Lesson 26

For my last post i only managed to complete the first page of my 2 page project. For my second page, i am doing a piece about three juices that help in weight loss.  So now here is my second page about a proper diet. And of course there is still work to be done with the touching up and the selection of fonts and colours. Furthermore out tutor mentioned that we should stick to our layout as much as possible and only do further changes after looking at the final outcome. So there may well be more changes.




















So starting at the top again there is the banner used in page one, this banner will be consistent between the two page layout.

Below it, the first paragraph, It is talking about the three juices for weight loss. It is the intro to the topic. The title is right beside it on the right. I made a typography poster to use as the title. These two parts were the ones that i was so tempted to change. To me it does not match up with the bottom part and seems out of place. However we were strictly told to stick to our layout so i will leave it for now until discussion with my tutor on improvements.

Below it is the main article, these are the three juices. So basically, i put a picture of the juice and the description beside it. For now, the colours i use are just to match up with their respective pictures and further discussions on colours and fonts will be made.

In conclusion, we are almost at the last hurdle, submission is coming soon and i have learnt so much creating this newsletter layout. There were a lot of challenges such as finding the relevant articles, resizing and editing the pictures to use, coming up with the relevant headlines and titles etc. As for indesign, it does seem to be simpler than using the softwares we have used earlier which was photoshop and illustrator, and it took me a much shorter time to get used to. After a fw edits my project will be done and my group will create common style sheet and compile our pieces together and hopefully get a good grade together as well.

Lesson 25

Our group project is due next week! The time really flies. So far for my project i am happy to say i am already halfway there. I managed to complete one page of my 2 page newsletter so i will talk about it awhile. Here is my first page. Note that the fonts and the pink colour may or may not be the final as i just used it to have a look at the layout.





















Starting right at the top, i made a banner out of a picture of fruits. What i did was trace out the shape i wanted for the banner using the pen tool, inverse select then delete the rest of the picture. A nice trick which i picked up from the e learning exercise we did.

The headline and sub header is using a font i downloaded called syntax. I did some research on fonts that are commonly used in health magazines and this was one of them.

The picture of the woman is used to show that between the apple and the cupcake, choose the apple and eat healthy, this fits in my theme of diet

On the left hand side of the page, in the pink box, that is the summary and overview of the article. I put it in a column to make it take up less space and be less boring that a summary must always be in the middle.

The 3 steps to eating healthy was taken from an article and rephrased to fit in the space by me. I thought this would be quite interesting as it is short and sufficient to get my points across.

The last paragraph at the bottom right corner will to talk about the food pyramid on the right and explain how and why it works.

Lesson 24

The project i am doing is currently underway and now it is time to get my articles, pictures and final layout together. With inspiration from my previous post with the good and bad layouts i gathered the pictures.

First of all, here is my final layout

















It is the same layout as the last layout of my earlier post in lesson 22 however in that post, i made a mistake by not dividing the modular grid to smaller boxes when drawing my layout on a single piece of A4 in a landscape manner. With a few changes this is the final layout after discussion with my tutor.

For the pictures these are what i have. For the page on the left, there are just two spaces where i intend to put a picture and on the right page, i intend to use four pictures.

Left Page: I plan to talk about diet as a whole. The importance of eating right and how it can affect you. This are the pictures i intend to use.













http://healthymaxs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/guide-nutrition.jpg

http://www.richinfoods.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/healthy-eating-for-women-640x371.jpg

Right Page: For this page I intend to do something a bit more specific. I am doing a section on three "Wonder juices" that helps in weight loss





















http://worldfunfacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Melon-Juice.jpeg

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/files/wh6_uploads/2014/07/29/collard-cooler.jpg




















http://www.womenshealthmag.com/files/wh6_uploads/2014/07/29/blakes-juice.jpg

http://farmtotablela.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/green-juice_0003.jpg

The progress so far has been steady for my project however i might be a little behind time. It was tough finding pictures to match with what i wanted and articles that are suitable but after awhile of searching i have them. Now that i have my pictures and relevant articles, it is time to finally move on to indesign
and put all this together.

Lesson 23

To get some ideas for my group project which is coming sooner and sooner, i took to the internet to get some ideas and look at some designs and themes that magazines and newsletters use for a health segment. Our target audience is women hence we have to look into a design and layout that appeals to them. Here are some health layouts (Not all examples relate to my part about diet, but the examples put up are related to the theme of health to get a feel for the general layout, pictures and content used by this category)

http://www.phoenixhelix.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/DSC01140.jpg

What i like about this first layout is the theme it adopts, it is doing an article on sleep (Natalie's part). It uses a very nice and calming white that feels like clouds to me giving that dream look. The nice light colours blends very well with the background and is visible.

http://www.7things.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/pick20up20your20posture11.jpg

Another example i got was this, similar to the previous example, this example makes use of one colour for the theme, green. Why i like this layout is because the green just screams "health" to me with that fresh colour. The article is also spacious and very neat.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbrOxNJx04MALR5LF6qqoS6ISk07_Y22tWCaVtOIO0-iFNBPqwJDrmhe9JPyekQB3WqYFL23tGeaE7UUIvEfnGRK9CvTbdy3wvsV14_sFxmHEQ1CkO74iOpUg5eoW9V4jnVtHfowQlccCO/s1600/Parents%2527+Pages+01.jpg

