Project Monitoring 30.01.14

This week, I had planned on starting and even finishing my contents page. However, my endeavours have been slightly lacking in comparison to last week. My schedule told that I was to begin design and finish placing all of the finishing touches on my contents page. Things do not always go to plan, though, I did actually have to start my contents page again on the Tuesday of this week because I had initially started to compose on photoshop, but the problem with this was that my contents page did not look authentic enough. In addition to this, I did not have enough space to create a professional-mimicking contents page. On Tuesday I started creation once again on InDesign, even though I did actually transfer some of the elements from my photoshop draft to my InDesign format. Because of these complications, I am not fully meeting the targets that I have set for myself, though I am determined to complete my contents by college closing times on Friday. This will mean I will need to increase my focus and speed of production.

This week, I managed to create the page that I need insert the contents lines that would showcase the articles that are to be featured in my magazine. I inserted a artistic Victorian-style stroke that amplifies the title 'contents'. This gives my magazine two styles - modern and Victorian. While I feel that this may be particularly risky, I understand that trying to blend two very different styles would help me to create a magazine style of my own. I especially would like to veer from the tendencies other writing magazines on the market have, and that is being simply boring. Other magazines do not at all feel like writing magazines and they do not even create a style for themselves. I personally find this exasperating and therefore would like to send my product in the complete opposite direction of magazines such as 'Writing Magazine' & 'Writers' Forum'. I inserted polaroid-style images of things that are related to literature to make the page more interesting and non-too-text-heavy.

This is the contents page that I have started producing on InDesign. The fonts are missing because this blog has been composed on a different machine to one I usually use. However, this clearly illustrates my progress and it is easy to see how much of better contents page I am now producing. 

Now that I am managing to make more progress on InDesign, progress is running more smoothly. However, I fully acknowledge that my progress has been devastatingly hindered by my photoshop mistake at the start of the week. I admit my naivety in thinking it would be fine to create a contents page on photoshop and I will ensure I am not so ignorant in the future.
During this week, I have developed the skill to remove backgrounds from complex images, insert them into photoshop and then insert them into InDesign. This proved to be complicated at first, but as I played around more with the two programs, I managed to get the result I wanted.

If my client were to have assessed the progress I have made this week, they would probably we slightly worried with the pace at which I am currently working at because of my set-back at the start of the week. In terms of what I have achieved this week, I think my client would be happier with me working on InDesign, as I have more space to create and increase the amount in terms of contents which would enhance my product.

Here we have the contents page from Photoshop and we can clearly see that I have little room to actually create a contents page of good quality. 

The current state of my project doesn't mirror my plans in treatment fully because I am not using a colour scheme that I had initially planned to use. I had wanted to use light blue but have been made to use a dark red because of the complications with backdrop. This has not been too disadvantageous to me because the colour actually works well non-the-less, and I am even starting to think that light blue may have been slightly challenging for the reader.