This week was design boot camp for me. As part of boot camp, I had to watch about 4 hours of Lynda.com tutorial videos on the inn’s and out’s of Photoshop and InDesign and do the corresponding exercises; identify different sections of a newspaper including the headline, masterhead and jumpline and finally design my own newsletter page based off of a template.
So, to say this week was hard would be an understatement. It was beyond challenging but also rewarding. At the start of this week I had very minimal experience with Photoshop or InDesign. Most of my experience with InDesign came from designing one postcard for my internship this past summer. It took me about 2 hours to design that postcard and even after I was done I wasn’t happy with it. Even with all of that I have always wanted to learn more about design software and I was excited to start learning about them. Whenever I was getting frustrated with one of the tutorial videos or the typesetting assignment I would remind myself of that enthusiasm.
I hated my typesetting assignment. In my opinion it looked really bad. It was fairly easy to make the text boxes but the “bold” option didn’t work and I couldn’t figure out how to make the green line or the dotted line. I’m happy that I submitted something that looks somewhat like it’s supposed to but it could have been a lot better.
My reaction to my design was because I am a perfectionist and I have a hard time continuing with an assignment when I know that it’s not good. I recognize that this is something I need to work on for me to be successful as a designer.
