I have been contacting sponsors, meeting with the city, and I just finished a website for the event – which can be seen here:

daveghent.com/bramptoncomp

We also got a chance to test out the park for about 10 minutes, and amazingly enough, with the help of my friend Jon we filmed a little, and I put together a small promotional edit.

Not sure what to make of this. We’ll see in time if its better than www.picnik.com, the other online photo altering site made in adobe flex.

Monday January 21, 2008
Arden Royce
Freelances for Microsoft Canada

The first imression I got from Arden was that he was a bit shy and had not spoken in front of students before. But as he continued, I realized that he had a lot of things to say. I liked the insight he gave us into the life and finances of a freelance designer. I also liked that he doesn’t feel too strongly about code and is still successful – which is something that reflects my own hopes too. As it stands now, I hope to be doing work similar to his own in the future. I was surprised that Microsoft uses a weird cms – as Arden was telling us that he implements his designs through ‘Bedrock’ which is the cms mircrosoft choose to use.
I thought it was pretty funny when he said, “If you are viewing at 800×600 I don’t want to work for you.” That was an honest comment about choosing what screen resolution to make your portfolio in. He also stressed presentation in personal portfolios – what it comes down to is that. If you have a good portfolio you will get jobs.
Overall, I liked his casual approach to things, and I could relate a lot to his work. I am really glad we got to hear him speak.

Wednesday January 23, 2008
Mark Farmer
Webmaster at Earthday.ca
Mark was targeting his presentation toward being a webmaster – which is not something I am particularly interested in at this time. But of course, it is always good to have an insight. He talked about how he deals with clients constantly, and everything is solo for him. Here are some points that he went over about being a webmaster:
-    establish a communication schedule  – ask clients when or how often they want communication
-    perfection gets in the way of deadlines – make sure things are communicated well
-    establish if you tell a client there is going to be a delay/deadline extention, they will feel better about it in the long run eg. TTC
-    pretend they are right
-    don’t reply right away – to emails phone etc. It takes some time to think about it
-    less is more
-    presentation skills are important
-    cover your ass – use numbers to show you have been doing your job well (eg. Google Analytics)
-    never personalize – talk to the issue, not the person
-    remember that design should never compromise what you are trying to communicate – a website is a communication medium
-    books
o    teach yourself SQL in 10 minutes
o    web designers success guide – available free on fitc site

Overall Mark was communicated very well to us all. His presentation skills definitely helped with that. I don’t see myself being a webmaster, but who knows. This information may come in handy some day.

Monday January 28, 2008
Valencio Cardoza
Project Manager at Think Media, Creative at Organic

Valencio’s presentation was more about working for a big agency. I found this topic interesting right away. I’m not sure if that’s what I want as a career, but it does sound appealing.
He told us that at big agencies there are tighter deadlines, and they have to be met. There are also a lot more people working on these projects, so you have to learn how to work well with them.

This was for bonus marks James:
ideation – the formation of creation of ideas

Valencio took us through www.nofeemortgages.bankofamerica.com – a project for which he storyboarded a large portion of. I thought it was a great use of video on a site, the fullscreen resizable video was awesome. He also told us for this site: rewardsfaster.bankofamerica.com – since it was a main site they refunded the re-shooting of the actor.
He then took us to the Jeep microsite, where he told us again how everything is done in a team in big agencies. In this project they were selling Jeep as an experience – this shows how big names/companies sell more than just their product, they sell everything to do with it.
Another thing that was interesting – he showed us a salary guide here: creativegroup.com/salaryguide – I thought that was useful.
Overall, Valencio was very informative. I have a better understanding of what it would be like to work in a large agency now.

Wednesday January 30, 2008
Bob Connolly
Media production/desktop publishing/PDF expert

Bob Connoly struck me as an important guy – he claimed to have made the first music video after all. The fact that we went into a bigger presentation room for his presentation was a hint. I should say it was more of a “seminar” though. From that whole presentation all I got was the technical advances of the pdf. It felt like he was trying to sell us on the idea. It was interesting to know that the pdf booklet is a new feature google is looking into. You will be able to check boxes and add content to a customized pdf with articles, audio or video. All the interactivity and customization in the pdf file is interesting, but the in depth detail that Bob was showing us was fairly dry information.
I did not think that his presentation was useful. I could have learned all I wanted to know in a few minutes. And to be honest, I don’t know if I buy this new idea for the pdf. It seems like it is becoming easier and easier to access the web from cell phones, ipods, etc. – so why would people need to grab all the information they can to hold it in a file? If they can access it remotely from a wireless connection easily why would they store it. I could be wrong about it, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

Qixing Zheng
UX Advisor
‘User Experience Design at Microsoft’
Wednesday February 13th

Qixing is not so much a visual designer, but an interaction designer. At first I didn’t see what she meant by that, but after she started explaining how they revised the MS Word interface I had a better idea.
She explained the user experience – or ux:
-    ux is about many things, eg reliability, desirability
-    ux is the overall effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction a user has interacting with a product

She then gave us some information about new products Microsoft is releasing:

-    cutting edge UX – ‘Microsoft Surface’
-    Microsoft photosynth – flickr style photo bank, with 3D compiling
-    Microsoft Popfly – web application to create mashups ( with photos etc, link them together )
-    Microsoft design model – platform + craft + tools = UX
-    Silverlight and flash can work together, using javascript

Overall, she was useful for providing us information about what Microsoft has coming out – but not for much else. It was obvious that was misunderstood what direction to point her presentation in, but when she realized that we are graduating this year and looking for jobs she made a quick turnaround. It was a bit late, but I’m sure if she knew this from the beginning it would be a more informative presentation.

