basically allows you to control its different components separately. After a few goes of trial and error I managed to get an animation I was really pleased with where the web part spun round and could be controlled independently by the buttons while the flash part completed its animation. You seem to learn much more when you have an error opposed to when everything goes well since your encouraged to stray off from the tutorial and delve down into flash’s intricate components to see how it all works. I really get the feeling that I’m playing around with a very powerful program! I look forward to expanding my knowledge of Flash even more next week.

Below is a good website for all sorts of tutorials relating to flash from simple to insanely complex. This is how I found out how to make my text spin around 360 degrees.