17th Entry

This week’s lecture was dedicated to talking about the coursework. The coursework is to basically design a website for an online shop selling CDs. First we need to have a slash page as the first page of the website built with flash. This then leads to the main page which connects to three additional sub page. One a video with edited sound, another containing content with at least one paragraph and a final ASP page which draws content from a database. We need to use one of the Intensivstation templates and need to insure that the website is properly coded using independent XHTML strict and a CSS style sheet. During the lecture a sheet came round with half of our marks for our blog. Daniel ended with one final slide about text in multimedia.

The tutorial was on working with images, sound and video in Dreamweaver. First we inserted a pre made button below the two existing buttons providing a link and a text alternative to the image. We then experimented with alignment, borders and vertical and horizontal space on the button. We then moved onto sound and video, which in effect was the same thing since they were both included in the video. Once the video was embedded we experimented with different media player parameters to add or change some of the default values such as auto start, controls, volume and horizontal and vertical alignment.

It was really nice to have the whole hour dedicated to explaining the coursework. It’s quite a big coursework with a lot of different requirements so was a nice way to avoid confusion later down the line. As far as coursework goes it seems quite interesting and a nice way to test what we have learnt over the past months. Not too confident with sound and video editing so hopefully they will be covered in one of the next lectures or tutorials. This weeks tutorial went well, bit boring though since I finished in 20 minutes and had nothing to do for the remaining 40, but I guess its better being too easy than too hard!

For my independent reading this week I’ve got some Audacity tutorials and a how to guide on Windows Movie Maker.

1. Audacity tutorials

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/tutorials

Last accessed: 25/02/08

2. Windows Movie Maker how to guide

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/getstarted/default.mspx

Last accessed: 25/02/08

16th Entry

This week’s lecture was about fonts. A little boring to have an hour lecture on fonts but I guess it’s something we need to think about since text is very important in multimedia.

Fonts can come in many different variations. The variations can come in the form of weight, width and slant. These variations can be applied and combined to any font, such as Arial black bold italic.

Fonts or typefaces can come in two main types, serif and sans serif. The basic difference between them is that serif has more pointy edges while sans serif has more round edges.

Fonts can be proportional and non proportional. Proportional fonts have variable widths between letters, for example the width of an i will be different than the width of an o. Non proportional fonts have a fixed width between the letters, the text in Notepad is an example of this.

Fonts have the ability to create different emotions, from scary to childlike. These created emotions can be used by designers to create the desired affect.

Text can be aligned differently on the page, it can be left justified, centred, right justified and right left justified.

The spacing in between letters, words and text should also be thought about.

All in all, like I said not the most interesting subject. I’m really looking forward to moving off the subject of text, I really think we’ve done it to death now. It is however important if your creating a publication for example to understand the amount of options open to you.

This week’s tutorial was about database connectivity, something I haven’t done before. We worked with three files, an ASP file which displayed the database in a form web browsers understand, the database file and a CSS file controlling the visuals. While I haven’t worked with ASP before it was easy to pick up, you could easily see which piece of code did what. In the tutorial we added to the database, added some additional code to the ASP page to show the changes and edited some of the visuals via the CSS file.

I’m really pleased we did something I hadn’t done before regarding web development, it’s so nice leaving a tutorial knowing you’ve learnt or worked with something new. I’m sure ASP will come in handy with my upcoming coursework.

For my independent reading this week I’ve got a Wikipedia article of Typefaces and a free archive of free downloadable fonts. See you next week!

1. Wikipedia article on typefaces

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonts

Last accessed 18/02/08

2. Free downloadable font

http://www.dafont.com/

Last accessed 18/02/08

15th Entry

First of all, sorry this is a bit late! I can honestly say I completely forgot. I suddenly remembered at about 1:30am this morning in a heart shocking moment. I blame the Forensics coursework myself!

Anyway back to the point… Friday’s lecture was about text in multimedia. Not the most fascinating subject in the world but necessary to develop an appreciation for it while designing.

We started off with the question is a picture worth a thousand words. It odiously isn’t otherwise we would all be creating pictures to describe lectures instead of writing down notes. While the saying isn’t completely true, it does contain some truth element in that pictures can sometimes convey information, particularly emotion more effectively than text.

Text can be used for many things in application development such as content, interface, menus, instructions and sometimes even for decoration.

Even with text, you still need to do some planning. You need to ask yourself what the purpose is, who is your audience and how will they use it, will they read it on screen, print it, copy and paste etc. Also what mood do you want to create, serious and formal or light hearted and informal.

Text is created onscreen using ASCII code where each letter is given a code. A glyph is a name given to text characters. Glyphs can be bitmapped or outlined.

Bitmapped glyphs are similar to bitmap graphics in that they are created from pixels. Each letter is actually a picture that has been individually designed by the author.

