Nick Griffin Photographic & Design Portfolio

Tertiary Institutions In South Australia Out Of Touch

2007-10-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this year I decided to enrol in a Graphic Design & Advertising course at a major South Australian Training provider. My expectations were high, and I was really looking forward to learning a whole heap of new stuff to further my own business. Unfortunately this was not to be, and instead I found myself locked into a course which seemed to be on a lot of levels, outdated. I am sure most people would agree that today technology makes up a huge part of our lives and as such, it would be reasonable to expect a design school with a course focused on graphic design and advertising to cover the electronic forms of these at a very early stage. Once again, I was to be disappointed. For the entire first half of the year, and even into the second part, the majority of our practical training comprised of cutting up paper and pasting up artwork the old way. Naturally I found this incredibly annoying, and in the end put it down to the fact that a large majority of the lecturers had limited computing skills. Now don't get me wrong, some of them were particularly good and very knowledgeable but as I later found out, these were the ones that came from industry recently or were still working. The other lecturers on the other hand, which seem to have been working as lecturers at the college for the last 20 - 30 years, seemed to me to have no idea about current trends and modern work flows. Of course, like most arrogant teachers they had a defence, it was as they saw it, about fundamentals. I can appreciate this, however when we did finally did use computers they were of very little help, in fact on most occasions, we had to work things out for ourselves! Now, if Adelaide and South Australia want to loose their reputation for being the backwards state, they might want to consider adopting a much more forward teaching faculty within their colleges!

Aha! I see!

2007-10-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks I have been trying to find the best way to develop a website which is graphically pleasing. Last night, after much googling and following useless links, I finally ulocked the full potential of Photoshop as a webpage development tool. For a long time now, I have never really understood what the slice tool was for, but as of 8pm last night my life changed in a whole new way! No longer do I need to sit down and meticulously measure out the dimensions of a website in Dreamweaver, instead I can now head straight to developing the visual format, slice it up in Photoshop using the slice tool, bring it into Dreamweaver to add links and other functions, and wolah! One complete website ready to go! The only thing you need to watch using this technique is firstly, make sure you save your webpage as a layered Photoshop image as well as a website. Secondly, once you set the slices in photoshop DO NOT CHANGE THEM, otherwise you will find you will have to export your website all over again if you want to change or update it. Despite all that, it is certainly a great way to design a page, especially if you want to maintain its graphical layout as developed by you for a reason!I have not tried it with dynamic elements like Flash and Video as yet, so I am not sure how easy this is to implement but I will let you all know later down the track how I get on with this.

Welcome

2007-10-26T05:27:00.000-07:00

Hi everybody, and welcome to my first post to celebrate the opening of my first official website. Hopefully over the next few months I will be able to showcase a wide variety of my graphical and photographic works, demonstrating the breadth of my achievements. As well, I hope to post a weekly blog on the current advances in Graphical software, and the current trends in the graphic and design photographic industry in Australia. If that wasn't enough, I also hope to have a bit of fun along the way and learn heaps from those who know a lot more than me. Having said that, don't be afraid to drop me a line and share with me some of your stories and experiences!