This one is a strange one to me, i find it both good an bad. I like the concept as it uses animated figures to show the health components. However it is too cramp for me and there are too many colours that i do ot feel any flow in the article.

http://calorielab.com/news/wp-images/post-images/fytte-morning-banana-diet-spread.jpg

This newsletter, is one i find really bad, it is a diet article in japan. To me everything seems to be wrong, there is no colour theme, no proper layout, no flow, it is messy and it looks like it is published for a child. 

http://theharcombediet.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Star071209web.jpg

The last one, i like the concept here, the way they use the pictures and colours. Compared to the previous example, it uses the same colourful concept but it is much nicer and is laid out well.  It does seem a bit cramped to be honest but i see a flow when reading it. 

After looking through some of these health articles and layouts i feel i have a better idea on what type of pictures and colours i want to use. The deadlines are coming thick and fast so its time to really concentrate on my project.

Lesson 22

Today was a vital vital lesson, no other way to put it. This was concerning our submission of our group project and for this we have to create a book, and that is what we were taught.

For our group project, we are all doing 2 pages each, and we will have to combine them into a book.  A book also can be used to apply a style to all the pages to get the consistency as talked about in the previous post.









After creating the book, it is time o add the documents into the panel by simply clicking and dropping it into the book, the documents can also be arranged here. The pages it covers can also be seen.











Our group project was also getting closer so we had to work on that too. My group is doing a newsletter on women's health. I drew out a few layouts to visualise how my 2 pages would turn out. These were my sketches.

These are the sketches that i have so far, since i will be doing diet as part of our topic health, there will be a lot of colours to put to make the magazine bright and healthy. Yet to find the exact articles i will be planning to use but my layout has to be approved first. Also on a side note, drawing the grid was very time consuming especially the modular grid, drawing out and to precisely measure the length to use.

Lesson 21

Todays lesson was about style sheets and of course we had some hands on work to do. First of all the style sheets. It is simply a format used for text and objects. It is a quick and efficient way to have a standard format for different pieces of work that need to have consistency, such as our group project.

We learnt about 2 styles today, paragraph style and character style.

Paragraph style: Paragraph style is a style that controls all paragraph attributes as shown in the picture below

This paragraph style sheet was very useful to create different paragraphs to make an article look interesting instead of boring. 

Just by playing around and trying different styles i came up with the example, some might argue that all these styles can be achieved without using the style sheets, however it is all scattered in different places and it may be hard to find, hence the paragraph style helps o make things easier and as mentioned earlier, paragraph styles is used to get consistency when there is more than a one page article. Furthermore for the paragraph style there is a very nice feature, if a certain part does not match the paragraph style, there will be a warning to tell us that an area does not match the style that was used,(a plus symbol) this can be solved by clicking the paragraph symbol or i can create a style based on the paragraph style

Character style: A style just to control character attributes such as fonts

For example, if there is a long paragraph but there is a really important quote, this is where character styles come in 

Using the character styles, i made the quote a red colour and used a different font to make it more obvious, and unlike paragraph styles, only the selected area will follow the style.

Lastly, after our style sheet lesson, we put all our skills learnt to the test. This is what i came up with

    

This piece was tough, for the left page scaling the letters to the right size and placing them took longer than expected but i got it done. The right page was more difficult because there was alot of character styling and paragraph styling to do while placing and aligning the article properly as well. Overall today was a very useful lesson as i learnt about how style sheets can be used the exercise was a tough one too.

Lesson 20

Today was a studio b lesson so there were quite a few things we did. First we learnt about how to use an image and put the design to fill the words. Then we moved on to do another newsletter layout while learning new some new things we could do in indesign, and lastly we did a final newsletter layout to put all our skills to the test. This is the first layout we did.





















So first we started with that coupon for "free adult diapers." As you can see, it has a really nice design of fonts, this is actually a picture. So what i had to do was first of all type out the words and select it. Next i had to get the picture and paste it into the font. One problem we faced was the picture we used was very large, the learning point was how to re-size an image properly. Another way of course is to get a smaller picture. Once it was  re-sized, all that was needed was to copy and paste the picture into the words. A few key issues was how to move the picture inside to get the exact design we want to be seen in the words, this was solved by zooming in very close and selecting the picture. One more thing was now that the words were selected, we could not edit it anymore hence it was emphasised that we should make sure we get exactly what we want before selecting the words and converting it.

The header, the left column and the body text were straight forward, the hard part came when after cutting out the baby to put in the article, the text wrap kept making his diaper disappear.This problem was solved with some tolerance changes to help detect the edges of the diaper.

Lastly, if you notice his diaper, the words are typed along it.This was something interesting and creative to me. It was done by using the pen tool to draw out a path on his body and his diaper, next was to select the type on path tool and done, the words were following the path there.

In conclusion, this lesson was another interesting one as i learnt quite a few new things i did not know i could do for example using a picture as design for words like the coupon, and typing on a path. There were some problems such as resizing the large image and the disappearing diaper but I learnt from these mistakes and hopefully it will help me in my project. Here is the last exercise we were meant to complete.