Outlined glyphs are similar to vector graphics where each character is created from a mathematical equation. This allows for some automation when scaling the text and adding effects. Outlined glyphs come in two forms, postscript and true type. Both are very similar but have different ways for producing the characters.

Text can also be used as graphics by using a series of effects on the text, logos are a good example of this.

It’s interesting to note that the point size of the text does not actually fully relate to it’s size. The widths and heights of fonts are unique to the font.

Like I said, not the most interesting subject in the world but still very important none the less. Daniel always seems to make the lecture entertaining in his own way. It’s a nice lecture to have as the last lesson of Friday afternoon, where you can just sit back, relax and enjoy some of the finer points of multimedia you never before even thought about… bliss!

Friday’s tutorial was similar to last week’s except we went into a bit more detail with Dreamweaver, CCS and XHTML.

First we downloaded a CSS template from a website. We then applied the different styles from the CSS file into the XHTML page using the div tag.

We then experimented with borders, applying different colours and styles to them.

Finally we added experimented with some layers.

The CSS part of this tutorial is quite interesting since I’ve never properly worked with CSS before but everything else just feels really basic. I kind of wish we could be given something really challenging which will make us think and experiment with some of the advanced features of the code itself. But I know some people haven’t done this before so I guess I can’t complain.

For my inderpendant reading this week I’ve got the specifications of CSS as outlined by W3 and some advice for using text within multimedia applications. See you next week!

1. CSS guidelines

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/#specs

Last accessed: 13/02/08

2. Text in multimedia

http://www.ucc.ie/hfrg/emmus/guidelines/d41text.html

Last accessed: 13/02/08

14th Entry

This week’s lecture has an introduction to web development, in particular the two languages XHTML and CSS. I’m really glad we’ve moved onto this area because I’ve been web designing since I first taught myself HTML when I was 13 but like Photoshop was never taught professionally.

First we looked at HTML or hyper text mark-up language, the original code for the world wide web which uses a series of tags to create the desired effect or function. It’s advantages include that there are a fixed set of tags, it’s simple to use and there’s no need to include language definition. It’s suited for hypertext, multimedia, small simple documents and the web in general.

Mark-up can be split into two groups, logical and presentational. The logical mark-up deals with the functions while the presentational mark-up deals with the presentation. The idea is that you should not mix the two mark-ups together, this is where the two below languages come in.

XHTML is a replacement for HTML. It’s a lot stricter than HTML which tends to be very forgiving. If done correctly, XHTML only contains logical mark-up code. XHTML comes with a few variations to accommodate different users. We’re going to be using XHTML strict – the purest of the versions.

CSS or cascading style sheets contains the presentational mark-up. The XHTML file links to the CSS file so it can present the content correctly. Because the presentational mark-up is contained within one file, it is very easy to change, very useful if your website contains a lot of pages.

Sometimes there can be a few errors in your code that you may not notice. These errors can create unpredictable results for curtain browsers or users using curtain settings. Therefore you should always validate your code. On a personal note I have never properly validated my code. I did once but it came up with some errors even though me and seemingly my client and client's customers could display it perfectly, so I’ve always regarded validation as more of a perfectionist's tool rather than a practical one although I’m sure Daniel will disagree with me on that!

To make these websites we’re going to be using Dreamweaver although technically you can code most text editors, for example when I first started out I used Notepad before moving onto Dreamweaver about a year later. Dreamweaver has a few time saving features such as the design view and a user interface instead of just the command line.

It was really interesting lecture, I have to say that Daniel has convinced me to use XHTML and CSS in my future web projects instead of just HTML on its own although I can’t see myself validating just yet!

The tutorial served as an introduction to Dreamweaver, XHTML and CSS.

First we created a new HTML file which was saved in the area of our web space. Before we created this page we first created a new website under the manage sites function, something completely new to me. We then made a series of changes to the page experimenting with different text properties. Next we experimented using the HTML for presentational lookup, then CSS within the HTML and then CSS as a standalone file like it should be done. All our changes could be viewed directly on the internet since the files were saved directly to our web space.

While for some people this stuff is probably new, because I’ve been doing it for so long it kind of felt like going back to counting to ten after learning trigonometry but I guess the it serves as a nice break from the course’s otherwise reasonably difficult work. I hope we go into some of the more advanced techniques, although I somehow doubt we will.

For my independent reading I’ve got a series of articles about XHTML and CSS.

1. General structure of XHTML

http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~i385f/archive/liaw_h/xhtml-webpaper.htm

Last accessed: 05/02/08

2. Wikipedia article on XHTML

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhtml

Last accessed: 05/02/08

3. Advantages of CSS

http://www.vordweb.co.uk/css/advantages-of-css.htm

Last accessed: 05/02/08