Bad day.

So today has been one big problem after another. I spent the day creating possible final designs using AVA.  The designing was going well and I was happy with my progress. I was using sacnned drawings from my sketchbook, as well as drawings created straight onto photoshop. I liked the variation between the methods and was surprised how similar they looked once put into repeat. So after many hours of designing and manipulating my motifs, I went to save the files, to then open them in my user account. The problem was my files were sooo big, simply due to the amount of information on each one. The files would not save at all. I started to panic after spending a long time working on them. I couldn't save them to my memory stick and was struggling to get why it wouldn't save. I asked at the desk a way around the saving and was told to save them in a shared space on the NUA database. Once on there I would be able to access them and convert them back to a PDF and work on them further. I saved my work to this database space, praying they would work. Long story short and they did not load. The ones that did load took nearly 30 mins to do so. This was a big problem and something I hadn't  intended to happen, after numerous successes using AVA.  I was feeling very tired and frustrated and decided to seek help to try and retrieve my work. It turns out I had created huge scale designs, which had been the cause to my very stressful saving and converting process.  I learnt that photoshop and AVA are very different and that you cannot alter the size of the file in the same way. I had created 8×8 repeats with my original motif already being A4. I now know I need to be more careful with the size and scale of the work I produce on AVA.  I need to be more aware of the DPI count and the data size of my documents. In future I will seek reassurance of measurements for my AVA work, to ensure I do not do the same again. This problem was due to lack of AVA knowledge although I felt fairly confident with the software.

In the end, with help from a very helpful technician I slowly managed to transfer my work on a memory stick, open on another faster computer and reduce size on photoshop. This was a very stressful and long process however, I have learnt from this error and will be more aware of it in the future.