Matt Tate's Archive

I really really enjoyed the team based planning at the beginning. I had always wanted to work on a concept team like that and I really like how it worked out. I think that bouncing ideas off of each other ended up helping everyone’s project a ton.

My biggest weakness in this project was probably the fact that I did not create a new style for myself. I wish I could have pushed my creativeness more and created something with a different style than everything else I have done. If all my stuff in my portfolio looks the same, even if its good work, it won’t count for anything.

My most improved area was in the conceptual stage. I think this was probably largely due to the group work but during that time my brain just started going overboard. With other people’s idea’s I had things to spark my own. I felt like I was talking a lot while we were in there (and I probably was) but I just had a rush of ideas come to my head (a lot of which I ended up using.)

I would still very much like to improve on just about everything related to web design. During this project I feel I did a lot better in the conceptual work but can I do that on my own in the future? I have no idea. There was comments about my website being clean and having clear hierarchy, but I don’t feel it was so different from some of my other work (like my AIGA re-design) or very original. Can I work on getting good clean work and be more original at the same time? again, I have no idea. I would like to eventually be confident enough in my skills to easily assure clients I can both come up with creative concepts and an original creative final product.

This project helped me get a little closer to both, but there is always LOTS of room for improvement.

I don’t see a category for Wire frames in Project 4…

This might be cheating… but its for the greater good. Here is a list I found of a ton with addresses and hours listed.

Food Pantry List (Word Document)

User Can:

• Search for Restaurants within: Zip Code, City, Certain distance from a specific Address
• Filter Results by: Distance, Food Type, Cost, Dress
• View List of Results
• Select Restaurant
• View Selected Restaurant Information (Address, Contact Information (phone, website), Cost, Dress, Food Type, Photo, Rating, Comments/Reviews)
• Get Directions to Selected Restaurant
• Add Comments/Reviews to Restaurant’s page
• Add Ratings to Restaurant
• Add New Restaurant Entry
• Save Favorite Restaurants

At first, I thought this project would be super easy. Design A Blog. How hard could it be? Title, an image and some words about the image. I wasn’t thinking about… comments, pages, archives, dates, authors, categories, tags, etc etc etc. It was WAY more work (am I really surprised?… no… am I surprised I haven’t learned better by now? yes) Having a more involved wireframe helped me a lot with the layout of the blog. Just proves our teachers are right, prep work does pay off. again… not surprised. I’m afraid I may have gone a little too simple, a few more design/decorative elements I think could have helped a lot. There is a fine line that is tough to figure out between good simplicity and bad simplicity. I struggle with that in almost all of my work.

Imbalance

AutoFocus

Aparatus

It was really hard for me to get interested in doing this project. I think because of that it definitely did not turn out as well as I know I could have. Not only does that suck because it will hurt my grade but I’m just not happy with the result. I’m fairly comfortable with the software so I didn’t have any technical struggles really, most of my mistakes were due to lack of interest or lack of time due to other things. A conceptual mistake I made was to not include any space on the website for advertising of special events or any kind of special “catch your eye this is important” detail that would probably want to be added at some point. The main area that I feel I am improving on (enough beating myself up) is my understanding of “web-possible” design. That doesn’t really make a lot of sense… What I mean is the idea of things popping up on top of other things and drop down menus and things changing colors and all the things that are not possible with print design. It a whole other group of design ideas you have to wrap your head around and I think I’m beginning to understand it more (probably due to years of designing band Myspace profiles in high school haha.) Again… I really need to improve on my time management and forcing myself to do my best work even on a project that I’m not super into. Odds are A LOT of my work outside of school will be stuff that I don’t really care that much about, but I still have to do my job and make it look good.

Joe’s Bar