Last week one of my email signature designs that I had created almost a month and a half ago had became the new official email signature for MassMedia Studios. This is my second email sig to become one of the official email sigs which is currently included with the footer information of each sent email. A preview of it is below:

This week I designed the Massmedia’s Christmas season to announce the opening and closing dates. My supervisor was impressed with the design and approved it immediately. Below is a preview of it:

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time being an intern at MassMedia and would love to continue on immediately as a full-time employee. I have learnt so much since I started, developing my skills in many areas, especially in regards to the refinement of my design skills, techniques and approaches in a number of different programs such as PhotoShop, Illustrator and InDesign. Thanks to my supervisor I now approach design in a totally different way, keeping my designs clean, simple and effective with an emphasis on the development of concept. Most recently I was also given great advice concerning my resume and business card designs, triggering an overhaul and redesign accomplishing a more professional design.

While working hands on in the industry, I have also learnt how to relate professionally and confidently in a work environment and to pitch ideas and make other valuable contributions within a team situation for a client both local and international. Particularly during this final 12 week term of my degree, my inspiration and desire to learn more and develop my skills continually increases in both the design and development areas.

After completing my Roulette game, which can be played now at www.joeldobbinsdesigns.com/cashout,

has proven my capabilities as not only a designer but also as an up and coming web developer also. I completed the entire project myself without any help and guidance with saving functionality using a txt file. The only help I did get was to alter the saving functionality from using txt files to using a database, implementing some security measures as we went. ExpressionEngine obviously was already using a database for my website so all that was needed was to create a new entity within it. By using session variables to distinguish between users, my teacher and I were able to implement the multiple saving functionality which did not require any direct user input such as username and passwords. The save game entry stored in the database is automatically compared to the user’s session variable and the score is updated with a single click via the ‘Continue from Saved Game’ button.

I’m finding that I just can’t help designing and developing in my free time (this term I’ve especially focused on JavaScript, watching tutorials and researching and studying code and examples). This industry is becoming more of a passion and hobby all the time and I can’t wait till I finish my degree this coming Friday to enter this great field as a full time employee. For more information and examples of my portfolio work, visit www.joeldobbinsdesigns.com. I would also love to give you, either in hard or soft copy,  my resume and business card.

Thanks to some great advice from my supervisor and a designer employee from MassMedia Studios, I redesigned my resume and business card. The most important advice I was given was that, as a designer in the multimedia industry, a resume should effectively only be one page long and should be clear, plain and concise. The resume should be easy to read for everyone with minimal design elements distracting the reader’s focus. Prior to this advice I was designing a very complex layout that, from a design point of view, looked quite appealing. As a result, such a resume design would not have practically served its primary purpose, which is to portray my skills and abilities as quickly and professionally. Often a business could receive several hundred resumes for a single position so it is absolutely crucial that my resume is instantly readable and achieves to portray key important information quickly to the reader.

This highlighted some of the main differences between a designer and an artist. A designer’s job is to offer a solution to a problem or situation, communicating a message in an effective and memorable fashion. An artist’s approach, my original approach, is to primarily create an aesthetically pleasing design. Once the audience’s attention has been captured, the portrayal of the message can then be portrayed.

This week I also worked steadily on my work, making small refinements and improvements on my major work.

I uploaded my first and current portfolio website almost three months ago. Since then I have progressed so far and have developed a totally new approach to my designs. I feel that my current portfolio website does not represent me and my skills as accurately as I would hope. I feel I must redesign my portfolio by at least February next year, as soon it will effectively become out of date.

I have also been watching many JavaScript vodcasts (video podcasts) and have been researching and learning as much as I can. As Flash Professional CS5 will enable the ability to write ActionScript 3 applications that will be convertable to the native iPhone application format, hopefully this will encourage Apple to make the step towards supporting Flash swf files in the browser.

I’m noticing more and more that all corporate and professional advertising is simple and bold, sometimes in my opinion a little too simple. In almost every case the background is either black or white. This is because advertising’s main purpose is to create instant impression appeal with a clearly defined primary focus. Although many advertising and marketing designs are too simple and are almost ugly, a prettier design would ultimately compromise its effectiveness to effectively communicate to the targeted audience. Most importantly the message must be conveyed quickly as possible as, with our modern world filled with advertising, one’s attention span for a single advertisement is often less than a couple of seconds.

I also believe that simplicity of a design promotes a sense of security for the product being advertised. Apple products such as the iPhone and Mac OSX are a great example of this and it is evident the design has followed this trend.

