Media Production: October 2011

Monday, 31 October 2011

Web design.

The world wide web is a way of accessing information over the internet. The world wide web is built on top of the internet. The internet is a massive network of networks and the web is one of those networks. The use the world wide web you usually have an application which is a web browser. A web browser enables your computer to understand the web pages you have searched for. The most popular web browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

Image source: wikipedia.

The most common web coding language used is HTML & CSS. HTML stands for hyper text markup language. HTML is a markup language which means it is a set of markup tags. Markup tags describe webpages. The HTML elements are the building blocks of a webpage, it's the coding behind what you see. HTML is very easy to transport to other platforms. CSS is the opposite to HTML. CSS is the loo and style of your webpage, when using CSS to create your website what you see is what you get, you drag and drop what you went, then it shows you the HTML coding. CSS stands for cascading style sheets.

Web coding protocols allow the designer to do different things and edit their websites. Such as meta date, mata data is data which contains meta tags which allow search engines to find your website as they search those key words. When doing adding meta tags you add them in the <head> section of your HTML and you add <meta name="Website" content="Website"/><meta name="keywords". Another few examples of web coding are adding images or hyperlinks. If you want to add a hyperlink, you put

<a href="url">link to website you want to go to</a> in the body section of the HTML so that it is seen. When adding an image you also add this in the body <img src="url of the image">.

The structure of a website is simple. You have the <head> and the <body>. The head part of the website is the part you don't see, it's all the coding and nesting tags, where as anything in the body part you will see. I already explained CSS and the 'what you see is what you get' concept, the best websites to use this format are dreamweaver, FrontPage or expression web. The advantage of using these websites are that they are disk base and they are checked before goes out to the real world, so you don't have to worry about you website being published and then something going wrong.

To publish a website you first need to find a server such as Go Daddy which allows you to save all of your HTML on there server. These websites usually cost money though. You can promote your website using S.E.O (Search Engine Optimization) or S.M.O (Social Media Optimization). Using these makes your website easier to find on a search engine. It the HTML coding you add key words which the search engines will search for, many websites using mis-spelt words or 4 related words or the title page name as the key words.

Overall i wasn't happy with my website, i feel it was plain and boring and i definatley should have had more colour and images. I found it hard using the HTML coding and much prefered when we used FrontPage. Overall i enjoyed web design and learning how to use HTML.

Friday, 14 October 2011

photography book cover assignment

Evaluation.

The book I chose to do, Pretty Little Liars, is targeted at teenage girls, this is one of the reasons why I picked it as I can relate to it. Pretty Little liars is a series of books 9 books written by Sara Shepard, it is also a very successful TV show, which is targeted at the same audience. There are 2 versions of the pretty little liars books, One of the versions has the actresses from the TV show on the front cover whereas the other doesn’t. So when designing my own version, I wanted to try and design a cover with the actresses and then also one without.

The whole plot of pretty little liars is based around secrets. So when I started my first attempt and was looking for an image to use, I decided to pick something relate to secrets, so I went with the ‘shhh’ gesture. I like this image as it’s simple, but is big and stands out at the same time. I decided to use the font I used as it’s simple and clear, it also has a soft feel to it, just like the image does. The colours I used are very feminine as that is who the target audience are, also the 4 main characters in the story are female. I like the colours I used as it doesn’t distract you and they all complement each other very well. I didn’t like this cover and decided not to use it for many reason. The first reason being, I forgot to include the author’s name, which is a huge mistake as every book should include the writer. Secondly, I think the back is very bland and boring; it just has writing and doesn’t really attract you in anyway.

For my second attempt, I decided to use the actresses from the show as the main image. I wanted to try this idea as it’s completely opposite to my other design and some people may recognise the book more if the girls are on the cover other than something else. I used the colour yellow as the image itself has a slight yellow in the background so I felt it would all look good together. The font I used this time for the ‘pretty little liars’ is more like the original book, but personally I don’t like this font as I feel its associated with older people where as the target audience is teenagers. The reason I didn’t use this idea was because I feel there is a tad too much going on around the image, I feel If I had used a different picture then maybe it would have worked better, but as it is I feel it looks slightly unprofessional and cheap, which isn’t the look I would like to achieve.

