i am iffah;
— Saul Bass
The time has finally come; after writing on this blog for almost five months, this will be one of the last (if not last) posts I will ever have the pleasure of writing for this particular module. What better picture to accompany this post with if not my almost complete page for the EGD group project?
Today, Ms Teh had given us time to work on our own group projects, as well as try putting every single page together into one InDesign 'book' and exporting it to PDF. Some of the challenges we faced when transferring InDesign files are the missing 'links' for the images, which I had figured out can be solved by merely embedding the links of the images into the file. Not only does this stop the 'Missing Links' pop up, it also ensures that the pictures used will not go missing after being transferred back.
I have filled in most of the content for the whole 'Musician of the Month' section, so now all I have to do is check and check and check to make sure every page flows smoothly.
Overall, I feel so proud of what my group mates and I have accomplished as we've been working very hard on our group project as a team. Even though we had split up the work, we were still able to ask one another's opinions about the various pages since we usually have our laptops side by side as we are doing it. This is one of the most important things that ensures our whole newsletter has a matching theme throughout.
We will be making it a point to double check every single page before turning our newsletter in next Thursday.
Labels: egd, processes, reflection
A huge difference of this page from the one posted last week is the watercolour vector image, which I feel is the thing that pulls the page together. Naad had bought the image to make her sister's wedding invitation with, and it definitely adds a lot to our project since we'll be using that on every page now.
Besides that, I have added some of the content, mostly the 8 pictures of the band members and the album art of the most played Echosmith track on AMPed. I had edited all the icons of the band members individually, since they were all from the same picture. I had to edit the original picture on Photoshop using the Pen Tool and Selection to get the white backgrounds as their bodies overlapped for some of the band members, as shown below:
For the pictures of each band member using their instruments in action on stage, I just used the various Adjustment Layers to make the colouring for each picture match. This keeps the whole page standardised, as the colours of the pictures play a huge part in that.
Now, I will be focusing on making the design for Page 3, which is a continuation of the 'Musician of the Month' section, before adding more content to this first page. If all goes well, we will get the whole thing done before next Monday, and we'll be able to cross check every single page to be handed up on Thursday.
I was wondering what my second post this week should be about, and I was scrolling through pictures of Max Irons when something just popped into my brain; what if I do the 'Manipulating Smoke' tutorial from e-learning week on a picture of Max Irons holding a cigarette?! And so that was how this picture came about.
I probably could've done better if I'd only spent more time on it, but this is the end product of my work. EGD is most definitely something that requires lots and lots of patience! The long process is actually one of the things that makes this tutorial extremely tedious. I had spent two hours, and the picture above is the result. The most difficult thing I found is to know exactly how I want the smoke to turn out. If I know how I want it to be exactly, I'm positive I'd have been able to manipulate it more properly and make it look nicer!
Maybe one day I'll redo this tutorial and it'll look even more realistic - who knows?
This week, Ms Teh had told us to do a second edition of our grid layout where, instead of just using rectangular boxes, we should be more creative with it; which gave us the idea to use circular "boxes" instead. We decided to implement this second edition into our final newsletter, since we felt that a newsletter about a music app should be more innovative. We can also develop more on our newsletter if we use the second edition, so that is why the picture above is a little different from our original grid layout.
This morning, I started working on the style sheet for my group's project. We had decided on Thursday to follow the style sheet that is on the AMPed website; we felt it is best if the colours and the whole design of our newsletter corresponds with the actual website. This would definitely make the newsletter seem more professional and official, in my opinion! We will be using three main fonts: Open Sans Condensed, Helvetica and Didot. Even though the website uses Arial instead of Helvetica, I decided to use Helvetica - doesn't really make a lot of difference, but Helvetica is a little rounder. I just thought it would suit better for the purpose of our newsletter.
The website doesn't use Didot, but I went to check different types of mixtures of fonts, and I felt that at least one Serif font should be used to make the pages more "balanced" in a way, since Open Sans and Helvetica are non-serif fonts.
After getting the style sheet done, I tried to make the newsletter page seem even more like the website. This is where the background and the dotted line below the "Interview" header comes in; the background is the exact same as the website, and the colour used for the header is the same on the website as well. The text used in the Most Played track was actually cropped out from a screenshot I got from Tumblr, although that's definitely not the final one to be used as I'm going to change the font.
I've already gotten feedback from my group mates about the style sheet, and I think we'll be sticking to this one; so now all we have to do is get our creative juices flowing once again :)
This is the very first rough sketch of the grid layout I had done for my 'Musician of the Month' section of my group newsletter.
My group decided it would be nice if all our section headers went on the top left corner for pages on the left and top right corner for pages on the right. Since my MOTM section will occupy two pages, the section header only appears on the left, as shown above. I'm using a 5 by 6 grid for each page which will help me figure out where exactly to position all the elements of the page.
LEFT PAGE: The header, which is the band logo, will be on the top right, next to the section header, to level the page. There will then be a square box that contains the album art of the most played track by Echosmith on AMPed that month. A large box below it will contain pictures of the 4 band members and their names and ages. The Most Played track and band member details will take up the left side of a page, as a type of sidebar. Lastly, there will be a large box on the right side of the page which contains an interview AMPed has done with the band.
RIGHT PAGE: This page will show more pictures than words, as shown in the layout. The top half of the page will be taken up by a large picture of the band in action, and there will be a few square boxes below that picture that contains pictures from the band's Instagram account. There will be a box that occupies the bottom half of the page, and that box will contain an album review done by AMPed moderators. This box will also be filled with the band's social networks to inform AMPed newsletter readers where they can connect with the band.
Labels: egd, processes, reflection