Project Monitoring Week 1

I have now finished the first week of my project. In my schedule I set myself 3 simple homework tasks in order to gently ease myself into my project. They were to r


This week I did my font research before lesson 1 which saved me a little time because I was able to do the header straight away. They were to research fonts for my Money article, decide which font I am going to use, then decide which blending options I am going to apply to it. 

I used the website Dafont to select my fonts, I very quickly chose a basic style I liked which was a san serif narrow font. And then simply picked out my favorite 7. This was the short list:

After asking 3 different people who all fit my target audience which font they liked the most I decided to go with Bebas Neue, because 2 out of 3 people liked that one the most, and so did I. I also decided not to add any Blending options, because I think the thing I like about this font is it's simplicity, and I didn't want to over complicate that. 

I finished the font tasks before starting the first lesson which mean't I had the opportunity to get ahead of my schedule and begin my week 2 work. In reflection I definitely didn't delegate enough tasks for myself in week 1.

I decided that I would begin writing my second draft of my Money article, when I opened my first draft that I had wrote several weeks previously and read back over it i realized that I didn't actually have as much to change as I originally thought, meaning my second draft was finished in my first lesson, this is my second draft:

Article 1 Draft 2

We all want more money. But these days getting a part time job is hard, and lets face it, who wants to work in Tescos anyway? Today we’re gonna learn 7 unusual but surprisingly efficient ways to earn some extra cash!

7. Amazon Mechanical Turk

Have you ever wanted to write a 650 word article about household products? No? Well now you can! Amazon Mechanical Turk is a website that pays you to do boringly simple tasks that computer can’t do. You can do all kinds of different things on this website, whether it be identifying brands on a banner for $0.60, copying text from a business card for $0.02 or recording your iPhone for a week for $20.00. There is plenty on this website to keep you busy. Check it out for yourself at mturk.com.

6.  Professional Gaming Tutor

We all hate it when we’re playing COD online and a n00b ends up on in our team. The type of person who would try and defuse a bomb with only 5 seconds left. But did you know that some gaming novices are actually willing to play real money to be taught how to play?! An 8 year old kid from America managed to scrap together $25 dollars an hour teaching adult men how to play Halo 2.

5. Do Something you’re good at for $5

Fiverr is a website where you can post something you’re good at doing and then someone will pay you $5 dollars to do it. Whether it be, removing the background on an image, designing a Facebook cover photo, or writing a custom message on your boobs. This website is great for both people who are strapped for cash and companies that are looking for unusual ways to market themselves.

Website: fiverr.com

4. Put Adverts on your Car

We all know that running a car is expensive, especially for us students where the price of insurance matches that of a six-bed-roomed house. So why not ease the costs by wrapping your vehicle in adverts? Lewis Hamilton does it, so why can’t you? Wrapping your car in adverts can bag you an extra £200 a month! You can also choose if there are any companies you do not wish to promote, so don’t worry guys, no one is forcing you to drive around with a giant tampon on your car.

3. Become a TV Extra

Do you like walking down corridors? You enjoy putting bags in lockers? Are you a fan of drinking a fake pint as 7am? Then why not become an extra?! There are tons of extras agency’s knocking about to sign up with, just do your research first because most of them charge you to join. But who knows, in a months’ time your mum might be sat at home watching Corrie and see you ordering a brew off Roy.

2. Sell your Life

Mark Merrill is an interesting fellow. One day he decided to sell his life for 100,000 shares, charging $1 each. Now his shareholders basically vote on any kinds of decisions he needs to make whether it be, should I become vegetarian? Should I die my hair? Or even something more serious like should I get a vasectomy? Then whichever response gets the most votes he does, whether he likes it or not.

1.  Youtube Partner

These days Youtube isn’t just for watching pandas sneeze and children biting their sibling’s fingers. 10,000s of people use Youtube as their main source of income. Take Freddiew, once a week he uploads an incredible short film which quite often in terms of vfx tops industry professionals. And through this passion for video production him and his small team earns a few thousand bucks a day. But I know what you’re thinking, I have no idea how to do amazing editing with green screens and 3D animation, I don’t own any fancy HD camcorders. Well I bet you own a video game? Pewdiepie has over 20 million subscribers on Youtube simply because he records himself playing video games with funny and entertaining commentary. This man became a millionaire without leaving his desk. Just try it, make a video, you never know, it might lead somewhere…

I didn't change very much within this second draft, I made it about 100 words shorter because I thought that would be more appropriate for my short attention spanned - target audience. I also tried to add very sarcastic humor wherever I could because that is the tone that a teenage audience would appeal to.

The rest of the week was spent sub-editing my first article, because I am ahead of my schedule perhaps this meant that I was a little relaxed and wasn't working as fast or efficiently as I could have done, and this will probably catch up to me in the future. This is my DPS so far:

Obviously I still have a lot to do, but I do like the use of the triangle because I think it makes the page looks very dynamic, I used the blue and white colour scheme just like I said I was going to in my treatment plan because it creates a modern and masculine feel.

 I am not particularly experienced with InDesign and before this week I did not know how to create shapes, so that is one think which I have learned. The reason that I chose to do this article first is because I had already done the photoshoot for it a couple of weeks ago, however when looking through the pictures of them, some of them were over-exposed, so I had to do very minor colour correction in Photoshop.

I ran into a couple of issues this week; I had to remove the the background from all of the images that I wanted to use, which I did using the lasso tool in Photoshop, this took way longer than I thought it would which slowed down my progress considerably. I also had an issue when I went to work on my project outside of class, because I did not have admin rights to install the fonts I wanted on any of the Windows computers, meaning I could only use the Mac's, there are only 3 Apply computers compared to about 50 PC's meaning that most of the time they were all already being used by fellow Media students. This also slowed down my productivity. 

I think that if my client were to see the progress I have made this week they would probably be slightly disappointed because they'd expect at least 1 DPS to be complete by now, I partly blame my lack of productivity on not being 100% confident or competent in InDesign but mostly the main issue is how easily distracted I get from my work. In order to overcome this I should perhaps consider isolating myself from other members of the class, so instead of talking and socializing, I am working. However this sometimes depresses me and demotivates me from working even further.

I think although I haven't done very much just yet the current state of my product does mirror what I said I would do in my treatment, the colour scheme is the same as what I originally said, and my model creates a window to the future self from the reader's point of view. The only thing that I have done differently is split the page diagonally into two colours, this is an Idea that I got from Stuff magazine which I believe, like I have already said, looks good.

I am a little worried about my progress so far, and whether or not I am going to be able to complete everything in time, however, providing I stay motivated and do plenty of work outside of lessons, I should be able to keep my head above the water.