Lesson 7&8: 1-hour challenge: What can you do?

In my opinion, last week was a practical week when we spend nearly haft of the lesson’s length on InDesign’s activity. When I reconsider this experience, I think it helps us to enhance imagination, creativity and teaches us the lesson about time-management. Why?

Back to Monday’s class, our mission is to design a cover page for a magazine called “Campus Life” and present the final product in 1 hour. However, this task is special because we have to utilize the photo taken by our own mobile device instead of pictures on the Internet. For a long time, we used to depend much on the online sources to create an appealing look for our project. Therefore, it might be intangible barriers in Uni life when we are required to generate everything from the beginning steps in order to avoid plagiarism. In this activity, it took me much time in taking photos process because I was not familiar with determining the focus-point of my pictures. As a result, the lack of time for designing became a problem that prevented me from finishing the cover page on time.

On Friday class, we also have another 1- hour activity that connected with the previous one. By using InDesign, we are required to create the layout for a 3-pages article from some pictures that we took on Campus. Instead of consuming time in taking the new photo, I decided to choose some images from my Monday album. For this reason, I had the expanded time to concentrate on the designing process. At the beginning of the lesson, our tutor suggested us to draw the layout draft on a blank paper, and this method will help us to define and organize the structure of the article so we could have a clear direction on what we need to do. However, when I started my works because I did not have the planning habit before designing, I totally forgot about his recommendation and jumped straight into the InDesign app. As a result, when I had to choose every element for the magazine, I had lots of confusion and consideration of what I want to include in my layout. Overall, the significant experience that I realized from this lesson is the important role of planning and drafting your idea at the first step of your project.