"Now this is Craig's latest post and I guess it will be a rather special one"

So... first week back, and the first week's gone. It's more than flown by to say the least and on another plus I feel a bit more clued in about the whole team tasks of next year, which isn't very far away. I'm glad that we get to know our groups before we go away, so at least we've got four heads looking for one client, which will be a considerably easier feat than having to find one yourself.

It's mainly just been a "get on with it" week so there isn't all that much to report on the work front. I've finalised my CO-ID, so the only part I've got left to do on that is do some visual margined PDFs for the site, and present them nicely ready to go on my submission disk. The website is almost done as well. I've validated it through W3C and it seems all fine and dandy (it's the first time ever it's been fine on the first attempt) and now all I've got to do is tweak some of the text and change nearly all the header images. I'm glad I'm at such a stage to be honest, because we've only got three weeks left and I'd like to be near as dammit to submission standard in two. That way I can have the last week to check through everything.

I've started to work towards my CD as well but although I've got most parts of the idea digitised it's a fair way away from complete. My only problem currently is that I haven't used any images, but that should be sorted soon enough when I take the image I'm planning on using in there tonight. In some ways for the CD ideas I've found the learning outcomes quite restricting, because it pretty much requires you have to use images. As my CD has got a really strong speech at the beginning I wanted to make this a major part of my CD cover idea, and I didn't originally plan to use any images in there. At the end of the day though I knew these outcomes in the first instance so I knew what I had to do. I'm not too worried however because I think I've come up with a really strong textual-based idea that will be enhanced with some strong images.

On another front, we had a pre-assessment on our sketchbooks and I already knew what was going to be an issue before I went in there - my lack of inspirational work. This is something that I'm working hard on as well as the current assignment for the next three weeks in a desperate hope to reach a merit level. I know I've worked hard on my blog, but I also know I've not worked equally as hard on my sketchbook. I've found it difficult to balance the two at times and because I'm from more a "wordy" background I've found the blog more enjoyable on the whole. Having a sketchbook has taught me a valuable lesson though - as a designer you can't do without one in one shape or form. It's definitely been a useful tool, but just one I've not always taken full advantage of.

An early concept of my idea for my CD cover can be seen below.