This past week I survived, but did not thrive, in InDesign and Photoshop bootcamp.  Bootcamp consisted of watching several hours of tutorials over these two programs, completing some typesetting and newsletter formatting assignments and writing a few blog posts. We started off the week by creating a fake newsletter with all the right elements and formatting, then I watched about three hours of tutorials while following along and ended with analyzing a newspaper’s elements. This bootcamp was a good overview of the skills we would need for the semester, and praise the lord for the Lynda.com videos. I’m a visual learner so I don’t think I could have learned all the program functions without those videos.

I really enjoyed the newsletter re-creation and I jumped in right away and finished it rather quickly. I also liked the newspaper analysis and thought it was cool to see all the elements come together in that format as well. As for the hours of tutorials, I was really dreading watching those. Photoshop and InDesign have always intimidated me and I have pretty much always left it to someone else I knew to do the things I needed done in those programs. I like learning new things but I just always thought those programs would be too much for me.

I got through the tutorials and I was surprised that I wasn’t totally overwhelmed at everything I had just watched. However, I was concerned that I wasn’t going to remember anything beyond the day I watched the videos, thankfully I took some notes. I was pretty proud of myself for completing the typesetting newsletter page and also for easily locating the elements on the newspaper. It was really cool to follow along with the tutorials and see my final creation come even somewhat close to what is was supposed to look like!

I think I was surprised because, like I said, I have always been so intimidated by InDesign and Photoshop. I have a really good photographer friend who uses these programs regularly, and the quality of her work is just so great that I’ve never thought I could learn to do the things she does. I’ve seen the awesome stuff she’s created with these programs and I always thought there’s no way I could even try to do that stuff…. But now I know I can at least do a few basic things and then hopefully I’ll learn more as I go! Then going back to the typesetting and newspaper stuff, I think I liked these activities because I like learning the logic behind ads and other creations. Learning the elements of whole parts makes it fun to then see the parts in everyday things.