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.

Powerpoint

Overall the self running power point was both an enjoyable and enlightening experience. Prior to this project I had only used the program for a few assignments and knew nothing of the interesting abilities which can be easily performed using it.

However that is not to say its use is without frustration. Attempting to get music to play continuously throughout an entire show was quite aggravating at first though in retrospect relatively easy to do. the reason i had so much difficulty was that there are neuances to the timing of Powerpoint animations.

Every time you introduce a new animation into the show you have to first place the order you want it to happen in and then make sure you define it as "on click" "with previous" or "after previous." This was the hard part for me but eventually i mastered it and could add new animation s in a matter of seconds.

What I enjoyed most but was also quite time consuming was working with audacity. To make sure my clip did not go beyond 390 seconds and also that it contained the best parts of my chosen but slow building song I had to cut it into three pieces and splice it together into one cohesive clip. While I didn't do this perfectly I did manage to get a pretty good 30 second clip with one smooth transition and one rough one. Overall I was pleased.

Font poem

These are the first and final drafts of my font poem. I began by choosing a set of emotive lyrics from one of my favorite songs, Lola, by the Kinks. The lyrics include action words which I could easily bring to life through Photoshop. Also the song's relatively taboo subject matter makes it a more provocative choice to work with. The idea was to morph the text to fit the action and feelings of the song. What you should notice when reading through the poem is way the words mirror the intensity of the singer.

Fonts used: Apple Chancery, Myriad Pro, GillSans, Impact, Herculanum, Mistral

In choosing the above fonts I was trying to mimic the actions and sentiments of the word. For instance by using Apple Chancery, for both the "girls and boys" on the left side of the page I was attempting to find a flowery, elegant font. By evoking Flowers, which are stereotypically linked to women, the idea was to point out the gender confusion that the song revolves around. I did the same thing using by using GillSans for the second set of boy and girl except this time, I tried to use a masculine font. Gillsans was bold, blocky, and intense, traits stereotypically linked to men. Also notice the color shift from female colors of pinks and reds, to male blues.

I purposely inverted the word "mixed," though I left it in the default Myriad pro which was easy to read. The inversion is an illustration of mixing. The use of Impact with some brown texturing was to recreate the differing look of mud. Also Herculaneum was used to mimic the movement of shaking. The last word in the that section was "world," for which I used the cursive font Mistral, in an effort to recreate a worldly feeling( I associate cursive with a global feeling). I also textured it to look like the sky, which joins the other earthy tones of that middle section of text.

If you take a step back and look at my poem you should notice the top section is in the shape of a pair of scissors. This was done to symbolize the gender issue, the idea of going under the knife, or alterations. I used warp to curve the words into the appropriate shapes. I also used warp to mold the three "up's" into a pointed semi-arrow shape to emphasize the rising. By lining them up on top of each other I could do this, and it also created some level of symetry which I was aiming for. The final series of "la's" appear on the page out of the blackness, getting clearer and larger until the climax of the final Lola. If you are familiar with the song you know this mirrors the manner in which lyrics sung. I did this by changing the opacity level. The la's and Lola also form the shape of a horn.

This is me in a paragraph

Howdy, my name is Teddy Applebaum and I am currently a junior double majoring in journalism and political science. When I am not immersed in the rigors of academia I hum incessantly. I play keyboard in the not so serious band Cocco Lopez who hopes to make it big (I lied, we don't care.) Oh, right, I am also the web editor for the Hawks Herald (we are making the site now.)