Open House (Republic Poly)

We were tasked to go to the different polytechnic open houses to be "spies" and take photos. My group and I headed to Republic Polytechnic.

This is the poster for RP's Open House 2014.

The theme of the open house is "Discover. Transform. Achieve." The message is to discover what you have passion in, transform it to reality and achieving results from it. My group and I discussed and we have come to a consensus that it is effective yet not effective. Effective reason being it is simple. It is not effective because it is not impactful and not memorable enough. It also doesn't appeal much to people. Like for us, after analysing it very very carefully then we realise that it is the theme.

We felt that the entrance to the poly could have been more welcoming, like having more students there rather then just a couple of balloon things.

The placard that the student from the School of Hospitality was holding had nothing to do with the school of hospitality at all. We do not have the slightest idea what it is and were told that it looked like a donut and coffee during the presentation. I felt that it looked like a bowl of rice. Also, they could have used better colours for the placard instead of the basic gradient.

I like the concept of their theatre booth!

This was the most attractive part of the open house! The exhibit which showed the model displays of students' works immediately caught our attention as it is not something we are used to seeing. Also, they display videos and slideshows on the walls instead of screens. We could see it playing even from far away so this is good!

RP has put in alot of effort in promoting their open house on social media platforms. This is a very good way of promoting because it will actually reach the targeted audience, which are teenagers (more towards students who have graduated from secondary school). Besides instagram, they also have a facebook page, a mobile app as well as a twitter account for open house promotions.

Our collaborative tools for my group members and I on this task are skype, whatsapp and powerpoint.

Making a GIF.

I wasn't the most excited person in the world to start making gifs. I have attempted on my own to do it before and I didn't like it as the instructions were hard to follow. I would have just stuck to saving gifs off tumblr but I followed the lesson and it wasn't that bad.

We started by attempting a gif of a basketball bouncing around. We cropped the basketball from the background first. The first thing we used was the timeline. It allows control over where we want each position of the basketball to be. We would then click on the little diamond at the side to position the ball. This is the key to where the ball would bounce in the gif.

The second thing is the timing of which the ball bounces. It was a little difficult to estimate the timing for each frame but I got the hang after afew tries. This determines if the ball would bounce quickly or slowly.

This is the final product:

We then learnt to apply opacity into our gif.

Opacity allows the images in the gif to have a "fade away" effect. It is pretty cool!

The final product with opacity applied:

I am satisfied with the final outcome of the GIFs. It was easier then the last time I attempted on my own and am very happy with it, of course feeling a great sense of achievement once again.

We created our own gif.

Dreamweaver Lesson 2

Our second lesson on Dreamweaver was to create a webpage for our favourite artiste! I chose CL from 2NE1. We had to apply everything taught from the first DW lesson, only this time, we're on our own! This was a practise for us to get used to using DW.

Just like last week, we started with Photoshop.

This is my overall web layout and home page.

About page.

Works page.

This time I included a gallery.

Black and white for buttons this time!

Had fun doing up this webpage as usual and was more used to transferring it to Dreamweaver as it is still fresh in my mind from last week.

We learnt to do up a different kind of webpage using splitscreen and worked with codes. This one seemed easier but was more challenging to me as I couldn't transfer the contents over to Dreamweaver properly.

Split screen for Dreamweaver.

This is how the finished product looks like.

I really had alot of difficulties working on Dreamweaver and really have to improve in order to come up with a good webpage design for our new CA.

Lesson #21

(Lesson 20 was HBL).

This was our first lesson on Dreamweaver.

We had to start with Photoshop, to do up the images we want to put on DW later on. We were tasked to do a portfolio on ourself.

I strayed off topic along the way and instead of doing a portfolio on myself, I did a portfolio on someone else. BUT I was still on track with the lesson and was following every step closely.

My "about" page.

"Portfolio" page.

"Contact" page.

We had to then crop out the buttons from the pages we have (already cropped in the above images) so that we can place it individually on Dreamweaver.

Two colours for each button so that it has different colour when the mouse is hovering above it.

I was having fun with putting everything together on Photoshop until the horror of transferring it to Dreamweaver came. Dreamweaver was very difficult to use and everything seemed so complicated. But with the help of people around me (again), I managed to do it and yes it was very very satisfying to see the webpage come alive, being able to click on it, linking one page to another. I didn't like using Dreamweaver as it was very difficult to put everything together.

Lesson #19

This lesson was our first lesson on web development fundamentals.

Every webpage consists of two components - the visible page and the code. Visible page is what is seen on the outside and the code is what is hidden on the inside.

We learnt about site architecture, which is how the site layout and links are going to be.

We learnt about the different kind of pages like the landing page, splash page, master page and content page.

