Special Details
In order to attract customers’ attention and to promote the company’s products at the same time, I will look for some stories and legends about one of the food products, which then I can put into the company’s promotional package, which should keep the customers interested in buying the products.
Section 3
Selecting Information
Selecting Information
There would be no doubt that searching on the internet would give a list of thousands of results, e.g. logos, therefore a careful selection is required. What I need are some logos of some food companies or restaurants for some inspiration for my logo design for the company that I am working for. On the internet they have a number of logos of different varieties of Chinese restaurants and food company. From those I will have to select the ones that fit into my catalogue. There is more information about this in the next section.
Section 4
Developing Information
Developing Information
Logo
For my project, I need some ideas for my logo design. I want it to give the customers an impression of old Chinese tradition.
Logos of existing Chinese food companies can be found on the Internet. Here I have found some logos that might suit my company with GoogleTM Search Engine:
This logo shows clearly that it is something to do with China, but it doesn’t show clearly that it is to do with food. The way in which it is laid out is quite good –the text of the name of the restaurant is formatted in italic. Some more colours would be quite nice.
This logo uses old Chinese characters as the logo of the shop. It is quite attractive, but then it doesn’t show that it is a logo for a food company. However, English text underneath it may help, so it is still possible for me to use a similar logo like this one for my company.
This logo is very easy to design, but the chopsticks wouldn’t suit as a logo for my company since they give people an impression of a restaurant instead of a traditional Chinese food company.
The little figure of a Chinese farmer is quite attractive. It gives an impression to people that the shop is to do with something Chinese. Although the logo is quite basic and untraditional, it may attract more young people to consume the company’s product.
Another basic logo design, but by just looking at the panda figure, it doesn’t tell people that the company is to do with food. Also, it doesn’t give people an impression of Chinese tradition.
This logo has the restaurant’s Chinese name as well as its English name, and also it has some flowers as a watermark background, which gives the logo a traditional look but still attractive. This type of logo is not hard to design, so I have decided to design a logo like this one.
Special Details
As mentioned in Section 2, my leaflets are going to include some special details to make customers interested in reading them. Here I have typed up a number of stories about mooncakes (thanks to my parents and my old relatives who told me those stories when I was younger), mentioning where they came from and how they got famous in China. Hopefully this would also make foreign customers interested in trying the company’s mooncakes. Here is the story:
Section 5
Presenting Information
Presenting Information
Designing the Logo
After having decided the style for my logo, I started designing my own logo with Adobe Illustrator 10.I used the software’s different paintbrush styles to draw the background of my logo, and different text layouts for displaying the name of the company. In my logo I have added a motto into my logo: ‘where the taste of the East comes from’:
Survey
Also, here is the list of ratings of different Chinese food that my classmates have given me:
From the table above, it seems that mooncakes are the least favourite Chinese food of my classmates. They all told me that they have never tried one before. Maybe I should consider giving up mooncakes for my company, or maybe I should take a risk to introduce these delicious cakes that are very famous in an alien country.
To make this decision, I went to Chinatown in London during half-term and asked for some information. I made a questionnaire for them to fill in. This questionnaire is designed for shops that sell traditional Chinese food package gifts and Chinese recipes, but the only shop I found which sold mooncakes was a small café called Far East Chinese Restaurant (even though it was not quite a restaurant). There I met the café’s owner and asked him to fill in my questionnaire, and here are his replies:
His answers showed that Chinese food and festivals are very popular amongst English people, and his reply for question number 3 tells me that there is no problem with introducing mooncakes in my promotional package.
Promotional Packages
I am using Microsoft® Publisher 2000 (at school) and 2002 (on my notebook) to make my leaflet, letterhead and business card. They all consist of the company’s address, phone and facsimile number, website address and e-mail address, and, of course, it’s logo. They all have the similar layout, such as the background and the colour theme. Note that they are all using the desert colour theme provided in Publisher.
I made 5 attempts on the leaflet, as it is the most important part of my project. I made many changes on the text size, font, background, layout and borders throughout those attempts. I also gave it to my guardian for proof-reading and she spotted out some minor errors (e.g. text overflowing in textboxes). Now I have come up with my final design of my leaflet.
As for my business card, I made 3 designs. They differ in the word art and border. I showed them to my friends and they all chose design number 3, which they all thought was the most colourful and most attractive one, to be my final design.
I made two attempts on the letterhead and the only changes I made were the background and some decoration around the header.
