The first ever
CityU-CS Robocode Contest 2010 has come to an end on 20 November 2010, congratulations to all
winners. I think it's now appropriate to recap my experience as a designer and helper in the Contest.
I have been asked to be the designer and coder of the website, then an additional request of preparing the poster, then the banner, and lastly being a voluntary helper.
Design
It was the original and the only request for the contest, and it's the area that I'm most familiar with. First, in early March 2010, I've come up an early design using blue-white theme for the whole website in order to match the colour of
Department of Computer Science, as well as the default tank colour in Robocode. The design is a little bit fail-safe approach, which would be easily accepted by most people. While getting the designed approved, I have implemented the same design into the poster, which have been prepared in A3 size.
Right in a few days before sending the poster for printing, a latest comment from senior suggested that we shall go further to the design with more attractive design. This is the same experience as in business world, a sudden change of plan or new comment, a total start from stretch again. Wouldn't it be great to have such instruction earlier? Go further for more attractive design, just aligned to my principle, perhaps I should have thought that seniors here could accept more crazy idea. In early April 2010, I have spent another day to design the website and the poster together, and come up the latest design finally - the current website and the final poster. The design is simply a big symbol of
"a tank plus a computer equals to Robocode Contest 2010", easy to read and digest.
Poster
This time, the poster has to be scalable - A4, A3 and A2 - with the same design and the poster design needs to cater both English and Chinese. The poster was designed using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
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| Designer Charles Cheng |
Website
The website was designed using XHTML, CSS, JQuery, etc. I was deciding both XHTML and HTML5 in March when implementing the code. Even though I like HTML5 so much, I understand that as of today, most of the secondary schools in Hong Kong are still the majority user of Internet Explorer 6/7/8, XHTML would be a safer approach in view of the coming 2 or 3 years. So that the website can be further extended without big changes in the coming years.
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| Designer Charles Cheng |
Banner
In October 2010, it's time to design and implement the theme into a banner. It's a one-time work and the design has been approved by directly, which proceed to printing within a week. The banner is designed using Adobe Illustrator.
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| Designer Charles Cheng |
I have been involved in several design works and web development for different parties in the previous years, this is the first time I have jotted down my experience. Love to see your comment :)
Official website:
http://robocode.cs.cityu.edu.hk/
This blog post:
http://goo.gl/DVe7d
