Another Day's Work

Ok... 

Today was one of those rare days where you get so consumed by your work that you pend hours staring at a computer screen until you finish. When you get up and turn around, you realize that 4 hours have passed and it is no longer daylight outside. 

Anyway, let's take a look at the work. Today I produced my two-page spread, the hardest part of the portfolio project (in my opinion). Before I start discussing the choices I made and all of that substantive discussion, I must say that the most difficult part of this whole process was getting used to the Microsoft Word formatting rules. I used the column layout tool to create the two rows of text, but this made it almost impossible to insert my sub-title image (the flag). However, I eventually got the hang of it. I'd also like to discuss what came most naturally, and that was taking the photos. I took the photos of the women learning and using code on Tuesday night, pulling out my Dad's old lighting tools from his photography days. The woman playing Ida Jameson was my Mom. The other two images that are here are graphically-produced. The flag image did not take very long at all. Of course, the graph on the second page is not accurate, and in fact almost all of the information contained in the article's text is fictitious. Still, I strove to make it read in the correct register for a magazine article. This is when my AICE English Language skills kicked in (I got an a on the exam).  I used a fake name in the by-line, but I want to emphasize that I wrote the article text myself and that Jonah Sartre P.h.d. is a fictitious person. Only one element remains to be implemented, and that is my father, playing Congressman Burrows, to be inserted above the caption on the bottom right of the first page. 

I decided to make the text in two columns as opposed to three because this is a text-heavy article. I definitely clung close to the minimum on the number of images, but this was because I felt that an intellectual political magazine would put more emphasis on the content text rather than visuals. Other than this, not much remains to be told about my creative process. I decided to embed the photos I had at intervals in the text that seemed equally distributed and compatible with what was being described in the text. Of course. much of the creative work done in this part of the project was coming up with ideas that could be done on Word. I think I did a pretty good job in that respect.

Finally, I will make two more posts this week. In my next post, I will provide a survey of my final product and outline any revisions that need to be made. I thankfully kept everything on one doc, so editing will take very little time. Then for my last post, I will find a way to include my final product in its full form on the blog.