Extended Techniques - Action-Script 3 Week Two

This week was all about random maths and more complicated things like if statements. these were quite new to me compared to week one but it still all made sense to me, some people were having a bit of trouble with the pervious weeks.

When i tried to do the work this week i think i bit off more an i could chew, i could get the random dice to work properly but the problem was getting things to happen when the counter reached a specific place on the screen. 

I went back to this after getting in touch with our lecture Liz and had another go and went even further with it, i had fixed the problems that had been plaguing me before hand and i was loving it, Im not one that usually lasts long doing something if i get stuck so for me staying with it and working out the problems was a great successes.

Extended Techniques - Action-Script 3

Actionscript is something i have been interested in for quite a long time now, and have been dying to expand my abilities in the flash department so i jumped at the chance to learn about actionscript. 

Week One

The first week was reactively basic just learning the ins and outs of instance naming and the like. these kind of things ive worked with before to create websites and the like. So i didn't learnt that much during that first week, but it was still really good to learn the basics again because there were somethings i needed a refresher on.

Homework - we just done some work on the basics that we need to show to make sure that we knew it, moving and changing properties like size, speed, alpha ect.

I created quite an elaborate changeable little program, which you can move, change size, alpha and rotation on one object. it was quite nice, the typography lesson i had earlier was already showing through in this.

Extended Techniques - Typography Week Two

In week two we were focusing on layouts, and how to layout a page with Columns to keep people interested and things easy to read, this was really interesting to me because print is something i am very interested in going into and will give me good ideas for my layouts in the future, one of the main things to remember with these kind of things is you can go away from the column structure and not to be limited by it.

Columns - It can range from a two column page to anything up to 7-8, the line spacing between them shortening with each added column.

Homework - We were asked this week to create some creative layouts which go well with our previous week one work. So i had to create a page layout for my light type work, at first i was a bit stuck not really figuring out a decent acceptable layout, took me quite a few goes to get them working with my uneven type style.

How it will help my Play Brief - I think this layout work is going to greatly improve my design theory when approaching my flash game, it will defiantly make me think more about the weighting of each of the elements as i keep the natural readability.

i am actually looking forward to working out the design properly.

Extended Techniques - Typography Week One

So extended techniques has now finished and looking back on them i feel that i've learnt quite a good deal, first up we have typography in which were learning the basics of type, i've had a few lessons on the subject before but it was really good to get a refresher on the subject. 

Serif - A serif font is like Times New Roman, where there are little flicks on the end of the characters, this is supposed to help with ledgablily/readability when smaller. It is also widely considered more professional than the other font styles. So its more acceptable to be used on a lawyer sign than a kid's store.

Sans Serif - This is basically the same and serif but without the little flick (the Serif) so the typefaces in this family are mostly straight and clean, the two most well known are Helvetica and Arial.

Script - Typefaces which are derived from human handwriting. these are considered more personal.

We then went onto how type can be made out of everything and anything, and how that changes the feel of the subject.

Homework

Feeding in from the examples he just shown us about how type can be made from anything, we have to go away and come up with a good idea on creating out own experimental typography.

I wanted to use my camera and capture something with motion in low light, so it would become blurry and directional.

I captured each letter separately using my camera, it was working really well and i did try to create the whole letter in one go but it was really difficult to keep the kerning right with ledgablitly, i had a few attempts before i decided to just do them separately.