video blog

Hey we finally have our video blog online. Here it is.....

enjoy xx



Y media video blog from kellective on Vimeo.

Finish

Final day is upon us and our group got stuck into the last remaining things that needed to be done. Heres a run down on what we did today - Had another meeting today with our community group Pablos Art Studios. We just discussed the general layout of the site, minor changes that needed to be made and gave them some training to make sure they were comfortable with using and maintaining the site. Then we began making the changes asked by Fiona and also began making our final video blog.
We would like to take this chance to express our gratitude and thanks to ymedia for organizing such a wonderful event. The group workshops were really fun and well structured, the idea behind the organization is great and as a whole it has been a really worth while experience that we are all greatful for being apart of. So once again thanks so much to ymedia we hope this event continues on for many a years to come.
We would also like to thank Pablos Art Studios. You are a wonderful community, the staff, the artists, the environment is all amazing and such a vibrant and wonderful atmosphere. We hope to keep in contact and see you and the work produced in the years to come.
So with out further a due here's our site that we designed for Pablos Art Studio

Site info

This is the home page we have created for Pablos Art Studios. At the moment the "About" page is the "Home" page as our community group requested that users can see exactly what Pablos does and is about instantly. In future if they ever want to alter the home page but keep the about page the same then they can. Please note the colourful brackets and information down the side are not part of the site but are simply their so viewers can see the reasons for us including these functions and attributes.

Image to simply show another page on the site - this particular image is of Pablos Art Studio Contact details.











Our community group requested that the "ROAR!gallery" page and child pages have a different look to it to differ it from the Pablos Art Studios pages as the two are separate
parts of the community group. We still wanted the site to feel connected to the Pablos Art Studio pages so users don't feel confused into thinking they are opening a different site yet we needed to show some significant detail that it is infact an individual factor of Pablos Art Studio yet associated to it. For this reason we have just made the header "ROAR!gallery" different from the Pablos Art studio pages. We feel this alteration informs users that it is still associated to Pablos Art Studios yet an entirely different area of the community group.

meta to the power of three!!!!

So our group figures we may have been a little slack on the posting updates section of the y-media challenge but that can only mean we've been to busy working on our goals for our community group... So here is an update an generalization on what our group has been doing for the past 2 weeks..
The first week was actually very slow - with group members in hospital and the rest bogged down with flu's and 2 major university assignments, finding time to work on our goals for our community group was scarce. However during this week we mostly spent time putting together concepts, defining the aesthetic design of the website our community group wanted and gathering information and regular feedback from Fiona, Andy and Kiran - workers at Pablos Art Studio. Our community group was really great, seeing that we were all really sick and tired they told us to just take it easy, rest up and get better....

A new week brings new motivation and incentive..

Fully revived and rearing to go we were a new team. We got straight into developing the website based on concepts we had previously shown Pablos Art Studio's and progressed from their. Our team decided on using wordpress as the fundamental base for the website as we believe it is very user-friendly, great for establishing a community online, easy for our community group to update and modify on a regular basis and has a unprecedented range on what can be achieved when altered and developed manually for a specific design. Splitting up into individual topics e.g - design, coding and sorting of information, we all worked efficiently and as a cohesive team. Side by side we were able to help out with such individual topics and bounce idea's back and forth to strengthen the general feel and design of the website - plus it made the whole situation more enjoyable as a whole.



(Tuesdays, gone with the wind) -
Tuesday was upon us and we had another meeting with our community group. Again we discussed the aesthetic look, navigation and general information and layout of the website. Developed idea's further on what should be placed on the site - for example the concept of "art angels" under "how to be involved" instead of saying "donation", gathered more information and exchanged conversation with current artists at the studio. Our group has been really interested and impressed with the work that is being produced at Pablos and great to talk to the artists themselves. We really took on board the information and feedback Fiona and Andy provided us and strived to achieve the exact look they wanted. Working endless hours Tuesday and Wednesday we developed a near new site that we believed finally cracked the vision Fiona had for the website. We sent her an email Wednesday night and she loved it. Was really great to hear such positive comments.



Thursday: nothings gona stand in our way. The goal for Thursday was to achieve all the little niggly things and insert the vast amount of information/images we had gathered from Pablos. The little niggly things that needed to be resolved were; loading a new header for a new page, improving the gallery functions and style, tiding up the side bar and making sure the navigation between pages were precise and accurate. Achieving these things took up all of Thursday, but our group is happy to say that we are very pleased and excited about the final result. The final design and feel of the site is very artistic and vibrant as Pablos has asked for, yet clean and simple making it easy for anybody to use and navigate. And that brings us to the present. Three weary Digital Media students with smiles and relief at what we were able to accomplish and provide for a wonderful community group. Pablos Art Studio is a wonderful group. The staff is very friendly, eager to help and be involved and full of wonderful ideas and knowledge. The Artists themselves have a vast range of talent and enthusiasm for what they are creating and combined with the wonderful environment that is Pablos Art Studios you are left with a sense of awe and inspiration for what this amazing community group is achieving...

Friday - looking to the future tomorrow will be fulled with blogging, refining small details on the site, but largely and most importantly our time will be spent with the community group going through the site with them, making sure they are comfortable with using their new website and answer any questions they may have. So until then.........this is meta signing out

Screen shot

Final Design

Mid Challenge Review

Basically we have been going through the old website and looking at what needs improving.