Section 6
Advantages and Disadvantages of Using IT
Advantages and Disadvantages of Using IT
Advantages
The advantages for using I.T. are you have the ability to make any changes on your documents easily to make them look neater, such as the layout of the documents, spelling mistakes, fonts, etc, and also you can have access to the internet where it is rich of sources, e.g. images, quotes, product information, news, etc. The sources can then be easily pasted onto your documents and can also be edited to make them appropriate for your needs. When it comes to storing, your documents can be saved onto your computer instead of adding a pile of paperwork into your drawers.
Disadvantages
One of the big disadvantages of using I.T. is that your computer may crash while you’re working and may lose your work. Also, the floppy discs that have your work in them can be easily damaged if not looked after carefully, which again can lose your work easily if you didn’t backup your work. The accessibility to the network may be limited due to the time limit set by the administrator, or maybe the computer rooms are locked.
The sources on the Internet are only limited to text and images instead of actual objects.
Section 7
Copyright and Confidentiality
Copyright and Confidentiality
Copyright
Copying software is a theft as they all have copyrights, which means that without the programmers’ permission, copying of the software is not allowed. In my project I have used software that is brought by the school and me (software on my laptop) legally, so I don’t have a problem with this. This issue also applies to other sources - either I.T. or non-I.T. - such as images and text contents. Normally they have a © symbol on them to show that they own a copyright for their images or text content (see picture on the left), therefore when doing this project I have to look carefully if our sources are copyrighted.
Confidentiality
Keeping our documents confidential can prevent them being copied or changed. This can be done by keeping the documents on a floppy disk or a compact disc and keep them with you, which will ensure that so nobody will have access to your documents. Also, you can set a password to the document so nobody can open the document without permission from you.
Section 8
Error Handling and Virus Protection
Error Handling and Virus Protection
Virus
A virus is a programme that can get into your computer data and can either destroy your files or allow someone to hack into your private data.
How can we prevent them?
E-mailing is the most common way to spread a virus. The hacker attaches a virus onto e-mails, disguising it as a normal document and sends them to other people, and when the people open the attached ‘document’, the virus is downloaded onto the computer and starts to interrupt the data files. To prevent this happening we have to be aware of e-mails sent from someone who you don’t know, i.e. junk mail.
Downloads from the Internet is also a high risk from getting viruses; therefore we must be aware with them.
The school has a firewall, which prevents viruses and hackers accessing to our school networking and destroying our documents, but making a backup can prevent your documents being affected by the virus.
Errors and Prevention
During the course of working on my project, I encountered a storage space problem. A message box appeared when I was trying to save my work onto my personal drive on the school network. It said: There is not enough storage space in your disk. This was caused by the large graphics file in my project and they had to be deleted in order to allow me to save my work. This problem can be solved by compressing the pictures before they are pasted onto my work.
Another problem that I encountered was file version compatibility. During half-term I had to use Publisher 98 on my guardian’s computer to work on my promotional leaflet which have been already started using Publisher 2000 on school computers, and, of course, the file had to be then saved in the format of Publisher 98 “*.pub” file. This degraded the layout and the quality of the pictures in the file. Later I received my own copy of Publisher 2002, and I used it to open my leaflet file, and the layouts went horribly wrong. The pictures in the leaflet, which were supposed to be wrapped round by the text in the text boxes, covered the text up instead, and no matter how many times I attempted to use different ways to put them back in place, the pictures just stayed like that (see 2nd attempt), and the only things I could do was to start a new file in the format of Publisher 2002 file. What I could have done before everything went wrong was to make a backup of the file when it was still in the format of Publisher 2000 file, and then I could have waited until my software has arrived.
Section 9
Health and Safety Matters
Health and Safety Matters
In the Computer Room…
Dos
Do:
- Save work regularly just in case the computer crashes
- Leave computer room tidy
- Keep bags under desks so people won’t trip over and get injured by falling into the computers
Don’ts
Do not:
- Eat, drink next to computers / in computer rooms
- Run in computer rooms
Health and Safety Issues in relation to I.T.
If our eyes have been focusing on a certain distance for a long time, e.g. working on computers or playing on TV games, the muscles in them will become stressed and causes eyestrain; therefore it is important that we should take a break regularly when working on a computer and look away from the screen.
Also, our backs can be hurt when we are not sitting properly. We should always ensure that we are sitting upright when using a computer. Use the support of the chair and set the seat up to the right height.
Using the keyboard and mouse for a long time can cause repetitive strain injury, caused by our arms and wrists doing repeated actions for a lot of time. Again, we should take a break regularly to prevent this happening.
