Thumbnails And Design

In terms of the layout of my magazine, I have designed some thumbnail images to experiment with different design set ups to see what works best when I come to hand rendering some larger thumbnails and making design outlines on InDesign. These small thumbnails show layout designs for the front cover, inside spread for my main article and the contents page.

As another step forwards to making my layout designs closer to how the final product may look, I used InDesign to create some blockout thumbnails. Using the small hand drawn thumbnails, I created similar layouts by creating columns of placeholder text and blocks that represent the titles, images and block quotes.

Blue- Titles

Pink- Images

Green- Block quotes

Here are my hand rendered designs for my cover, contents and spreads with notes on how I intend to develop each ones, these are just a guide to help with the layout style.

Image Size And Resolution

These images above of a duck are 2 inches in size but their resolution in pixels per inch have been decreased. The lower the PPI, the less pixels make up the image, therefore making it look less clear and crisp.

An image of the Suffragettes is relative to my political multipage document as my target audience will be young females. The screen size of the image is 620x591 pixels.

Physical screen size in inches

620/72=8.6 inches

591/72= 8.2 inches

Physical print size in inches

20/300= 2.07 inches

591/300= 1.97 inches

Physical print size in centimetres

2.07*2.54=5.26cm

1.97*1272.54=5.00cm

Physical print size in millimetres

5.26*10=52.6mm

5.00*10=50mm

Now I know how to convert an image from it's screen size to it's print size, I need to know how to convert an image from it's print publication size to it's physical screen size and to do this, you must do the process above in reverse.

This is picture of Andrew Garfield as Spider Man from Empire magazine.

Physical print size in millimetres 

127x157mm

Physical print size in centimetres

127/10=12.7cm

157/10=15.7cm

Physical print size in inches 

12.7/2.54=5.00 inches

15.7/2.54=6.18 inches

Pixel dimensions in inches

5.00*300=1500 inches

6.18*300=1854 inches

Physical screen size in inches

1500*72=108,000 inches

1854*72=133,488 inches

Creating A Christmas Jumper Pattern

What I knew before?

Beforehand, I knew how to draw basic shape in illustrator and also draw freehand using the brush and pencil tools, I had used the fill tool to fill in areas of my drawing as well as the pipette to copy exact colours from an original image to transfer into my own drawing. The basic commands I was aware of were holding alt to my continuous copies of the shape and cmd+D to duplicate a shape further.

What was the task?

Using a tutorial, I followed each step to create a pattern fit for a Christmas jumper using a repeating pattern.
Firstly I had to create my stitch shape my merging two ovals and locking this shape onto the grid. I then chose my dark background colours for the stitch pattern to go on top of. I locked the background so that it wouldn't move throughout the process. Here is the first line of stitches on my background:

Using the Cmd+D shortcut, I duplicated the stitch over the whole background. For the dark red background, the stitches are bright red, and for the dark green background I made the stitches a brighter shade of green.

After using the pain fill tool to create my design, I has one complete tile. Next, I made it into a pattern so that it would follow continuously. My pattern then become it's own swatch that I used to dil a rectangle to show my final design, that you can see at the top of this post.

What I know now?

• How to merge two shapes so they act as one.
• When and when not to use a grid to make sure the pattern is correctly aligned.
• Grouping and ungrouping sections of the design to isolate different sections of colour and pattern.
• Use the paint fill to select individual shapes to fill and create a pattern.
• How to convert my design into a pattern that can be used as a swatch to fill new objects.

Thumbnail Designs

Here are some thumbnail style designs that I used as initial ideas for my final poster. I focussed on aspects such as shape, size and space.

InDesign Practice

Using Adobe InDesign we work towards learning how to make a print publication in a Swiss Style with the grid method and minimal colours. After this we worked on our own poster design learning the skills we picked up.

Before this practice on InDesign, I had only used it for very basic interactive activities and I hadn't used it for designing anything based on a particular movement with specific rules and layouts. The only practice I'd had at designing posters in a Swiss style was by hand so I just used rulers and coloured pencils. Using InDesign makes it more specific therefore neater and closer to the style of the movement. 

As a class we all followed the steps to create a poster in a Swiss grid style. The content of the poster isn't relevant except from the title and small piece of text underneath, just to get some contrast between different sizes of text and how to lay them out. We worked with differnt layers making sure the background colour, title text and the main body text were all on different layers, just focussing on one at a time.

After creating a vertical, four columned grid and using filler text to fill up each column, we had to rotate the grid 35 degrees so that it reflected the Swiss style we were inspired by. By dragging the points on each corner of the text boxes on the grids, we were able to make the text legible and fit in the rotated grid.

After learning the basic structure of a Swiss style poster on InDesign, I started to work on one of my paper poster designs that happened to be a Swiss style to make my design more complete. Above is the start of my effort to create my poster.