I will be the first one to admit that I despise design. For some reason my mind just does not want to understand it. I have found that, while I can usually pick out a good design over a bad design, I kind of panic when I start with a blank canvas and have to go from there. Trying to fit in all of the pictures, text, captions, headlines and still try to make sure the page looks good is more challenging than I could have imagined. I have a lot more appreciation for designers after taking this class.I originally was going to put in my front page in this blog, but I'm not exactly proud of it. I really struggled with fitting everything and not making the page look too busy. I learned a lot from making the page, but I think the only thing that posting it to the blog would to would be teach everyone else what NOT to do.
In high school, I was very involved with my yearbook. I took pictures for it, reported for it, and even did a lot of design for it. For some reason that designing felt a lot easier than this designing. I felt like there were a lot of rules for designing the front page and that mine had to look like everyone else's. Once we got to design an inside page and did not have a certain number of stories we had to fit on the page, I felt like I was designing for my yearbook again. I felt like I could be creative with the design and really do what I wanted to with it. I think this page is very inspired by my yearbook years. I enjoyed designing this a lot more than the front page because I felt this creative freedom a lot more.
One problem that I encountered and I think one of the reasons this was so frustrating for me was because I did not know a lot of the tools and tricks to InDesign. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make things fit or make something look a certain way only to find out later that there is a quick and simple tool that I could have used.
Overall, I am proud of this final page. I think it is creative and uses the white space well without being too boring. It took a while to get it right, but I think with the pull quote and the drop cap that I added at the last moment, I finally did just that.
I think you know that I will agree with you in the "despising design" comment. I think you summed up well what this class has been for both of us during the design portion: very difficult and frustrating.
ReplyDeleteHowever, in the end, I think you did a superb job! I can really tell from this page that you were being creative: not trying to fit a certain certain number of articles on a page for example.
Overall the page looks very professional and clean. I think that was your overall goal to begin with. Normally, it might look like the page is too text heavy at the bottom, but the drop quote really helps to break up the text.
And I really like your use of white space as well. With this article taking up the entire page, it would normally be quite gray, but your use of white space off sets that nicely.
Great headline as well! It's really cute and grabs the reader's attention well.