Coke Bottle Design Feedback

These are the three designs that I have chosen to digitise, any comments, suggestions or improvements would be greatly appreciated. Please don;t be too harsh because they too me ages, especially the second one...

On the home straight... almost!

It’s nearing the end of the third semester, ¾ of the way through the entire course, which is kind of scary. Time seems to be flying and it seems like just yesterday that we were throwing a ball to each other and throwing eggs out of the window. The fact that time is flying is usually a sign when you’re having fun and I think this semester out of them all has been the most enjoyable.

We have had the group assignment this semester and that experience was fantastic. Everything about it, from the choosing of the roles to meeting with the client and organising a great user testing day flowed seamlessly. This unit has generally taught me the most, and especially the importance of user testing, which I somewhat did not take much notice of before but now seems to me that it should be the centre of any website that I make. User testing is simply the best way of ironing out a websites flaws, which me and my group learned the hard way the first time around because our site was simply not user friendly at all.

Another assignment that we are currently in to process of completing is the Culture Vulture. Again this has taught me a great amount and has given me a new found respect for artists. We literally had to sit behind our desks for three consecutive weeks and come up with designs for and unknown product which meant that they would be extremely diverse, and to be fair they were but after a couple of hours my mind tended to go blank and new distinct ideas were hard to come across. At these types of moments I always thought how it is for artists who have to come up with extremely distinct ideas day in day out, probably not at the pace we had to but even still their minds must boggle sometimes.

This semester also saw the introduction of CSS, something that I had been greatly anticipating and have managed to pick up rather well I felt. To say I had started with no knowledge whatsoever I was genuinely impressed with the final outcome, which although not perfect and not the best design in the world proved to be almost and exact replica of what I envisioned it to look like.

To say there is only one semester left and not a very long one if you take out the holidays I think its time to realistically start looking at the future and to look at the types of jobs that are currently available. Uncertain of exactly what type of job I want at the end of it all I think I will probably apply for a number of different types and hopefully I will the get a more specific idea of what I want to do. A third year at university I think is out of the question, for now at least. I just don’t see what I would gain from it and at the end of the day if its possible to obtain employment with what I think is a rather credible qualification then why waste another year, and I think from what I’ve heard I would learn much more in a year at work than I would in a year at university. So let’s bring on the last semester and learn some Flash!! Although I can’t wait for the Christmas holidays…

Skillset or BTEC?

Education is all about working and training to a certain level that is required for you to be seen as an employable person. Sounds pretty simple, but the difficulty in this is who do you get to actually set this so called standard that we should all be aiming for?

Many courses these days including the one that we are currently on are sort of being torn apart by two different groups of people. First of all by people who actually run the courses and who provide the platform for the tutors to then interpret these elements in their own understanding and then there is the people who are actually experienced industry professional and therefore potential employers.

The majority of us are all on the course to learn the skills required for us to enter the world of work; therefore it would make logical sense for us to be told what we should learn by the experienced industry people rather than people who have probably never been to a design studio, let alone have any sort of in depth knowledge of what goes on in one on a daily basis.

Due to many reasons all of which we don’t really have much choice in, our course is ran by what I would say are the wrong people. Simply looking at the two standards and requirements it is clear to me that Skillset seem to know more of what they are talking about. Their standards are laid out in three columns labelled “What you must know”, “What you must be aware off”, and “What you must be able to do” and that is really all we need to know, this would in turn allow the tutors to become much more creative in the writing our assignments, and that in it self would make the lives of the students and teachers a lot easier.

The thing that drew me towards this particular course was the fact that I knew I loved graphic and web design and had previously done rather well in these areas. Something else that attracted me towards this course was the fact that there were no examinations and I always figured that it would be a very creative course rather than an academic one. This sadly was not the case and there seems to be at least a 50/50 spilt between the two. The creative is very enjoyable and I feel myself and many others are being pulled down by what can only be described as lack of competence on the academic part. Admittedly there must be some sort of evaluative pieces and research but it’s at a level that I did not expect, at least not on a vocational course. A lot of this I can see the point of, mainly to give us an understanding of the industry but it often does affect the grades of people with real potential to work in the industry.

The other thing that seems quite major is the fact that the BTEC ones seem to be very outdated and I think this is the most obvious when they still consider CSS as a New technology even though it has been around and fairly widely used for a number of years now.

Overall without going into too much depth I think it is very clear that people who not only know what they are talking about and have the experience to back it up but are also seen as our potential employers should be setting standards to which we should all be aiming for which is why I am a fan of the Skillset standards more than that I am to that of BTEC.