3208 Doodlez

Alritey, I am actually at a birthday party right now. My boyfriend's sisters' birthdays. The 2 adorable girls are ALMOST twins. They look alike, but one is a year older than the other. Hehe... So cute. The room is filled with a bunch of very loud kids. But I just thought of something good. A new idea just formulated in my head!

Well, thank god that I brought my digital camera today. After this, I will head out to school to take the snapshots. Yes, it's a Saturday and I am going to school just to take pictures. Hahahaa... :) Oh, the dedication I have.. LOLS. *rolls eyes*

Oh right, back to the idea. I have brainstormed of the different shots that I wanted to take. For both Assignment 1 and 2, PLUS the final video project. I realise all our projects are more or less related to NUS. So I guess it doesn't hurt to take extra cool shots of the school while it's not littered with students on a weekend.

Oh, there's one more reason for me taking it in the weekend. One very good reason. It involves a twist in my story. I think, by now.. if Julian is reading this... I'm pretty sure he's seen so many previous projects having similar twists. Think he knows what I'm about to do. If not... I'll explain... :D

I'm not going to elaborate on it now.. Am going to execute the plan first. Then, I will tell all. Hehee..

Oh yes.. I'm about to leave soon I think. GTG.

Ok so we had our first group meeting. Me, Sharon and Jalea. Trio of girls. Awesome. Could get along well with them.. Hehehe... Oh right.. We discussed the layout and the kind of special elements we should incorporate into the website. And also things like what to put in and what not to put in. Some of the ideas I had previosuly during the last lesson, we kind of brought it forward, with their approval of course. And now we're sourcing out for ways to enhance our design even further.

As of now, we all agreed to keep this CNM website simple yet professional-looking, something that looks clean-cut and suave, not kiddish or too colourful or anything of that sort. Mainly because it doesn't tie in well with the other departmental websites within the NUS domain. We gotta look good for everyone, right? Even potential researchers could be the target audience. So we really started to think carefully. What is our main aim?

We then decided on a focus. We're gonna make the website idiot-proof and noob-friendly!!! Gonna have a clean grid with big buttons and signs... Nothing messy. Targeting the main dempgraphics that would actually visit our humble little CNM website. Yep. More details soon... I have to go for lessons now... Tata...

Assignment 2 is about 'a day in the life of a NUS Student'. Hmmm.... Basically, I have to take pictures of a typical day in school.

Now here's the sad (or amazingly awesome for those who might get jealous at what I'm about to say) part. I only have 1 proper day in school! It's the Tuesday. Today is Friday and I have to yet to take some good shots. I did bring my camera but I feel so conscious about taking it out in public and start snapping pictures around school like some crazy paparazzi. So I thought it might be a good idea to take photos with my groupmates Sharon and Jalea later on after Jia Xiang's workshop session. It would seem less awkward when people know that we're simply media students doing a project together. Plus, we get to kill 2 birds with one stone by taking pics of the university for our website as well! Yay!

Ok, so here's some ideas that sprouted out since when got the assignment. My very first idea formulated about 5 mins after Julian talked about this assignment. I can envision myself getting shots from my perspective, but in a tasteful way.. Like I want the audience to know that I'm just simply doing my thing, and not taking pictures with a camera.. know what I mean?

Well, for now, I'm going to try this idea out. Alrite, so for now, I'm going to be figuring out the CSS for Assignment 1 with my team. Oh right.. I should put that in a different entry.... Kk...

So the first assignment for the semester  would be to edit the current CNM website according to the guidelines given to us via the NUS Web Design Guidelines file. Yep. Pretty cheeeem stuff I thought. Hmmm...


The first idea that came to my head was to create a simple clean-cut layout that pays more focus to the links which students are more likely to click on. Just using my common sense I guess. Furthermore, I have my own opinions about the current website already that I would like to change. Well, I might as well list them out right now. This might come handy when my group decides on what would make the best design layout for this website.


Before I list my potential changes, I actually thought about the aspects that I must consider when I am designing a website with this specific purpose:


1. Target Audience: Important to know who is my target audience (who will be looking at this website, basically). A professional look would make our department look more.... worthy of entry and if its too colourful or too much design, it will be more of a distraction as opposed to being useful, as when someone visits this website, chances are that they are there to find information fast, and not to be wowed or mesmerised by the design they see on the main webpage, and to find themselves a bit confused or taking a while to adjust and learn how to navigate through the website. I want their learning curve to be next to nothing. Zilch. They can totally navigate their wair around the website intuitively. It's all about INTUITION!

2. Accessibility of links and information layout: Must consider how information will appear, in what manner, and how links will be formed from a set of info to another set of related info. I'm trying to imagine a potential, possibly better overall sitemap layout that could serve as a better website than the current one. Navigation is key. fast navigation, quick links, big buttons are best in my opinion.

3. Time taken to load: The time to load must be fast too. Cannot be so slow. Thus although I originally wanted everything to be a Flash applet, I realsied that it would take a long time to load. Plus all the hassle in updating the information via Flash. Now that would just be a pain in the *****.


Here are the changes (in general) which I hope to implement for my new website design:

1. Header: Right now, we don't seem to be conforming the header with the guidelines' one. So we're gonna be doing that I expect. I do have the preference of using the blue header instead of the orange one. Since I'm so used to seeing the CNM website in blue. Haha... :)

2. Links: In any website, I think it's good to have a few key links being highlighted or given precedence over other links. Rather than having all the links placed in a list to the left side. I would 'highlight' the links which I think are the most important or the links that students go to the most.

3. Displays of students' work: I thought that since we're a CNM major, CNM students regularly produce all sorts of designs and media forms as part of our regualr assignments and projects in various modules. But no one every gets to see it! :( I later on found out from my fellow classmate that she felt the same way. My idea was to have a form of platform to showcase certain digital media on the website. For display purposes. Which I thought would be cool I guess. So far, everything that I hope to design, I'm capable of scripting it out, plus the Flash and wat-not, since I know how to create Flash movies (I did Flash games before though). But I am trying to find better ways of displaying the work and making it easy for students to donate their work to the CNM department for display. If only I could find an proper outlet....


Other changes that I intend to make would probably be the CSS style sheets the website uses and such, particularly for the print and screen. Those would be according to how well and easy it is to read on screen/paper. The rest I think I will be discussing with my team about it soon enough! :)


Here's just the rough 'sketches' I did to realise my designs, very minimalist I'd say. I love straight lines, straight cuts, clean and crisp edges, very simple without the hassle of shadows and bevelling and such. I think they are just too detailed for my taste.

Welcome everyone! :) Ok, I thought of continuing my 2208 blog, but then I decided to go for something different. I feel like just creating a new blog and make it my canvas or something. Would like try improving the design of this blog too... Hmmm...

So here goes... Wish me luck.... I'm gonna try doing some stuff to the blog...

Oh and by the way... our first Assignment is to edit the CNM website.... You can check out my progress on that in my new blog entry...

See ya later!

Siti