T'interweb Portfolio - A Brief

These past few days I've been working on the new brief we got on Thursday for our portfolio website.

I've actually enjoyed working on it quite a lot and the clearing out of the mess of the last unit (even though I still need to show you what I did Derrick) and the nice balance of ISTD and this portfolio plus any other extras feels manageable.

I've gone full-on into it, maybe a little foolishly, by making my sketchbook as an PDF. It makes more sense to have it all as an electronic document rather than a physical book because the majority of the time I will be researching on the computer. This has thrown up a few problems intially which although not immeadiate threats, do deem some kind of problem.

Firstly the actualy physical print out (for when all is done and dusted) had problems. I made it smaller than A5 so that I could print onto A4 sheets at uni or home and actually bind it in folios properly without having to stray or payout for some kind of expensive printing. I can actually make a nice book of something for once! I did a lot of pre tests for format by using the university's printers as a basis (they aren't borderless printers so the white gaps at the edge when doing a full colour A4 print was accounted for) and trying to work that into my design so that when I do print it all out, I can use bleed settings properly. Granted I'm not going to be printing onto large A0 sheets even though I'm planning to use and eight or six sheet folio. Simple A4 with both sides will do me. Luckily the printers at uni and Acrobat can format this by clicking the 'booklet printing' option which then turns the document into printing correctly without having to re-paginate everything into a print-run order. However, for some reason, with all my calculations and print tests, it just still doesn't like it so I'm going to have to try and sort it out as to what exactly I'm doing wrong.

Secondly electronic wise there's a few problems with displaying for screen and how this translates to print. Any screenshots I take are default at 72DPI. If I then paste this onto a 300DPI book the resolution and size of the picture gets all messy. Could be solved by having a separate screen version and a print version (in which I could use interactive elements for the screen one and then typed out URL links for the print version), but I'd still have to translate all screenshots somehow to a 300DPI nature somewhere down the line. Getting my head around this problem is confusing me firstly because I want crisp screenshots in both and resizing them (I'm currrently resizing the natural screenshot import to a default of 48% then cropping by moving the frame outline rather than actual picture) doesn't always lead to nice images and distorts.

But still, I feel I'm getting a lot more involved with the sketchbook than the actual site but I know that my online expertise isn't that great and I do want to have quite a simple website so for now it's not an intimidating use of time.