Daily Skills Development

THURSDAY 23/9

After we were given an overview of what to expect throughout the 7day Macromedia intensive, we moved onto our first subject:- Fireworks2, which is esentially a tool for image manipulation, animation and java rollovers.

On the Thursday afternoon we covered the following:-

• Introduction to fireworks tool palette
• making selections and using image editing tools
• vector and bitmap/pixel based graphics
• editing vector images
• drawing in object mode
• basic understanding of web banner concepts
• creating a web banner(with the title "Experiments with Web Elements")
• selecting, importing, resizing and soft edges
• overlay
• using text and customisable text
• compositing and blending several images together
• how to group objects and change the order of them
• using a digital camera and opening and modifying the saved images.

I found most of the things covered today to be fairly easy to understand and manipulate. Fireworks appears to be a very powerful tool/program when it comes to creating effective web graphics. The only problem that came up today was when we downloaded the digital photo's we took onto our hard drives. For some reason, maybe the fact that it was a different camera, the colours were all wrong, as in, the images came out bizarre, bright, almost flourescent shades of blue, green and pink. We were unable to change the colours back to normal.

FRIDAY 24/9

Today in Fireworks we worked through and created the following:-

• searching the web for design elements-examples of good and bad sites
• demonstration sites
• animated Gifs
• layers and frames
• how to create an animated gif
• frame-by-frame animation
• onion skinning
• symbols and instances
• tweening-used to fade and an image in this case
• changing playback settings
• exporting to size wizard

Rollovers, Slicing and Image Maps

• bevelling and using textures(gives the image a slightly 3D appearance)
• web objects and the web layer
• creating, saving and running an animated sequence
• image maps
• creating HTML files and rollover graphics
• slicing an image for faster loading

We focused on and made two main things today which will be used in this web site:- an animated name tag that fades in and out, and the "click here to continue" button that is on the first page of this site. I enjoyed learing how to bevel an image, in this case the button, and experimenting with the various different effects such as textures and drop shadows, which all help to make for a more creative and individual design and graphic.

MONDAY 27/9

Today we started learning how to use Flash4, which is mostly used for 2D animation, but is also very effective for making rollover buttons. The following are the things we covered on flash today:-

• setting up a new flash movie
• basic flash drawing tool palette
• drawing characters and background
• select, reposition and group elements
• animation basics such as frames, tweening and onion skinning and flash timelines and scenes(key-frames etc)

Flash appears to be quite similar to Fireworks where the tool palette is concerned. The animation in the two programs are totally different though. I found creating the animation timeline to be quite difficult when you start adding several elements to it. For every excercise we were given a tutorial, which proved to be incredibly helpful.

TUESDAY 28/9

We continued on with Flash today:-

• Sound-inserting sound in the timeline
• advanced drawing techniques
• custom colour gradient fills and creating your own gradients
• actions and buttons to control your animation(stop and start) and looping an animation
• image library and global changes to images using the library.
• rollover buttons, inserted into the movie to control it
• putting it all together and testing the movie

The insect movie we created, although basic, is quite effective and "pretty". I imagine that once you have learnt all the different elements to creating a Flash animation, there would be quite a large amount of flexibility in what you could create.

WEDNESDAY 29/9

Today we moved onto learning the basics of Dreamweaver2, which is a program that helps you to create a website.

Building a website

• dreamweaver interface, palettes and property inspector
• creating a new document and adding/importing text
• paragraph and break tags, basic formatting
• ordered and unordered lists
• defining colours
• templates and library items
• adding and postioning images
• linking to another page, to another site, or to something further down on the same page(the latter uses anchors)
• setting up email hyperlinks
• image maps

Dreamweaver, compared the the older ways of putting together web pages/sites(ie/ HTML and other forms of programming) seems quite simple and far more effective. We also went back and revisited Fireworks and learnt site maps and image slicing.

THURSDAY 30/9

Today we concentrated on Dreamweaver and it's features for creating a table and a template in which to insert images. A template is a basic page model which is divided up into sections that images and text are inserted into. If your web site has five pages and the layout is the same, or very similar on each page, then you would create a template, which saves you the job of creating each page individually. We created our feedback forms using radio buttons, text boxes and various other form creatibf features. We also touched on how Fireworks, Flash and Dreamweaver work together. In the afternoon we had self directed time, which was spent finishing off the different pieces to go on our personal sites, and we started to put together our sites in Dreamweaver.

FRIDAY 01/10

Today, which is the last day of the course, will be spent finishing putting together our web pages, which will then be presented and assessed. All in all, we have learnt a great deal about the three programs covered over the past 7 days, skills which will be very usefull when creating web sites and individual web page graphics and animations in the future.