A landing page is known as lead capture page or lander. It is a single webpage that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. Landing pages are often linked to from social media, email campaigns or search engine marketing campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales leads.

A splash screen is an image that appears while a game or program is loading. It may also be used to describe an introduction page on a website.

The master page is a feature that enables you to define common structure and interface markup elements for your website including headers, footers, style definitions or navigation bars. The mster page can be shared by any of the pages in your website called the content page, and remoces the need to duplicate code for shared elements within your web.

A content page will contain only markup and controls inside content controls and it cannot have any top-level content of its own.

We learnt about content management system, web page size and developer's tools mainly HTML.

I never actually thought a webpage was categorized into so many different parts and that each page has a name. I understood more about webpages and the tools that people use to create webpages. It seems complicated to me though.

Lesson #18

In this lesson, we learnt about the creative process and creative brainstorming.

The creative team is responsible for the origination of advertising ideas and concepts from a creative brief supplied by the planner and account team. It consists of a creative director, art director and a copywriter. They are the ideas people, solving their client's problems. They reach their target audience through understanding of consumer behaviour and the many varied media channels available to the advertiser.

Answers to the questions on the lesson slides:

What is the sequence of the creative thinking process?

Idea generation, concept development, copywriting, visualising the concept, brainstorming.

What are the differences between ideas and concepts?

Ideas are a simple mental effort. They are a straightforward and factual and can exist discretely as individual ideas. Concept on the other hand refers to a process, a procedure. It is not straightforward and requires some long mental processing. It exists as a collection of ideas connected in a more complex and interesting way.

What are the 3 C's of conceptualisation?

Cliche, connotation and context.

What is the difference between headline and body copy?

Headlines work with image to complete a story. It makes little sense but when combined with picture, the full message is expressed. Body copy starts from the middle. It carries on story from where pictures and headline left it. It drives the pace and momentum created by a powerful headline.

What is the mood board for?

The mood board establishes the style to follow. It may include colours, photography, illustration, fonts etc. Once it is approved by the client, it can prevent costly work attempts and wasted resources.

What is the difference between a thumbnail and a tight sketch?

Thumbnails are small-hand drawn sketches of your ideas (written explanation). The idea should be down on paper quickly without much effort. Tight sketches are b&w drawings that explain the concept in a simple way. It normally includes visual ad headline brand logos.

What can be presented to a client?

Visuals. It can be shown either in black and white drawings, tight sketches or highly finished visuals.

We also learnt about brainstorming.

We brainstorm because it gets more and better participation from everyone in the team. It provides a freewheeling environment in which everyone is encouraged to participate. Many issues of the problem will also be solved during brainstorming. All participants are asked to contribute fully and fairly, liberating people to develop a rich array of creative solutions to the problems they're facing.

We researched on different methods of brainstorming like thinking hats, the stepladder technique, reverse brainstorming and starbursting.

Later we learned about visual heavy ads and copy heavy ads.

An example of visual heavy ad from the lesson slides:

This ad has more visuals then words.

An example of copy heavy ad from the lesson slides:

This ad has more words then visuals.

Some ads we found for class activity:

This is a visual heavy ad for Colgate dental floss. I like this ad.

A visual heavy ad for diet pepsi.

A copy heavy ad for Starbucks.

Lesson #17

This lesson, we learnt about the Agency, client brief and creative brief.

In the Agency, there are quite a few different departments.

Strategy Planner
They come up with the consumer profile, relations with the brand and qualitative market research.

Account Team
Consists of account director, account manager and account executive.
They do the liasion with clients, supervise, admin and plan as well as deal with new businesses.

Creative Dept
Consists of the creative director, art director, copywriter, designer and studio artist.
They come up with ad ideas, art direction and copywriting.

Production Dept
Consists of the production manager, art buyer, print producer and film producer.
They turn ideas into reality, have tight deadlines and works together with the creative dept.

The necessary briefs to have are client brief and creative brief.

The Client Brief
Every project starts with a brief from the client, which clearly states the objectives of the campaign. It should give the Agency as much guidance and information as possible to arrive at the best possible solution.

The Creative Brief

This is done by the account team and strategy planning teams and is based on information given on a client brief with supplementary research. 

There are 5 criterias of creative brief:

1. Background info - brand, client, product, unique selling point, service, target audience and target market.

2. Key issues - aims and objectives, anchor to the creative team without restraining their ideas

3. Contract - formalizes specific criteria and objectives that the client and creative team both agree on.

4. Checklist - campaign's deliverables and objectives.

5. Conclusion - brief should be a framework, should not restrict the creative team's perception of the brand, product and service and gives the team enough room to explore.

Through this lesson, I had a better understanding of the roles of different departments in the Agency, as well as what a client brief contains and what a creative brief requires of from the account team and strategy planning team.