For my newsletter, I drew out this boy so that the book can hold the achievements of the residents living in the area, which is my plan. it fits in with the scrapbook design, and gives it a cute feel. However, I am still in the process of fixing him up, using photoshop to make him appear more cartoon like. And I think his legs are too long.

During egd lessons, we drew out our template for the newsletter. We have decided to group a few of our similar topics into one page with the suggestion of Ms Teh. We also went online to free fonts to download fonts for each headings that is appropriate for our topics. Overall it was a productive lesson .

For our wednesday tutorial lesson, we learnt that an A4 size paper is 29cm by 21cm. In ratio, it meant 1.414:1 . When the paper is folded into half, it becomes an A5 and the dimensions although smaller, maintains the ratio of 1.414:1. Likewise for the A3 paper. This ratio is the international standard for papers. We had to fold our paper and unfold it until it resembled the photo above. the boxes you see are although of different sizes, maintains the same ratio of 1:414:1. I had a hard time folding it and gave up after a few attempts. 

At the end of the activity, Ms Teh explained the purpose of learning this grid system. It is to help us understand important design elements like flowlines, all to aid us while designing our newsletter and magazines.

For our EGD lesson on thursday, we were to copy a sample cover page of a newsletter on indesign. At first I felt lost as I thought indesign would be very difficult to use. However, I realised that it is really much more simple than it seems. All the borders were created with the box tool and essentially, the majority of the work was to create boxes, lines and ensure the words were where they were.

The biggest problems I faced was the words. It was difficult to space them out the way the sample cover was. However, practise makes perfect and I got the hang of the exercise pretty quickly and actually managed to complete the exercise on time.

After the exercise, Ms Teh went through with us more about the Golden triangle and the Villard's diagram. 

I learnt that the golden triangle has a spiral which indicates the place where the eye of the audience will be drawn towards when they see the advertisement. This is an essential concept as many advertisers make use of this triangle to ensure the most important points will be understood. 

I have always known there was a certain science to advertisements, however when learning it, I felt amazed. Also, I thought that this exercise could have been more engaging if Ms Teh had asked us where our eyes were drawn towards when we first looked at the picture. Then it would have been mindblowing when she explained to us the science behind the golden triangle.

The Villard's digram, as shown in the image above, is for 2 page layout.  To create it, we have to first draw lines across a 1/2 page diagonally and draw a line across the entire page diagonally and do the same for the opposing side.

This diagram acts as a guide for us to place important pictures and helps our layout look better. 

Today we learnt about columns, margins, flowline and many other technical terms to use while designing a newsletter. I did not know so much work went into it. Also, i learnt that a market is a placement indicators for running heads, folio which is a page number. There are so many terms that will take me some time to get used to, but generally the ones that really stuck with me was the marker, spatial zone, module, flowline and column.  Of course, there were a few terms that I already heard of and is used so often by the rest of the world, header.

For wednesday's EGD lesson, each student had to explain their advertisements and their difficulties in overcoming their difficulties in designing their poster. It was an enriching lesson as we get to learn from each other and even get new ideas and tips from each other's advertisement. I remembered my biggest difficulty was colouring pooh. I had to draw him out 2 times because the first time, I used the paint tool along with the pen tool. From there I learnt my mistake as the colour bucket did not recognise the paint tool.

Today for egd, we learned how to use in design to create a layout for magazine. I learnt how to use text wrap around an image. Previously I thought that writers manually edited the words around the images. Now I know it is as easy as a click of a button. The whole exercise was boring and I encountered many problems     , but I solved it eventually. 

I spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to invert selection and I was stuck there, the instructions were not very clear and were quite vague. I went onto other tutorials, but the tutorials taught me different ways to do words over images. So I eventaully gave up and did this in a simpler way.