My final and finished design is pretty much the same as my first attempt. The main image and the colours are the same; the things that are different are the font, the back page design and including the author. I decided to change the font as I feel this font is in-between the original and the font I tried first. It looks formal and it is simple and stands out, but it is still young and doesn’t have the old fashioned association with it. I decided to use a burgundy red colour as I feel it works well with all the other colours on the page and it also nearly matches the colour of the ladies lips. I decided to put a faded grey box over the ‘pretty little liars’ one of the reason I done this was so that the text didn’t get lost in the image, but I also feel it could represent the whole ‘secret’ idea as it’s almost like the text is hiding behind something and isn’t has bright and bold. On my first attempt I felt the back page was fairly boring, so I just decided to add a simple oval shape of colour, I didn’t want to put a big image on the back that would distract you from the text, so I stuck with something simple. Overall I am happy with my final design, If there was anything I would have done differently that would probably have been try out more main images, but overall I am happy with this image as it represents to book extremely well and it’s fairly obvious what the book with contain just by looking at the image.

photography book cover assignment

Attempt 1.

Attempt 2.

Final Design.

Photography book cover assignment

Photographers.

Iain Macmillan was born on the 20th October 1938 in scotland, where he grew up before moving to London. In 1958 he moved to London to study photography at Regent Street Polytechnic. He first worked a cruise photographer before moving back to london to become a street photographer. In the mid 1960's Macmillan first worked on an exhibition catalogue for "The Sculpture of David Wynne". On november the 9th 1966 Yoko, one of Iain Macmillians former clients, met John Lennon at a art gallery, she later introduced John Lennon to Ian. In 1969 John Lennon asked Macmillian to shoot the very famous and iconic abbey road album image. A couple of days before the shoot, Paul McCartney gave Macmillian a sketch of how he would have liked the shot to be like, Macmillian confirmed he could do this shot, although, the volkswagen in the shot, was not supposed to be there, it just happened to be parked on the side of the road that day.

abbey road, taken by Iain Macmillian, 1969.

Iain worked for Yoko and John til 1971 doing a variety of different work, such as The cloud on the album cover for Live peace in Toronto, Yoko's book 'flies', the wedding cake in the 'wedding album', The merging heads label of John and Yoko's album "Some Time In New York City" and The cover photo on Yoko's book Grapefruit.

In the 1970s Iain taught photography part-time at college in Stoke-on-Trent, On 8 May 2006 at the age of 67, Iain died of lung cancer.

Tim Page.

Tim Page was born on the 25th May 1944 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Tim is an English photographer who first made his name during the Vietnam War and is now based in Brisbane, Australia.

Page has done front covers for many books such as;

Tim Page's Nam (1983)
Sri Lanka (1984)
Ten Years After: Vietnam Today (1987)
Page after Page: Memoirs of a War-Torn Photographer (1988)
Derailed in Uncle Ho's Victory Garden (1995)
Mid Term Report (1995)
Requiem (1997)
The Mindful Moment (2001)

Photography book cover assignment

Illustrative Photography

I decided to research in to Autobiographies and Horror/Thriller books. They are both completely different, so this is why i chose these 2.

Autobiographies.

photographer unknown.

photographer unknown

When looking at autobiographies, the first thing i noticed was that all the books had images of whoever the book is about and the images were usually close up shots. They do this to make it 100% clear who the book is about and it also keeps it fairly simple, as unlike story books, they don't really need to catch a shoppers eye as much, as the shopper is more than likely going to know the celebrity already and have a view on whether they would enjoy reading about them.

When looking at a variety of front covers, i noticed that the celebrities who would target an older audience, usually use more simple colours and some times even in black or white, where as the autobiographies targeted at the younger market, such as justin biebers book, the colours were more front and in your eye.

When i looked at a variety of musicians autobiographies, i noticed that if the artist was well known for playing an instrument, then they would inclucde that instrument in the main image. I also noticed that, like i said, most shots are close ups, but when the book is for a band then they use a long shot showing all the body.

photographer unknown

Horror/Thriller books.

photographer unknown

When looking at horrow books, the first thing i noticed were the colours. Nearly every book used the colour red. Red is associated with death or danger, so this is the reason they use it. Also, all the other colours they use were dark colours to create a eary spooky image for the book, such as blacks or greys. The titles are also really big and stand out. The reason for this is because the covers never really have a huge main image, then just keep it plain to create suspence and make the viewer wonder what the book is about, so because the cover is plain, they need a big bold title to make the book stand out on the shelf. If they do use an image it usually covers the whole front cover of the book, it's still a simple image & still leaves something to the imagination, but it does give a rough image on what the book is about.