Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Evaluation Question 4

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I learnt about various file types and their uses. .PNG maintains transparency, .JPEG is what the file should be exported as to be an image, .PSD files can be opened and edited in Photoshop.

I learnt how to customise my blogger theme with a custom theme, using HTML to edit widths and aesthetics of the page. I also learnt how to embed videos and pictures, as well as add tags and create posts.

I already had existing knowledge of both Photoshop and InDesign, but I did learn some more intermediate skills which are explained in the ‘Skills Development’ tag. I shared these skills with the class, helping them with issues ranging from rasterising layers to creating shapes. In InDesign I helped more with formatting pages and assisting with grids.

Photoshop doesn't possess formatted grids which is a problem when aligning text and images. I used rulers in an attempt to keep my lines crisp and clear. Photoshop was very effective with image manipulation, allowing the use of transparent layers and other editing tools which aren't present in InDesign. When creating a front cover next time, I will use Photoshop for editing and manipulating images and text, and then export these files into InDesign to create a more structured layout.

InDesign's main strengths are the grids and columns which can be altered and formatted. This means a clearer, more structured layout which is effective especially for the contents page. One difficulty I discovered in InDesign was the image quality. Even when exporting the final product I found the image file to be of a lesser quality than the photoshop exported file. This may be down to the fact that Photoshop retains the pixels per inch better than InDesign, and next time I will attempt to transfer the final InDesign document to photoshop and compare the exported file qualities.

I was conscious to present my work creatively, utilising Issuu, Slideshare and Prezi to name a few. I had never used these programs before, and learnt to export my files as .PDF’s to save the formatting options. Prezi is an interesting presentation program which I mainly used to illustrate points.

In this exercise, I merged existing Photoshop and InDesign skills with new presentation skills using online programs.

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