Project Four: Indesign Magazine Article
Directions: Integrating everything you've learned about graphic design so far, create a multi-page feature spread that would appear inside a magazine. You must have between 1,000-1,200 words in the article and the entire feature must be at least five pages (more than that is fine).
Issuu Link: https://issuu.com/emmyscherer/docs/magazine_2
It took some fidgeting, but eventually, I created a layout I was happy with simply by resizing and moving elements around until I was happy with it. The best idea I had while working was incorporating the floorplan of the Frost building into the design, as I felt it added visual interest while still being informative to the audience. The most enlightening part of the project was once I had established a theme, the colors, and the fonts, the project felt much more like a puzzle I needed to solve rather than an overwhelming task.
For my article, I chose one that I wrote for Jour 352 last quarter about the Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies major, a seemingly unknown major at Cal Poly. My article is about 1700 words, so I thought it’d be the perfect size for a five-page spread.
Because the article largely focuses on the Jack and Felicia Cashin Expressive Technology Studio and, mainly, the state-of-the-art projector it contains, I thought that repeating some red and blue elements throughout the spread would go along nicely with the “3D” theme. The color red, whether within the photos or as an element on the spread, is present on every page.
Since I took all of the photos for this article, attribution/permissions were easy, along with the captions I wrote that were displayed in the actual article. Page numbers are also present on every page in the bottom out-most corner. For my infographic, I thought it would be interesting to compare the size of the LAES program to the size of the Cal Poly student body. I used Illustrator and the pie chart function to create this graph, then imported it into the spread.
I chose to do a more modern layout with large, eye-catching images. I also left white space on certain spreads (specifically the ones that contained cut-out images) to make sure that the layout was not too crowded or overwhelming to the eye. I used such cut-outs, a layout of the Frost building floorplan, and other arrows and shapes to break up the monotony of the layout. I also made sure that no page had the image in the same spot to break up the layout and keep it visually appealing. In addition, I kept to one, consistent, color scheme throughout the entire spread, as well as two fonts, to keep everything cohesive.
Project Three: Indesign Newspaper Clone
Directions: Find a newspaper front page and clone it using Adobe InDesign. You will be graded on how well your version matches the original layout; the content (text, photos and graphics) can be anything of your choosing.
I typically enjoy highly technical projects such as this one. The tasks/adjustments are somewhat relaxing when they are meticulous or monotonous. I spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect typefaces, using font-finding programs on the web or Google Chrome extensions (which didn’t really work). The most useful font-finding software was Photoshop, and it got me the closest to the fonts in my original newspaper. The text was the most time-consuming aspect of the project. I spent a good amount of time messing around with the font size, tracking, horizontal shift, and vertical scale functions to better align my text.
The most informative part of this project was actually creating/editing the columns. Tweaking the columns took a good amount of time because of all the specificities. For example, it took a bit of Googling to understand how to ignore wrap for text boxes that are near other text-wrapped columns. Messing with the columns helped me explore more of the program and find other helpful tools. It was at this time that I located the grid overlay, which was exceptionally helpful in lining up and spacing out the objects from then on out.
All in all, this was a really productive assignment that helped me understand all of InDesign's basic functions. It was also very interesting to see how many different newspaper layouts there are and how they benefit storytelling. It was a good reminder of a newspaper's hierarchy and the power it can hold, even if it may not seem as such at first glance.
