The card project was difficult in the sense that it forced me to learn 2 programs which i had a weak grasp on before. Photoshop and indeisgn. While indesign turned out to be a lot like quark it was less user friendly and forced me to do things i would not normally have done.

For instance, doing borders on boxes was something that is easy on quark and i didn't figure out on indesign. I had to actually build those boxes using the line tool, something which was very time consuming.

Another thing i wish i had known beforehand was how to mimic the colors in each program using the cymk color numbers. as it is all the cards are slightly different shades and colors.

I found quark to be the easiest and now i can use both photoshop and indesign much better then before. photoshop was highly aggravating as it required me to deal with those freaking layers which i hate. I just wanted to click on something and be able to move it but it wouldn't allow me to do that.

To find an appropriate new yorker font i searched online but all the really good mimics cost oodles of cash so i was stuck with a second rate version which i used but does not look quite like the original. Oh well you cant have everything.

I think this project is my pride and joy though it caused me a lot of grief and aggravation. I remember trying numerous programs hoping to recreate my original design which includes angular stripes. I wasn't able to accomplish that and moved on to my second design which was a skull behind horizontal stripes and that failed as well. finally i settles on this design for which i took this picture of legs with striped sock and placed it in the background.

The band has a thing for stripes and i wanted to stay faithful to their image. i places the black on the left and right to attempt to frame the legs for emphasis against the white.

The actual lettering was simple once i found the right font to give the words some life. using the red was just a good choice as it emphasized the words and allowed the readers eye to move appropriately down the page. That along with the slow shrinking of the lettering.

I also like the irony of the bands name over such an absurd photo as this girls legs which are anything but subtle.

For the brochure project I worked with Kelleigh Welch an accomplished graphics design minor. We struggled for a while deciding the layout for out pages. unlike some of the other groups we had decided to do a brochure for a real organization, the chair rearrangement club of which i am founder and president.

We also decided to use real typed information which gives out brochure a meaning that i think lorum ipsum lacks. do do the inside was difficult as we had to photoshop and image and then get the words to wrap around it.

our origional word wrap failed because the image includes white space that caused to wrap around the entire square and not just the colored pic therefore we had to do it spacing it by hand.

for the outside I found some nice pictures of wood panels whcih we thought looked good as a background and were appropriate for chairs. We used the pull color technique to make boxes behind the images as well. the program itself was a bit confusing at first but generally not that diffecult to work with. these design programs are iffy and photoshop is by far the worst.

Newsletter

For the newslettter project i once again decided to work with Kelleigh Welsch as she had been a good partner for the Brocure project and as an editor for the hawks herald has a god understanding of Quark.

As it turns out, technically speaking this was an easy project. The problem for us the aesthetics of setting up a cohesive and eye catching newsletter to do this we took ideas from some of the newsletters that were circulating around class. for instance the banner that covers the inside page was a particularly nice touch. to build it we took a banner from the RIIFF website and used photoshop to extend and realize it. The colors are vivid which was good for this.

A trick Kelleigh taught me was that when you use colors on a document and have a picture in the same window you should steal the colors from the photo to use. For instance on the inside page we have backdrop colors which all exist in the overhead banner. This method makes for a natural color arrangement.

Actually using the text box tool, with columns and so on was easy as i am also an editor at the paper and ahve used quark many times before.