Chad Mueller (.com)
Freelance Designer, Humber Graduate

I think I can say that a lot of use could relate to Chad, and therefore he was more interesting right of the start. He had graduated from the same program as us and basically had relevant information for everyone in the room. He has been freelancing for 4 years, and has done print, motion graphics work, mobile apps and games, and is currently a production assistant for a small newspaper company. He also owns a t-shirt company, runs a design blog (which had over 180 000 visits in the first month) and on top of everything he has a solid freelance career going on.
Chad stressed the idea of your brand – and how important it is. What I got from him is to figure out what you want to do – design/code – and get good at it. I personally don’t know which side to go to, but I really hope to be good at both.
Above all he said to separate yourself from the rest. This is something I have always known, but some reinforcement is always useful. I am glad that Chad showed up (although he wasn’t confirmed to) and gave his insight into the work he does.

Readings

Interbrand Report on the Best Global Brands of 2007
http://www.ourfishbowl.com/images/surveys/Interbrand_BGB_2007.pdf
This article brought my attention towards what it means to be a global brand; I had not thought of it on such a large scale as this before. I found it very interesting to look through all the different brands to see what they ranked. That novelty lasted longer than I thought it would have too – but after I absorbed in all the information I realized that branding is a huge part of  company.

Branding 2.0 by Adam Bass
http://www.brandchannel.com/papers_review.asp?sp_id=1318

This article seems to ramble a bit, but I did absorb some information that stuck. The main thing here is that consumers make the rules – we need to keep up to date with everything basically. Adam Bass says it best here: “Branding 2.0 means accepting that no matter how large your marketing budget, you can no longer dictate to consumers about what they want or when. Failure to upgrade to Branding 2.0 may lead to your company becoming incompatible with its customers and ultimately, obsolete.”

Building Your Personal Brand Online by William Arruda
http://www.brandchannel.com/images/Paper/401_Personal_Branding_Online_org.pdf
I found it interesting that 40% of respondents google people to
learn about them. Not to say I haven’t done it before, or I haven’t googled myself for fun. But it seems that an online presence is becoming more important these days. It makes me wonder about duplicate names though – what if someone had the same name as you, and they had a terrible online reputation. Is that something we should be worried about? I hope it doesn’t come to that in the future.

Emotional Engagement by Ruth Simmons
http://www.brandchannel.com/papers_review.asp?sp_id=1323
To be honest, this article was a bit dry. Maybe because I had higher expectations for it – seeing as it was about music in part. I was expecting a music rights/online sharing argument, but didn’t get one. Not that I’m looking for an article like that, but I was expecting something a bit more fresh.

Video: Madison Avenue Stampedes Onto Facebook
http://adage.com/article?article_id=119822
This article didn’t give me any information that I didn’t already know. Maybe if I hadn’t heard about all the marketing going on in Facebook I would find it interesting, but I have and therefore I didn’t.

Experience Design
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/experience
I found this article interesting – maybe it was because I’m interested in learning more about design. Nevertheless, the comparison between designers of physical matter and online designers was interesting. The author, Bob Jacobson, was telling us all how important it is to learn from other designers. It seems like a simple and truthful statement to make, but why don’t more of us do it then? I guess it is the lack of convenience. As a web designer I would not particularly go out of my way to learn how a architectural designer would operate. And vice versa I’m sure.

Reflections on the experience my team and I had working on the Brand Deconstruction exercise.
I found that it was easy to get started, but hard to maintain dialogue. Re-creating a site is usually a fairly straightforward task right? Not really. I found that because of technical limitations we ran into dead ends, and had to wait to get help. That caused a lot of delays. Although I was lucky enough to get a big chunk of Adam Thomas’ time so it pulled through. Overall it has been a good experience, but I would break up the tasks in a better fashion next time.

Speculation on how interactive media will change branding, advertising, marketing, and message delivery in the future.
There are so many possibilities here. I think the level of visual entertainment/eye candy will continue to rise with the advancement in software and techniques. And the fact that there will be so many people working the media industry in the future. It’s a simple fact of supply and demand, there is more of a demand for this kind of work these days so I’m sure that more people will realize that and see a career out of it. The possibilities are endless really. I’m glad that I am a part of the industry now, and can continue to learn more and be interested by the advances and changes as they come along.

The latest microsite for one of honda’s cars is really sweet. I loved the preloader:

and the interface for the entire site is really organic..just my style. Check it out.

http://www.problemplayground.com/

I’ll have more updates as they come along, but for the moment I feel important working downtown.

Tell me if its better…

5 Things that I realized about Germany compared to Canada:

- The cars are so much smaller. Everywhere. Partly because of the higher gas prices, and partly because of the smaller roads. But in general, I loved it. Less is more.

- Beer is cheaper than water. Literally.

- The food is richer. Everything has something extra to offer. For example… 3% milk is normal. And almost everyone drinks Perrier type water – the kind with bubbles.

- The air is fresher. I love it.

- Less pop stars. The youth isn’t so concerned with the north american pop culture. It definitely still exists, but girls aren’t loading on the makeup.

check it out here