ORIGINAL WEBSITE PROBLEMS
disjointed
each page has a different style
problems with displaying in different browsers
text styling problems on the studio page
no dynamic content
no user login
no online community
Pablos artists can’t update their own pages
does not reflect the vibrant, creative atmosphere of the Pablos Studio

















































We have set up a wordpress site for them and they would like 2 main sites - one for Pablos Studios and one for the ROAR! gallery. What we are going to do is have a template design for Pablos and have a slight variation for the ROAR! gallery, so it looks different but you can tell they are connected.

The pablos site will host information about the organisation, staff bios, contact details, artist bios, event calender for workshops and exhibitions, and possibly a forum.

The ROAR! gallery site will be a link off the main Pablos site and will host a selection of art work and an archive for all the artists who have exhibited there in the past.


GATHERING INFORMATION
























Here is our site map (sorry a bit messy!)
















DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT

We have been working on ideas for the design of the site, making sure it reflects the vibrant, creative atmosphere of the studio. The studio walls are covered in colourful paintings and sketches and we wanted to show that on the website and make it inviting and fun.

Here are some ideas we had:



























































We like the idea of making the posts look like they have been stuck up on the wall like the art work in the studio.

yMedia Challenge 08 initial brief

~Meta
~Pablos Art Studio

~ Pablos's aim is to build confidence and support personal growth and independence through individual artistic development and challenges and promote "outsider art" and the scope of the community. To enable and provide the chance for people to portray their artistic skills/abilities and to be apart of a group/organization.

~ Pablos art studio has asked us to improve their current website by: updating it, make it more user-friendly and manageable, allow users to contribute to concepts, opportunities to make a donation and possibly download a image from some of the artist work for their own desktop, provide the chance to receive feedback/comments/forum etc, online gallery for work to be shown, archive to store work and to establish a community and connection point for those within and outside of Pablos Art Studio.

As a lesser goal, (basically if time is available) they would like us to possibly provide an online progressive and interactive art project that develops over time and allows memberships where people can become "art angels" to help out amongst the group and make donations etc etc. Also possibly a promotional video and maybe update and improve their current logo.

~ We need to be aware of the sensitivity of the artists by making sure they feel comfortable and are aware of everything that is going go around them and onto the internet.
- Resources to maintain ability of making donations online.
- Keeping the site easy to manage for the organization as the site will be regularly updated as new work is produced.

~ Pablos Art Studio target audience is largely people involved in the Pablos Community or whom are aware or interested in the artistic work that is being produced at the studio.

~ To resolve these problems, largely maintaining the website issue, we propose to create a site that is very front end user friendly. To achieve this we provide and develop all the necessary structure and coding involved in the back end work so that they have a site that can easily be updated from the front end to be developed. At present thinking of using CMS tools such as Silverstripe where we can achieve and design a very community based feel.

~ Our design approach is to develop a site map first to show Pablos Art Studio so they can gather an understanding of how together we invision the site, to build a strong relationship with our community group and to gather constant feed back and opinions from our organization. Largely our required elements for achieving this is to have a domain or host provider (as Pablos already does), learn required coding that will be required to enable the ability to make donations etc and access to computers which all of us have. Pablos Art Studio has asked us to keep the site simple, sustainable, to show that they are a real art studio, provide information in may forms to others and importantly to keep the "outsider art" aesthetic or style (being fun, movement, life, vibrant) that they currently have at their studio.

~ Pablos Art Studio is going to gather current photos, video and any other media files that may be of use to use and source on the website. To provide any other necessary information that will go onto the website and constant feedback and communication with the meta group.
- Team Meta intend to achieve all the required goals asked by Pablos Art Studio, most importantly the website requirements and if able to the lesser goals suggested by both parties.

~ Technology that will be used during this project will be camera's, video camera's and computers with largely adobe and CMS software.

~ Timline and dates - TBA

~ Proposed structure - TBA

TASK TWO:

Who is the organisation?
Pablos Art Studio, the organization involves 3 part time tutors and 1 casual tutor. Fiona is the co-ordinator of Pablos Art Studio. Sian Torrington is the ROAR! gallery manager.

How/when did they start?
1993.

What is their main purpose/vision/mission?
Pablos's aim is to build confidence and support personal growth and independence through individual artistic development and challenges and promote "outsider art"

Who do they serve? Who are their audiences?
Outsider and individuals who have experienced mental illness and people who associate themselves as outsider artists.

What challenges do they face?
Fundraising to provide free materials for artists. Ministry of Social Development funds half of their costs and they are required to raise the other required money.

Hey!
We are very excited to hear we will be working with Pablos Art Studios and will be meeting up with them mid-day on thursday (before the briefing).

We will start our first post off with a little introduction to us all. We are three 4th year Digital Media Design students from Victoria Univesity (Kelly Cheesman, Alex Nijathaworn and Ryan Christie).

Kelly began her career while still in high school as a nominee for the 2004 Computer World Excellence Awards “Excellence in the use of IT in Education in New Zealand”. She has a strong interest in interaction design, lomography, film, post production and gaming. This year Kelly was a keynote speaker at the 2007 Tech Support Hui which aims to educate and motivate secondry school students to get involved in information technology. Kelly is working part time at post-production company Sirocco Post.

Alex was born in Bangkok. Now currently studying Digital Media Design at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her interests are Lomography & photography, film and interaction design. Alex is hoping to continue on to a Masters of Interaction Design and pursue a career in new forms of experience and interaction design. Alex is working part time at web design company Decisive Flow.

Ryan grew up on a farm in a small town called Cromwell in the South Island, which is why he loves to escape to the country when he can. Ryan's strongest fields at University are in gaming, interaction and electronic systems design. Ryan's hobbies are snowboarding, wakeboarding, basketball and tennis and in his spare time just likes to relax with his mates when ever he can.