RIIFF Horror Newsletter

Stacy and I worked on this project together, and we decided to split up each side.  She took the front page and I did the back.  I had a section on the Lovecraft Walking tour.  We agreed on using a serif font for the text because it would be easier to read, so we chose Book Antiqua.  We also wanted to use something different for the headlines.  At first we used Papyrus, but it just did not look right. After trying many different fonts, we ended up choosing Lucida Blackletter. The headline of the entire newsletter was supposed to jump off the page so we downloaded a Creepsville font from the internet and bright green. It fits perfectly.  We converted all the images to black and white through photoshop, to create a creepy, old fashioned look.  The only graphic that still has it's color is the banner at the top of the back page, so that it would stand out more.  The format of our newsletter was not much different from our mock-up.  We basically put everything where we said we were going to, and just adjusted colors and fonts.  

Choosing coloring for the news letter was very difficult.  We knew we wanted to use a black background, but we were unsure about the text color.  At first we had yellow text, then purple, then red, but none of them looked right.  After getting some advice from Professor Shiebler, we did a black and gray background.   The gray background had a bit of gradient in it, and  black text.  The black background had white text. It ended up coming out to look really good. We had trouble getting everything to fit on the pages, but once we got everything on there, we adjusted sizes to make it fit.   

Roger Williams Park Zoo Brochure

Stacy and I chose to make a brochure for the Roger Williams Park Zoo, because I went there at the beginning of the school year and had a great time.  I do not think many RWU students know about the zoo, so this would be a good way to get the message out. We went on the park website, and saw that the colors they used were green, yellow, and blue, and decided they fit perfectly.  At first, we just had a solid green background, but Professor Shiebler told us to try out gradient.  We did not want the background to be two different colors, so we added a little white to give it the gradient effect. 

The font on the entire brochure is Papyrus.  I like this font and think it fits in well with the zoo theme.  We got all of our information from the Roger Williams Park Zoo website. 

Stacy did the majority of the InDesign work for the brochure, and I was in charge of finding all the images.  I googled different types of animals and picked out the ones I liked.  I then used Photoshop to resize and crop the images, transferring them to CMYK style.  I originally wanted to make a banner going across the top of brochure with different types of wild animals, but I could not find images that worked.  Instead, I used the black zoo animals on a collage from google.   I used the Photoshop lasso tool to crop them and we placed them in their respective places.  I love the picture with the children looking at the seal, and think it goes nicely with the page it is on.  We had the most trouble with the cartoon image that is in the centerfold of the brochure.  It was hard to fit on the page. We kept on loosing the panda bear's feet and the top of the eagle's head.  Eventually, we got it to fit without stretching, and I'm very happy with the way it came out.

Concert Poster

Deciding how to approach this assignment was very difficult for me. I know I wanted to make Madonna pop off the page, but I had no idea how I was going to do it. I could not think of any other graphics that I would be able to make fit with the poster, so I decided to take up the majority of the space with a large image of Madonna.

When photo shopping the image of Madonna, I wanted to play with the colors. I did not like the way the image looked when I applied different filter effects, so I had to try to alter it in a different way. I used the Brightness/Contrast. I played with them until I found a spot that looked good, and made her stand out and look brighter. Then I used the magnetic lasso tool to crop around her body, which was surprisingly very easy to use. At first, I had the image on a hot pink background with yellow type, but there was something about it that I just did not like. I thought it was too boring and wanted it to be more exciting. I tried to add some fireworks, but they were nearly impossible to crop. Then I had the idea of adding spotlights, and found the image of the blue spotlights online. At first I cropped them, but they just did not look right against the pink background. I decided to make them the entire background, and had to resize the image to be at least 3400x5114 pixels. I had to keep going back to make it bigger and bigger because it would not fill up the entire Quark document. I then layered everything else on top of the spotlights, and was happy with the way it looked.

In my original draft the font was yellow on pink, but I thought it looked better as pink on black. I chose to do all caps with an Impact font, because it seemed to stand out on the page nicely. I wrote the headline at the top above Madonna’s head, and the remaining text at the bottom. I wanted to put the concert information on a slant, so that everything wasn’t the same.

I did not enjoy using Quark for this project. I feel as though Photoshop is more user-friendly. Every time I tried to move something on the page, I ended up moving the spotlight background by mistake. I also had difficulty figuring out how to apply different colors to the text, because there were only about five options on the toolbars. If I had the choice, I would definitely take Photoshop over Quark.