4/21 Choosing my topic and Exercise #1
Choice: Food
I chose to focus on food and gardening mostly due to personal interest. My housemates and I are quite successful at keeping indoor plants alive and thriving but have struggled with outdoor plants. Over the past weekend we repotted our plants and I got to thinking about having an outdoor garden in our little backyard. My boyfriend’s mom has given me some tips about gardening but nothing substantial enough to stop me from inadvertently overwatering them. The article was interesting to read and caught my eye.
Exercise
4/26 3 x 3 Outlines
I struggled with this a little bit as I tried to successfully incorporate the photos into the project. Overall I think I liked the 3 x 2 columns with spacing in between and 3 x 3 columns with spacing.
I got halfway through the exercise before realizing I should make significant borders on the outside as well and realizing that four rows would be way too many for me. While they don’t match up super well I did get a lot of breadth from this exercise learning what I did and didn’t want to do.
4/28 Digitization and Feedback
3 x 2
This was the first iteration of my 3 x 2. I still wanted to work on the last page and find space for more interesting photos as well as fix some of the alignment issues.
3 x 3
I didn’t like this as much as I liked my 3 x 3 layout particularly because of the first page which felt weird with the layout and the third which still felt awkward.
Feedback
Anna and I discussed a number of technical issues including ensuring there was a designated block quote space, increasing the margins to 1in for the outside and 0.5 in for the inside, and changing the type to a 12 or 14pt font.
Compared to others my piece was much less creative but I’m going for more of a clean look with this one and hoping that it’ll turn out nicely!
5/3 Choosing a Layout and Incorporating Details
Layout
I wound up going with my 3 x 2 layout which I was quite happy with. After taking in Annas feedback regarding size of text I updated my work accordingly. This left a lot more room for photos and diagrams than perviously which was pretty exciting! I tried to make a dynamic layout which wouldn’t overcrowd with text on any fold.
Details
I grabbed all of the photos for this project from a site called pexels which offers $0 copyright free and no credit needed photos from photographers. I was happy to find the site and I’ll definitely be using it for projects in the future, it was super easy to use.
I’m having a little trouble uploading and resizing the photos and want to check in with Anna or Ji regarding if I’m ensuring the quality of the photos.
Not sure if I’m loving the title or last spread so I’d like to get feedback on that before committing to it. I might want to make the 4th page 2 x 2 text with one or two photos on bottom. To be determined! Also I’m still looking for my diagram on space, I’m sure I’ll find one that I like this week!
Feedback
My cover page was in desperate need of advice but I didn’t quite know what to do. Anna suggested expanding my photo to the entire page and bringing the opacity back to 100%. While I really enjoyed the lowered opacity, I needed to combine this with another technique of which Anna suggested having a white box and changing the photo for. I took that into consideration but definitely would need more time to make those changes.
Similarly I received feedback about lining up the text boxes with the rows I had created— definitely something I had overlooked previously. I still wasn’t content with the photos on the side so that was something I was looking to change up as well.
5/5 Changes and Feedback from class discussion
Work
Feedback
I missed a few key things such as page numbers and I had forgotten about some of the singular lines on words that I needed to pay more attention to which really needed to be fixed. The hierarchy seemed to play well enough without any indentation and the color change between the regular and header text seemed strong. My classmates enjoyed the photos I chose and felt like the text was readable.
Anna suggested that while the quote looked cool it wasn’t doing a lot for readability and should be changed. Later on in the Miro feedback I also got some tips about re-arranging the pages which I took to heart and iterated on.
Again, Anna (and also my classmates) gave the same feedback about my cover page. I tried out the suggestions before coming to class and it didn’t really work for me. However, I believe it was Olivias work, was really strong and inspired me to do something similar on the first page where the image wasn’t on the outside of the solid boxed but cropped and to the side.
While I didn’t receive direct feedback about the color of my headings. I had seen some pictures in (again I believe) Matthews work which were a similar color scheme as mine. I loved how the brown he used for the headings complimented the photos and I took a warm brown as a change for mine in the future.
5/10 Finalized Work
Looking back on my work I really wish more than anything that I had had more time to work on it. If I had had another week to work on this I would have loved to taken the time to restructure the pages just once more perhaps with smaller margins on all sides just a little.
Many of my paragraphs wouldn’t work without having singletons which wound up being super frustrating even after hours of reorganizing. The accordingly in the first paragraph on the fourth page was super frustrating. There was no way to make the text not look extremely awkward since the line before it had lots of room, just barely not enough for the word to fit.
Other paragraphs faced similar issues where all but the last line would fit where I wanted it to be. That definitely got frustrating. Maybe something that would have helped would be having more pages or longer text so there was more room and places to maneuver. A strategy I would’ve tried if I had enough time would be 3 columns and 4 rows as I think that would’ve given me many more breaks to work around.
I don’t know if other classmates didn’t follow the lines religiously but I did— absolutely nothing is outside of the rows and columns created and the only thing in the gutter is the caption. I spent a lot of time ensuring everything was perfect as I hoped that would help everything be more pleasing to the eye.
