List of components turned in:

• big sketchbook
• A4 notebook with notes, sketches, ideas etc (I scanned all the pages for this unit, put them on photobucket and posted them throughout this blog).
• a series of worksheets clipped together of the various stages of the project (including annotations or in some case references to where the annotations can be found on this blog).
• CD with the InDesign file, PDF file, fonts, photos and other relevant stuff
• A2 and A3 print out of the final pieces

Here’s my self-evaluation for this unit.

I think that the worksheets of the progression of my work (esp. the tumult of variations and changes) speak for itself…..I have really learned A LOT from this unit not only about the software but also in terms of a crash course in typography. In the first few entries in this blog I mentioned how I really hadn’t done much typography before so for this project I really wanted to go indepth with it, in terms of the principles of typography and how to apply them to my work. With most project this year I kept planning to learn about typography, but I haven’t done that properly until now. I really do find it very true that the best way to learn something new is by doing it, whether it’s learning a new software or the nuances of typography. As Vince Frost says in his interview, every project you do has a knock-on effect on the others and I do find this to be the case, that with every project I am taking on board new skills and information and then applying to to the future projects (though at times these things become second nature).

In terms of software, I am really pleased that we are doing the qualification for InDesign and I actually wish we could have done such qualifications for all the other softwares as well….it really helped me learn how to use it properly and I feel quite competent and confident with InDesign now. Oh and just to clarify, I did all the typography in InDesign, but the visuals (which started out rather artistic but then became a bit more simplified) I did in Photoshop. It’s much easier to create visuals in Photoshop then in InDesign because of the variety of options you have (such as creating clip masks….basic functions such as resizing, opacity and changing colour seem to be much easier to do in Photoshop as well, unline in InDesign where you have to ‘scale’ everything and can’t just drag it to whatever size you want – as far as I know that’s the way to do it in InDesign). I also used Illustrator a bit at the end for importing the images into InDesign since they would get pixelated from Photoshop to Indesign, but were alright from Illustrator to InDesign. So, I like how I ended up using a variety of the programs we have learned this year…quite a nice way to begin to conclude the year by bringing what I have learned together.

I will most definitely take the experiences, which I learned the hard way I think since it didn’t come to me naturally and I really had to work at it, and apply them to future projects. I am sure that I can apply a lot of this to the upcoming Live Briefs/Work Placements.

What I found most difficult was a) the typography aspects obviously b) creating a final result which answered the brief appropriately. As I have already written about in multiple entries, the main comment in tutorials and crits was that I should step back and see if it really answers the brief, whether it is really something you would see in a magazine. For this brief I had to really consciously pull away from my illustrative tendencies (which is difficult since I have a fine-art background). As you can see from the worksheets, it was getting very close to the deadline and I was still struggling with answering the brief appropriately with my design. It was rather frustrating, but I stripped away all the artsy bits and tried to make it as simple and straight-forward as possible….and with a bit of guidance in the right direction it all worked out I think. The typography aspect was obviously difficult as well and I have lost track of the times I have had to look up terms such as leading, tracking, kerning, soft return etc. but the repetitiveness has paid off and I think I have come a long way from when I started.

It was definitely a challenge and even though I do wish that I had come across my final solution a bit earlier, I don’t think it could have been helped….I was making a conscious effort to do things in stages (which I did do and am rather proud of that), so I don’t think it was really a matter of bad time planning. It just really took a lot of stages to get to where I am now with the design and I don’t think it could have been helped, I kept checking in with Sally and Kit with new variations every few days and just reworking them and reworking them. In the end I do think I have created a successful, professional, magazine-worthy design.

Because of the problems which arose along the way (as I just explained) things did get piled up a bit towards the end. With just maybe an extra day or two I think I could have gotten everything sorted out nicely, but what’s done is done and working to deadlines is a big thing in the real world and I will have to learn to deal with it and accept it. If I could I would organize and cross-reference things much better (I have just seen how some people have A3 folders with everything and this would be a nice way to arrange it I think…something to consider for the future). Also I should have started the worksheets earlier on and kept updating them throughout the project (again something to do in the future). Must work on better presentation in general so that it’s coherent and user-friendly….again something to practice for a real-world scenario of presenting work to a client where everything counts – the quality, presentation, content, coherence, user-friendly-ness.

