Reflection

Well this weeks assignments were long and intense. Going from last weeks assignments to bootcamp was a dramatic change in pace and I was not prepared. I have little experience with Indesign and Photoshop. I have been exposed to it some through shadowing the graphic designer at my internship, but I have never designed anything on my own.

This week we were asked to watch over two hours of online tutorials about photoshop and indesign. After watching the tutorials we used indesign to create the front page of a newsletter. To help, we were given a step-by-step video of our professor making a newsletter in indesign. Then we were assigned to get a newspaper and mark it up with labels for the headline, dividers, byline, subhead etc.

I ended up liking the video tutorials more than I imagined. It helped that I knew a little bit of the information from my experience in my internship. The videos did get exhausting after awhile, so I broke them up and watched photoshop before bed one night and woke up early the next morning to watch the indesign videos.

My favorite part of the week was marking up the newspaper and creating a newsletter template. That was hands-on and I often enjoy taking a break from a computer screen. I feel somewhat overwhelmed from all of the information that we were given this week. If I were to go back I would have started the videos earlier and split them up into four days. I will definitely be going back to the videos to watch some of them again.

Overall, this week I think my reaction to the intensity of the videos and the depth of these programs made me nervous. My goal is to be very comfortable with these programs come December. To do so, I will be asking to shadow the graphic designer in my office more often. I want to see her step-by-step make a website banner ad or a rack card. I think my reaction was overwhelmed because it was too short of a time to learn all of the information that we did this week. But, I am confident that I will get a grasp on the basics of these programs.