Brettia

The newspaper thing is improving a bit. I emailed some suggestions to my supervisor and much has been done to better edit articles. That’s great, but now I’m loaded with homework, so the issue’s been delayed a bit since our timeliness is basically contingent upon whether or not I am able to work on the layout. I gotta work on building up the team a bit…especially since I’ll be gone next year. Anyway, I’m pseudo-liveblogging tonight while I work on the paper. It’s coming along fairly well; most of the pages at least have stuff on them, but there’s a lot of tidying up left to do.

I’m listening to a station I made on Pandora, which you really should try if you haven’t discovered it yet. The song it’s playing right now kinda sucks…where’s that skip button…. Yeah, anyway, I’m working on the Sports and Clubs section right now, mainly because it’s been kinda crappy all year because no one seems to want to write articles for it this time around (last year it was one of the better sections). It’s looking a bit better in this issue though; we’ve got two good articles on FCCLA, a new club at my school. I went with the ever-awesome wrap-around text effect around the FCCLA logo, so that page looks fairly good, though there aren’t many pictures. Maybe I’ll flip it to the other side of the fold so that the other page in the section (which should have more photos) will be the primary page…hmm….

Okay, so now I’m on that other page…I think “Jerred’s Journal,” a soon-to-be monthly thingy about a student who’s training to be an Olympic skier will go at the bottom…in a nice box. Yes, boxes are always good. I think I’ll use a little journal image next to the main heading to set it off a bit more.

That looks pretty good…I just finally figured out how to do rounded corners in InDesign - there’s an option under Object -> Corner Effects… that will do them. Maybe I’ll round off some other things too…hmm…. Next up, the top half of this page.

That basically finishes this page off…just needs a picture for that big empty splotch in the middle of the chess article - that might be a problem, but we have timid freshman for these things…. I’m still not sure whether I like the rounded corners thing or not. It seems okay; it softens the somewhat harsh font choices…but it also kinda clashes with other, less curvy design elements. I guess this can be the “pilot issue” for that - er, feature. Onward!

Oh, one other thing…headlines. Few of our writers seem to be able to write good ones. I can’t blame them; after spending your academic career writing titles for papers and such in a certain way you wouldn’t be all that good at writing newspaper-style headlines unless you read the news often. But still…I tire quickly of writing them myself, mainly because sometimes the ones I come up with really aren’t very good, and secondly because writing a decent headline often requires me to read the whole article to get an idea of what it’s saying first. After a while I start to get exasperated and I begin playing around with them…one of last issue’s headlines was, “Sales from sugary snacks support sweet scholarships for some OHS seniors.” Yay for alliteration! Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone notices these things unless I point them out to them….

Yay, a chunk of a page in the Entertainment section. I’m thinking that due to a dearth of good entertainment articles I might have to divide this page between Entertainment and Sports and Clubs. Hmm…decisions, decisions. Yay for (almost) total editorial control!

Ugh, my music just turned crappy. Pandora hasn’t been trained very well on this station; I think I messed it up by thumbs-upping some songs that didn’t really fit that well. Back to iTunes, then.

Ugh again, someone submitted an article that just randomly started Microsoft-Works-ing all over the carpet. There’s WPS everywhere. All over the walls! Oh God…lead me to the magical Save dialog so that I can destroy this atrocity once and for all! *sighs contentedly* Much better…now it’s been happily converted to a Word document. Well, c’mon, at least it’s kind of an improvement. At least it’s not an oxymoron. Don’t bash Word, you know you use it too! Even you OpenOffice people - you know in your soul that it’s not as good! Don’t wave your Java-bloated semi-open-source office suitey goodness at me!

Well, it’s 12:30 and if I don’t shower and go to sleep now I’ll probably be dead in the morning, so I guess I’m finished for tonight. Above is the second half of that Entertainment / Sports and Clubs page. Not my favorite of all layouts, but it’ll work, I guess. Maybe tomorrow night I’ll blog some more about the other pages. Until then…peace out, homies. (Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. I know you’re just jealous because I’m so much more street than you are. I got skillz, baby.)