Our COMM 700 presentations were on Tuesday afternoon. I thought that mine went well. A little bit about what we did: We were tasked with putting together a 12-to-17-minute presentation that would run in a loop at the Mac terminal you see there. We used Camtasia, a screen-recording program. My presentation was about 13 and a half minutes.

Each student was assigned a two-hour afternoon window to be present to answer questions. Three professors evaluated each project, and they showed up during that time to watch the presentation and talk to the student about it.

This was the first year for this new format, and I think it went well. I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do regarding the project. My COMM 701 work will go so much more smoothly as a result.

I think everything turned out well for the purposes of the project, although I’ll be doing some tweaking with my client/dad before we get serious quantities printed. I like what we came up with.

But, when I put together a shorter video with that footage for my web design class a few weeks ago, I found that I really liked the shorter approach.

So what I decided to do instead was build a 2-minute introductory video, which is this:

And I’m working on a series of shorter, topic-specific videos. Here’s the one on client relations.

Firebug lets you look at HTML elements that can be hard to spot, and even lets you edit and see what changes might do. For those inexperienced with code, such as my ownself, Firebug is an absolute lifesaver.

I wanted to cut out the top half of my profile, which isn’t too hard in PhotoShop CS5. This tutorial helped.

And voila.

I feathered the edges a bit too much, so this will need some refining. But it’s a start.

My main focus has been web design. This has been my Bible:

I’ve been working on redesigning this site that I have been working on for my father, who is a consultant in the transit industry. I’m also working on the site for my web design class, which is going to link to this blog. It’s a work in progress as well.

Also on Thursday, we were led through a Camtasia tutorial. Camtasia is a screen-recording tool that we can use to present our final project. It looks like a great program, and appears user-friendly enough to work well for the task at hand.

• Planning and managing content organization are incredibly important.
• There are zillion little things that you’ll forget to do, even when building the simplest website.

Regarding point No. 2, I’m referring to navigation issues, lacking a favicon, stuff like that.

Regarding the first point, Smashing Magazine has a couple of well-put, relevant posts, one about planning and organizing content, and another on time-saving workflow tips.

In any event, I put together a rough cut of a 2 minute, 39 second promotional video for my client, a k a my dad. He liked it, which is great, but I’m making some tweaks to it (for one, the aspect ratio is off).

Here’s a brief cut from one of the interviews, in which my dad talks about the important points of client relationships.