First Class
Indesign is my favorite and this class is just Fun. I learned some new things for Indesign and also for layout of magazines from all the classes and different approaches to use Indesign. Thanks to all tutors and helpers this course started very promising a pity it is so short...
My magazine is about my kibbutz this is the place i love most in the world here i want to be and not to go nowhere. I love the quiet of the desert, i love biking in nature and i love the community. I want to share a little about this most beautiful place on earth for me - sure home is always best...
I tried to keep layout constant and took as challenge to add hebrew that goes from right to left and english and in order to get a symmetric layout i did not align the languages to their original direction i am not sure this works english from right to left is not so easy to read. So i kept the lines short in order to read easier. I used Paragraph and images styles and took colors from the pics. I tried to find fonts that look good together in hebrew and english. Unfortunately to find hebrew good looking fonts is quit hard, but Indesign has perfect support for RTL languages (just publish online is not possible from right to left i asked Adobe why and got the answer it should be in future). Using styles is a must and i learned it the hard way i the past and never get any document any more without styes. I use the libraries as well and Photoshop and Illustrator to embed images and graphics from there.
Second Class
This homework was really challenging mainly because most didn t use the templete providen . I didn t as well ... It took me some time to get a little order in all the colors fonts and layouts. So i added a masterpage background that was a clipping mask and the same on each page. In order to show the oages that belong i created a second master that has this clipping masks over the hole spread. Very few times i had to break this because the writing of the article was so closed to the border that this mask cut it out. Now i understood why its so important to have space between important content and the document border even in the internet! I learned a lot from how other people worked and find solutions sometimes really good ones.
In order to get it less full with so many colors i decided to make it half Black and white and played with masks and clipping a lot . That was really fun. I did do several things in Photoshop and Illustrator and its amazing how well they work together. As longer you use all you get to know what app is best for what.
I faced some issues with the PDF and Page links and did link to pages for the publish online and to bookmarks in the PDF. And i had really severe problems to load it to publish online and getting a PDF that works with the pagelinks and the effects and Transperency. I think spark should at least allow to embed publish online Files and to add a PDF... My PDF was much to big for the Edex as well and i couldn t load it only after reducing filesize in Acrobat Pro such as that all images are pixelated. It took me a long time to find out how to present my magazine. i wanted the magazine visually here for a reference without clicking... so i split all the files ito images and added them as Photos. Its a long way to scroll ....No slideshow in Spark as well... I love Spark for simple contentmanaging but some things are really missing!
Final Reflection
This course was much to short and many questions stay open...but in this short time the tutors and also fellow students put so much in it that it actually gives a lot of tools to keep on learning alone after ending. I am not a teacher and won t be able to use it in the classroom but i think children would love to do a project like this. I personally dont like traveling, i like home and creating a travel magazine was may be not the right task for me but when doing it i started to like it a lot and i saw so many great places in this world and so many beautiful Pics. I think in education its a real art if you arrive to give the children a first looking boring theme and show them in the way you teach it how interesting it can become. So they learn that most things in life depend on how you see them and how you react to them.
Concerning Indesgin even while using it a lot i learned many new things from all the lessons. Thanks a lot to all of you! The Adobe Edex courses really gave me so much and i like the family like atmosphere. And by the way the tutor spark journal is great!
See you in the next course and mainly in the 5 weeks Digital Publishing lessons.
Credits:
Susanne Tamir