I have a ground-breaking update: photoshop is useful!
When beginning to get pictures for my newspaper, I did not have the intention of utilizing photoshop for my images. At the time, I did not have photoshop on my computer nor was I patient enough to wait to get it/pay for it if need be. Boy was I being foolish.
So, as a result, my dad, Joey, who is a mastermind when it comes to anything computer or technology related, decided to sit down and help me find an alternative source to photoshop. Together as father and daughter we scoured the internet, looking for something that made cutting and cropping a photo appear an easy feat to accomplish. After about 10 minutes or so, we came across an app called GIMP. Essentially, GIMP is exactly like photoshop, but it didn't work out that way for me unfortunately.
The first challenge was downloading GIMP onto my computer. Since GIMP isn't an app from the Apple store, my computer, a macbook, was being stubborn and wouldn't let me download it for 10 minutes. Finally, fed up, I went to my Finder tab and found another secretive way to unlock my computer for a moment, download Gimp, and then lock it again.
So, once this problem was out of the way, I was thinking 'this will go great; smooth sailing from here.' Ehh... wrong.
GIMP was giving me major problems. It was not user friendly, which was an aspect I was in dire need of. The cutting tool, which allows you to trace out the shape of an object in a crop so there is no visible background, was not doing so much cutting as it was making dotted lines all over my page. GIMP opened up new tabs, didn't trace my shapes correctly, and took me steps backward when cropping; not fun on my end.
So, surrendering my pride, I ceded to photoshop. Though I was very against it in the beginning, as long as t creates my images the way I pictured them in my head, it will have to do.
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Friday, March 31, 2017
Sketch it
"A picture can say a thousand words."
One of the most important aspects of a magazine is the pictures contained in it. As a child, I know I didn't read books for the words, I looked at them to see the beautiful pictures or illustrations contained inside of the. The same goes for a magazine. A good picture could be the difference between a person picking up Relatable and taking it home for a good read or the magazine being left for the dumps.
Since I am going with summer trends (this includes fashion and accessories) as my story for the double page spread, I have already captured photos of cute new, unique clothing and accessories, some of which I had never seen before I took pictures of them and were really cool. However, I must include other pictures in order to harbor as little 'white space' as possible. White space is the blank or empty content on a page. I'm not saying more image content is better, because it is not in all cases, but when it comes to laying out a page, there should not be any empty space because it will appear awkward to the eye. I had to learn this the hard way after laying out many pages for my school's newspaper.
So, what pictures do I still have to take in order to put the whole enchilada together? For one, I need a cover image. I also want to include a model-esque image on the page adjacent to the table of contents as well as on the first page of my double page spread. Thankfully, one of my good friends, Sanjana Pai, agreed to help me out. She, like me, is a Media Studies student and has to create a Foundation Portfolio as well.
Sanjana will be modeling a few trendy summer styles for me; the question now is how do I capture my image with the click of a camera? This I have the answer to as well: it is called planning. I have sketched out three separate images that I wish to include in Relatable's June issue. Now, I'm not the greatest artist and these were relatively quick sketches because I wanted to get my ideas down onto paper; please, no hardcore judging!
One of the most important aspects of a magazine is the pictures contained in it. As a child, I know I didn't read books for the words, I looked at them to see the beautiful pictures or illustrations contained inside of the. The same goes for a magazine. A good picture could be the difference between a person picking up Relatable and taking it home for a good read or the magazine being left for the dumps.
Since I am going with summer trends (this includes fashion and accessories) as my story for the double page spread, I have already captured photos of cute new, unique clothing and accessories, some of which I had never seen before I took pictures of them and were really cool. However, I must include other pictures in order to harbor as little 'white space' as possible. White space is the blank or empty content on a page. I'm not saying more image content is better, because it is not in all cases, but when it comes to laying out a page, there should not be any empty space because it will appear awkward to the eye. I had to learn this the hard way after laying out many pages for my school's newspaper.
So, what pictures do I still have to take in order to put the whole enchilada together? For one, I need a cover image. I also want to include a model-esque image on the page adjacent to the table of contents as well as on the first page of my double page spread. Thankfully, one of my good friends, Sanjana Pai, agreed to help me out. She, like me, is a Media Studies student and has to create a Foundation Portfolio as well.
Sanjana will be modeling a few trendy summer styles for me; the question now is how do I capture my image with the click of a camera? This I have the answer to as well: it is called planning. I have sketched out three separate images that I wish to include in Relatable's June issue. Now, I'm not the greatest artist and these were relatively quick sketches because I wanted to get my ideas down onto paper; please, no hardcore judging!
Sunday, March 26, 2017
Every story needs a Table or Contents
Good morning/afternoon/evening/night (for whatever time you are reading this),
If you hadn't guessed from the title, today I will be discussing my Table of Contents.
There were some features I immediately wanted to include in the Table of Contents, one of them being my obvious color scheme. A second feature I wanted to include was to have the words 'Table of Contents' in three different fonts, colors, and located in the middle of the page. After this however, I found myself stuck.
As I've disclosed before, I am a newspaper student at my school and I have to layout pages for my newspaper; this should be no different. But it is. In newspaper, we are hand-given the stories that we will have to put on the page, told which style headline the page will need, and given the pictures directly (they need a caption depending on what they are.) For Relatable, I must create my own content; this includes stories and images. That's what makes this so complicated.
So, being stuck as I was, I ventured into the vast internet to try and find some samples that I could use for inspiration.
If you hadn't guessed from the title, today I will be discussing my Table of Contents.
There were some features I immediately wanted to include in the Table of Contents, one of them being my obvious color scheme. A second feature I wanted to include was to have the words 'Table of Contents' in three different fonts, colors, and located in the middle of the page. After this however, I found myself stuck.
As I've disclosed before, I am a newspaper student at my school and I have to layout pages for my newspaper; this should be no different. But it is. In newspaper, we are hand-given the stories that we will have to put on the page, told which style headline the page will need, and given the pictures directly (they need a caption depending on what they are.) For Relatable, I must create my own content; this includes stories and images. That's what makes this so complicated.
So, being stuck as I was, I ventured into the vast internet to try and find some samples that I could use for inspiration.
While I took bits and pieces from these two examples, such as the circles around numbers, I also discovered a website, design school.canva.com, that featured many different table of contents. The link, along with the links to the pictures, will be provided at the bottom.
For now, my Table of Contents is incomplete, I have yet to take pictures for the pages. However, I have a pretty good idea of what I want now, and it does not include much change to what I am currently producing.
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