Week #5–7521QCA Visual Communication
If I had to sum up this week with regards to Visual Communication, I would say it’s been all about finishing assessment one.
During our class on Monday we spent the majority of the time going over the tasks that we’ve completed. By that time I had already completed all of the tasks and was able to show them all in class. All my classmates showed their progress and a number of them caught my eye. Pretty much all of these were self portraits. One of them was themed to an anime that I really liked and another used methods I didn’t recognise. Thankfully, I found out what tutorial video was used to create it so I can learn from that.
There were also a few creative outcomes for the “modified raster background” task. Much like my own, there were some that played with the scale of oneself and there were others that dabbled with multiplying oneself.
It was overall very interesting/inspiring to see the various different approaches that everyone took to each task and the techniques they used. One of us even used their experience in 3D modelling software in one of the tasks.
After everyone got to showcase their tasks, we went through an InDesign demo with Rae and then spent some time working on the final InDesign task, Putting it all together. This is the task I would continue for the rest of the week.
I recall Rae mentioning that this would take longer than we thought but still I was surprised.
I got it done of course but I just didn’t expect it to take as long as it did.
It wasn’t as simple as sticking images in an InDesign document. First off, page layout needed to be considered. This by itself took me a couple of days. I ended up settling on a layout that afforded each task two landscape pages with either a six by six grid or a eight by eight grid.
This would normally add up to eighteen pages (over the twelve page word limit) but the brief didn’t specify whether or not the pages were double sided.
Don’t worry, I’m not taking a risk. I already ran it by Rae and thankfully she approved of the exploitation of this loophole (Thankyou Rae).
The document itself would be organised into sections much like in the brief: Illustrator, Photoshop, and Photography tasks. These sections are colour coded orange, blue and pink respectively. For each pair of facing pages dedicated to a single task, the page on the left is white and the page on the right would be coloured.
In order to find a suitable grid(s), I had to make a few test pages using images and placeholder text.
If there is one thing I would change about all my submissions in assessment one it would be to make them all the same size.
Eventually I settled on the six by six and eight by eight grids. I haven’t had to use grids before so I’;m not entirely sure if it is okay to use more than one grid. However, I imagine that too much variance in any design isn’t desirable.
After getting some helpful feedback from Rae, I placed all the images on their respective pages along with a few duplicate pages with different layouts in case I changed my mind.
This is where the slow part started.
I’ve written a lot about each task on the blog but i haven’t gone into a great deal of detail on the process of each. So I spent time writing about each and every one of them.
This once again presented an issue for page layout since content across pages needed to be as consistent as possible.
In some cases, I wrote too much and there wasn’t enough space on the pages (even with two pages).
The main subject of each task is the task outcome and that itself needs to be seen.
For a while, I added content, removed content, and rearranged content.
Now all of my image and text content is on the document with only some finishing touches to add. Hopefully it all goes well.
