In this tutorial, we went further to learn how to use InDesign effectively. In the first session, I felt out of my depth and was not comfortable with the programme, but now I was confident using most of the tools that we were learning about and I found quite a lot of the time, knowing how to do things already. However, I did learn a lot from the session and found it extremely helpful as InDesign is an important programme for the course,
We firstly had to design a poster in the style of another poster. We began by image tracing a silhouette of an animal (I chose a bird) to put on the poster. We then had to create a path that went over the first page of the double page spread. We then added text to the line and you can do this by holding down the Text tool and selecting Text on line and then adding text to the line. I attached the birds tale to the end of this line to mimic the other poster. We also were taught how to place text. In the image below, you can see that the text looks separated but it is in fact all in the same text box, I used the character tool box and edited the text to look like this.
I learnt a lot of other things from this poster, such as, how to make an object behave like text and how to make text wrap around an object. It was a very useful exercise and increased my confidence in InDesign.
We also learned about RGB (red, green blue), CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and Bitmap. During this task, we were told to find a vibrant image so I chose an image of fruit to use. In Photoshop, we opened up the image and saw the difference between RGB which is this image:
And CMYK, which is this image:
Although there doesn't appear to be a great difference, you can see that there is a slight colour change between the images. This is especially clear when you compare the green apples with each other. CMYK is used in digital printing whereas RGB is associated with screen and displays (digital cameras, for example).
After saving these images, we then turned the image black and white:
We did this to turn this into a bitmap image. When you turn the image into black and white, you get the 'bitmap' option in the 'mode' window under the 'image' drop down box. When you select 'bitmap', a dialogue box appears so you can change the output (pixels/inch) and even choose a custom pattern. I did this and came out with this effect on my image:
I then applied this image to a new poster that I was creating, in the style of the example poster we were given. It was from a high fashion grunge-style magazine and therefore, this effect was ideal.
I used a double page spread in InDesign and began to create my format and distort letters such as the L. I did this by changing the text into an object and then using the pathfinder tool, elongating the anchor points whilst holding the shift key to keep it straight. I used this font as it fit the style of the poster as well as because I could not access the exact font from the poster. The overall poster worked well, I used the text fill tool instead of retyping the text as the task was not to replicate exactly the poster. The poster did not transfer to my own copy of InDesign well as the fonts could not be found although I found the exercise incredibly helpful and it improved my confidence using InDesign considerably.