The final design is meant to be for Computer Arts (and yes as Sally knows I misunderstood the paper weight instructions, I thought we were just supposed to write down what weight in gsm the magazine pages are…but instead we were supposed to find our own samples and choose a paper out of those….so….note to self: listen/read instructions more carefully! a client would NOT be happy by something like this surely). I believe the overall look of  the design is professional and elegant and finally the text has plenty of room to breathe and really work that space on the page (also the visuals no longer clash with everything and don’t overpower the text). The target audience would be professionals and aspiring students such as ourselves…which I think is the target audience of Computer Arts. Their magazine is aimed specifically at the design community, though I think that my article could be understood by any reader (designer or not) since it isn’t too technical.

So I left feeling pretty darn good, since it seems that it’s finally starting to work out and fulfill the brief appropriately.

Notes:

• keep the one heading “education is extremely old-fashioned” on the spread, don’t add more….let it be dominant on the page
• both the headings I have are good but Kit suggested ways I could slightly adjust them
• Sally told me what she thought the top three/four designs were and then whilst talking to Kit I narrowed it down to the one I wanted to use…I decided (for the intro page) to go for the very simple yet elegant layout where I only had ‘education’ bleeding off the right-hand side of the page. I didn’t go for the one that Sally liked since it was being a bit repetitive (it had education and then the list of subjects attached to it…but then the list of the subjects is repeated on the first page of the spread, so I thought it would be simpler to just have the general subject ‘education’ on the front cover and then have the contrast of the subject hierarchy on the spread itself.
• so now that I have FINALLY nailed the visuals down, I am importing them into InDesign, at the appropriate size (Computer Arts is the magazine I am taking the page specs from), and adding all the typography (headings, main article etc).

So far:

• The visuals from Photoshop have been turning out rather pixelated when imported into InDesign, so to make things simpler (and for the sake of time as well, no more time to mess around anymore, plan B!) I just imported them into Illustrator (if they were really pixelated, like the big ‘education’ panel on the intro page) and just did a live trace of them.
• ok tried saving the two images for the main article spread as TIFFS (yet they were flattened and on a single layer), then ‘placing’ them into InDesign and they were STILL pixelated….I thought that maybe I wouldn’t need to trace those but it really bothers me…so into Illustrator they go…
• hmmm rather odd….pasting it into Illustrator and THEN coping it from illustartor to InDesign seems to work fine, no pixelation…strange technical stuff…
• conclusion to the night: I finished setting everything up, importing pics, paragraph and character styles (including inter-para spacing, fonts, point size, leading)
• tomorrow: put in the actual text of the article and create a baseline grid…also finish type and paper specs

http://www.paperonweb.com/grade.htm

http://www.paperonline.org/grades/grades_frame.html

Sally’s advice:

• make it look more like a professional magazine spread
• there is a clash in the imagery and text, the imagery is being too overpowering
• the cover page especially is way too busy and the text on that is getting lost in the visuals
• redo the ‘an interview with Vince Frost’ heading, it doesn’t really work, you don’t need to try be too smart with it….sometime best way is the most straight forward/simple one
• do you really need the white scribbly bits on the article spread pages?

So according to this I redid all the pages to give them all a much more professional and comprehensive feel.

Please refer to worksheets to see the progression all the pages underwent.

First of all, yesterday I brought in another modified version to show Sally. In this version I tried to include a semi-transparent column on the right side of the page. On top of this I had put part of the article (200 words roughly) and also ‘an interview with Vince Frost’. Because of including the heading on the intro page I was able to get rid of the low opacity strip of grey on the article spread itself which had had Vince Frost written over it (this was getting lost though amongst the busy visuals). This is the version I showed Sally and then proceeded to modify further yesterday. And here are some annotations about the modifications…