I completed 31 different designs in total for this project. I’ve noticed that each design is generally a slight improvement than the previous. The process of designing becomes evidently more efficient and effective for me each day and I feel my inspiration and potential is flourishing. In contrary, I also feel that my coding skills, experience and confidence have also dramatically improved as well, especially within the last three weeks. My major work ActionScript 3 Roulette game is now complete with only the saving functionality to be implemented. I spent all last week fixing up small bugs and closing loop holes that allow the opportunity for the player to cheat. At one stage it was possible to edit your bets at the end of each round after the results of the spin have been determined. This was fixed a couple of weeks ago by simply applying ‘pokerChip.mouseEnabled = false’, for example, at the appropriate times so that the betting chips could not be moved around on the stage until the next round.

For my studies I’ve spent over 18 hours coding with ActionScript 3 for my Bachelor of Applied Multimedia major work Roulette game. My confidence and experience has developed tremendously and I can’t wait till I get a chance to do some AS3 for personal clients and/or for MassMedia.

I only have 4 1/2 weeks left of my degree with my final presentation on the 4th of December. I would like to encourage everyone, including anyone from MassMedia, who are looking for a full-time employee with both advanced web design and development skills. I am looking for work from this day forward and am keen to start work immediately before the Christmas holidays begin.

During my internship I also researched sIFR more in-depth. sIFR allows you to automatically generate swf files to replace html styles text with more flexible text styling Flash has to offer. I first learnt of this great technique during my beta presentation for Qantm 2 weeks ago, as a fellow student used this technique in his major work. I discussed this technique with my supervisor but learnt that sIFR can cause some problems.   Apparently, due to font smoothing in both Windows and Mac operating systems, sIFR doesn’t make much of a difference anymore. Since JavaScript, according to the web browser can behave differently causing problems with Flash. As Flash Player is incompatible with the iPhone, this in itself causes significant causes as this rapidly growing high-demand market cannot view Flash, making sIFR and similar Flash based techniques in many cases useless.

I spent my scheduled time this week at MassMedia creating PhotoShop designs for this product. My brief was to design the general layout for the Christmas card that is both professional but unique, portraying our Christmas message in a clever and fresh trend setting way.  Although I found this both relatively challenging at first, I really got into it creating over 20 separate designs. I narrowed the selection down to 5 of my favourites, developing and enhancing these even further. Although these designs aren’t 100% completed, I am very happy with their direction and I believe that, with just a little tweaking and final editing, at least 2 of these designs would be at a high enough standard to release as designs for the official Christmas card of 2009.

I also attended a meeting to discuss and brainstorm some ideas for a new promotional mobile product for one of MassMedia’s clients. I contributed suggesting a few ideas that are included in the solution package that will be sent back to the client for approval. During this week my supervisor and I researched some of the latest online trends to further develop our knowledge and experience for the future. I researched and learnt the process of how to implement new html 5 tags such as <audio> and <video> tags with their associated parameters. I was already aware html 5 offered these two tags almost 2 months ago after talking to a friend at church who works in the multimedia industry as a Python developer. He also has advanced PHP knowledge gained from previous work experience which we also discussed. I began learning PHP early this year and have even used PHP to develop a tutorial website using MySQL.

Recently I’ve also researched Microsoft’s Silverlight, a direct competitor for Adobe’s Flash. Silverlight makes use of the Visual Studio 2008, offering arguably the best development IDE (Integrated Development Environment) available with Silverlight rumoured to offer faster and more professional development than what Flash has to offer. Additionally I’ve also been learning the differences between low-level and high-level programming. Low-level languages allow you to directly control individual blocks of memory, allowing you to most effectively make the most of the resources of a computer. Unfortunately this level of programming requires the most time and knowledge as you are writing the actual binary code the computer will read. In contrary, high-level languages offer easier and faster development and testing with many functions pre-defined for you, providing many parameters and a broad avenue of functionality. Unfortunately much memory is wasted as these pre-defined functions have many parameters or potential processes that are often not required and hence are wasted. There are four distinct groups varying from low-level of manually writing the actual binary code, to high-level making use of an interpreter interface from which the binary code automatically generated from.

After contacting the UK movie cinema about some of the great promotional ideas we brainstormed for them earlier, we further developed the ideas the client wanted to persue. During the rest of the time spent at MassMedia, I designed some email headers for the UK movie cinema company for a specific movie that they wish to promote. By the end of the week I had accumulated seven high standard designs which, in my opinion, are ready to be published for the client.

