08 of 12

Slip Sliding Away

Embed from Getty Images

Time management is hard. Not just for meeting deadlines, wasting time is just so easy when it comes to all parts of your life.

How can I separate work time from the rest of my life? Should I even try to do that?

Being an employee at a company, where you go to a workplace during the working week automatically separates work from all other types of time. Even when I worked as a service engineer and was based at home this separation was quite easy as when a job was assigned to me I had to get it done within a certain time.

Now as a student I have to produce work at specific dates and even if I can chose when to finalise things there is still the date looming at a horizon – admittedly one that is creeping closer and closer.

For a future as a graphic designer I need to be organised and efficient. Time management and business practices has got to work for me.

I realise the key here is planning ahead. But how can I do that? Are there any tools available to assist me in achieving time planning nirvana?

I’ve looked into using software to make my working life organised and come to realise that more than anything else I need to be reminded of when something has got to be done, so here are some of the options that seem useful to me:

Appgenix Business Calendar 2 is easy to set up and use, and has got reminders as well.

Trello helps me to organise projects in more detail and has To Do lists and reminders.

I already use Pinterest and Evernote to collate ideas, as well as Box to store and share files.

Wave looks promising for invoicing, as well as a range of other services that could come in handy later on.

I’ve used Getty’s free images for non-profit blogs for this post. They are free to embed, easy to use, but if an image used is withdrawn from this type of usage there could be problems (as in no image). Worth a try though.

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07 of 12

New Challenges

Discovering GIFs and learning SVG animation is the beginning – learning how to best use these formats is the other part of the challenge.

Making my first ever animated GIFs I found that I really enjoyed the process, even if the outcomes were very basic.

Researching how to make more advanced animated GIFs I came across how to use them in advertising, which is a useful application of a simple type of animation.

From a usability point of view the GIF file format is preferable to Flash as it works across most platforms and devices – unlike Flash.

As an example, here are the individual images that makes up one of the basic GIFs I created during my initial session:

And here is the GIF itself:

When it comes to SVGs and in particular using animated SVGs on the world wide web there are more than one issue to deal with.

Scalability is not one of them, as SVGs scale very well – and is why they work well online.

Animation can be done in a few different ways:

1. CSS3
2. JavaScript
3. Editing the SVG file directly

For use on the web, I will likely have to do some or all of the above, depending on how complex the outcome needs to be.

After researching the subject matter I’ve come to the conclusion that I should use SnapSVG (http://snapsvg.io), even though I’ve looked into using a different JavaScript library called GreenSock (https://greensock.com) in the past.

As my Design Bridge project is a web site which is utilising animated SVGs to tell a story I have good reason to learn more about how to make the most of this format.

To conclude:

These short animated sequences do appeal to me and seem somehow manageable.

I enjoy telling a story is a simple format, which is a new discovery for me, and I will carry on learning more about how to best use these in real life applications.