cover page - I wanted to keep the placement of the text in a column to the right side of the page, so because of this I had to completely rearrange the visuals around that. The ‘education’ banner at the top was way too imposing and drew too much attention. So, I tried making it smaller as well as moving to different parts of the page. After this I thought it was best to place the scribbles in the background. I just used a cropped, enlarged section of the scribbles so that they would lead the eye diagonally from the text of the article to ‘education’. Then I tried finding a suitable position for the hierarchy of subjects. At one point I had the subjects appear to be coming out of the black strip under ‘education’ and i quite liked this transition so I tried to find a way to make it work. Because of this I placed ‘education’ vertically along the left hand side of the page. This placement complemented the vertical nature of the column with text (much better then having ‘education’ at the top regardless of what size I had tried to make it). Initially I placed the hierarchy of subjects on the same level as the article heading. It didn’t seem to work too well this way so I tried moving it up a bit so that it would serve as a visual arrow towards the article heading (it would lead the eye from the vertical ‘education panel’ to the list of subjects at the top, then right and downwards to the heading and the article, which then would lead to the dark scribbles, which would then link up with ‘education’ again….visually this would take the reader full circle around the page, quite balanced I think). I then placed the colored text of the various art subjects into the left hand corner of the scribbles (just like in the original piece). For the sake of balance and flow I decided to move it to the right hand corner next to the column of text (so that it would diagonally balance the subjects at the top and further help lead the eye from the article to the scribbles and back to education). Something I realized at the end of all these modifications was that perhaps it would be better to include the word ‘education’ at the top of the subjects list, and have ‘Vince Frost’ running down the left hand side of the page in the same manner and style that ‘education’ is in at the moment. I rearranged the heading so that it wasn’t that fancy and didn’t clash….looking at it now though I think I have to bring ‘Vince Frost’ closer to the ‘A’.

Spread – First I got rid of the white scribbles, but that didn’t seem to add greatly to it. So, since I had given the cover page a general vertical direction visually, I decided to try the same for the spread itself and just turn everything on its head (the visuals would therefore be at the edges of the pages on the far left and far right. This meant also turning the gray background the other way around as well. The colored visual had a very clearly defined edge to it, but the black and gray text did not since it was simply a jumble of letters. So, to balance it out I brought back in the white scribbles (on a much smaller scale) and used them to give a bit of a faded, blended and scratched up look to the edges of the visuals which met the edges of the gray. Because of the 200-250 words on the cover page I didn’t have to fill the spread with text, which left me with plenty of gray space to work with around the text. Finally I experimented by adding the quote ‘education is extremely old-fashioned’ to see what it would look like. I don’t think it works perfectly the way it is now but it could work….perhaps have one quote at the top and bottom for the first page of the spread and then have on quote in the middle of the paragraph on the second spread?

Crit notes :

• still, think about would you see it in a real magazine? does it look professional enough?
• elegant headings and quote
• liked the first heading ‘an interview with Vince Frost’
• do you even need the gray background?
• looks like an illuminated manuscript, nice but not what the brief is asking more
• continue developing the visuals….maybe just strip it down to the typography?

Tomorrow - final crit with Kit

Wednesday - last part of the InDesign assessment….also bring in folder of work done throughout the InDesign unit

Thursday - print off your spread with Darren asap!

Friday - hand in typeradio project by 12:30 am

Dorset Design Forum designs due!

next Monday - work placement research proposal

next Tuesday – turn in InDesign folder to Darren

Cover page= got rid of the black areas at the top (not the black strip with education written across it though). Also, in the black strip with education across it, I redid the scratchy white bits which were supposed to blend into the letters of ‘education’, since it was a bit illegible before.

Spreads= All I did was basically just deleted all the text boxes with placeholder text (which were all at different angles). Then I created two new ones. One split into two columns and the other with just a single big column. Instantly it made the whole spread infinitely better. I tried putting the text on the white parts of the spread but those proved to be too small so I just put them into the central gray bit.

Both need a bit more work but for the moment this would suffice to make it decent enough to put into my portfolio samples page.

I tried to improve the two page spread by replacing the black scribbled text at the top with a jumble of very formal, scholarly type so that it would contrast more with the messy scribbly and very colorful type at the bottom of the page.