During this time, I also did a significant amount of research about the company, the industry and the future technologies and directions. I discovered that not only does MassMedia offer Traction as a powerful relationship marketing tool for its clients, but in addition a product called ReturnPath. This product is owned by MassMedia, offering valuable services such as ensuring that large client companies manage their emails properley and effectively. The company also offers solutions to help guarantee that emails sent are delivered directly to their customers securely without being treated as spam or junk mail. After enquiring about this with the Traction Managing Director, I’ve been offered and accepted a formal tour and introduction to ReturnPath to further understand the marketing tools MassMedia offers.

In Addition I learnt how much more I need to learn about JavaScript as it seems almost every job being advertised requires advanced JavaScript knowledge. I have only just started writing my own JavaScript less than two months ago so I must continue learning and practicing the coding. If I continue learning and researching as I have been, I should have no problem aquiring the necessary skills, knowledge and experience by the end of the year to professionally offer professional JavaScript development services to prospective employers and hiring businesses. By December 4th, I will have completed my Bachelor of Applied Multimedia at Qantm College and will be available for full-time employment.

Later during the week, we brainstormed some ideas for our corporate Christmas card, which we developed ideas for and presented to the CEO for approval. Both the CEO and my supervisor said they were impressed with some of my ideas and effort, however the team, are requested to downscale some of the ideas due to the limited amount of time we have. 

Amongst these brainstorming sessions I managed to fit in some valuable research and development time for my major work.

During the meeting, we focused on and continued discussion in relation to our presentation and pitch. The team made sufficient progress and developed several good ideas and strategies that we can suggest to our client. Some of these related to how to most effectively target and implement the deliverables requested.

After learning earlier this year the iPhone does not support Flash websites, I have been very interested in keeping up to date with the politics this has created regarding whether or not Flash will phase out and will be replaced by JavaScript. I am just starting to teach myself JavaScript now but prefer the timeline and visual interface of Flash. JavaScript is an older language but in many ways is a safer replacement as if the browser is incompatible, the first image of a roller-over animation, for example, will still be loaded. In contrary, when Flash player is not supported or compatible, the swf does not appear at all leaving a white space on the screen. In today’s paper, Adobe announced that they will be releasing a new Flash player designed for the high-end ‘smart phones’ that will replace Flash Player Lite. Hopefully Apple will make a decision to support it in the next release of iPhone, as portable devices such as mobile phones are the future for the web. The iPhone, arguably being  the most popular and innovative ‘smart phone’ to date, has the power to dictate the direction of the Internet and the future of Flash. Fingers crossed, hopefully iPhone will support it soon!

At the end of the week I was given a large project to work on till the end of the year. It is a large project so I suspect it will keep me busy.

I also created four email signatures – a collection of headers for the MassMedia site. Each header represents a ‘Solutions’ MassMedia print for a selection of recent client work, who’s clients are happy to be advertised on the MassMedia website. On Friday I recieved an additional  request to begin a 5th email signature. This notification was sent via email from the manager, suggesting this signature to be uploaded online by next month. I finished this as soon as I could, submitting 3 final designs. Massmedia now have plenty of time to upload this email signature before the beginning of October.

On Thursday afternoon, I attended a meeting for a new client pitch for a well known cosmetic and makeup company. Their wish was for their website to be overhauled/improved with one of the requested additions of implementated social networking blogs within their own website.  MassMedia’s intentions are to create an appeal and to encourage them to choose MassMedia rather than our competitors via a presentation. The unique selling points that Massmedia convey to all our potential clients is that firstly we focus primarily on relationship marketing. Secondly, MassMedia offers digital pureplay. Digital foreplay refers to our focused professional skills  of web development and design rather than attempting to cover a wide range of services too large to manage. A company that fails to identify their focus and target market will lose direction quickly and will struggle to maintain high standards of professional skills in the specific areas they most require. Additionally, MassMedia is a fairly well known company both locally and internationally, and our potential client has worked with Traction in previous months.

I also sent an email of ideas for the new government Flash website. For privacy regulations I cannot disclose these, however I received several replies praising some of my ideas.

To finish off the week from 4.30 – 5.30 on Friday, I attended an internal presentation concerning one of our clients presented by one of Traction’s employees. This allowed everyone to update their knowledge and fully understand what the immediate directions and decisions we are taking as a company. This also allows employees to suggest and idea or make a suggestion to further increase MassMedia and Traction’s productivity, efficiency and reputation.