This project was interesting because it wasn’t about what the client specifically wanted. It was about how was the best way to organize the information that we were given.
Our group had a plan from the very beginning. We each took a specific topic like, raising goats or pygmy’s as pets, and we found all of the articles that applied to that topic. We removed the articles that had duplicates and really filtered the results. We paid close attention to what each article was talking about. After this we took our articles and came up with a theme using the h1-h6 style guide. It was interesting when we met back together because we all had a different vision of how we thought the article would look best. In the end we decided to combine a lot of our ideas. For instance, we used my fonts, Tony’s grid & margins, James’ cover page and Joe’s folios, etc. The finished product is really a combination of all of our ideas and I think it looks great! Once we decided on a layout we each contributed our articles. Joe put it into the book format (thanks!) and I printed the books at Alphagraphics.
We didn’t face many complications during this project but there were some to take note of. Intially we had issues on trying to decide spefically what the title’s of the topics should be named. It seemed like when we finally decided on a title, like for example, “Raising Pygmy Goats” there were articles that could apply but they could also be used in another area. It became vague in some areas. Then there were some articles that were so original that we only had one and we didn’t want to assign them a specific topic. We had to name and rename so that we could get the right amount of info for each area. Another thing that we had small issues with was understanding InDesign and putting all of our articles into a book format. Although the in-class demo helped tremendously, when we were in front of the computer screen, we had to use the help option often. Those were just a few bumps along the way.
The things that I would change about our finished project are minimal but were obvious in the final execution. Some simple errors were made like the fact that we forgot to include a style sheet and that our presentation was short and we addressed the wrong issues. We focused too much on the design elements of this project and not enough on the issues of why we organized our information the way we did. In summary, this was a learning process. I learned a lot about typography architexture and heirachy in text. I realized that not matter the subject (pygmy goats), most things can be organized in a beautiful way. There were glitches along the way but I am pleased with how the final product turned out. I learned a lot and was impressed with my group members as we taught eachother along the way. I think our final product reperesents the hard work that we put into this first assignment.
