Over the last few weeks, we have set foot into a new dimension of our yearbook experience: page design. The photography aspect has died down for the moment; at this time of year, there is no sports teams to capture, no school events that need coverage, and it is still too early for club pictures to be of any immediate concern, and we have taken advantage of this lull to finally delve into the realm of book layout that we have been neglecting thus far. Jessica and I have had a few jobs behind the scenes prior to the grand opening of the yearbook editing website for the entire committee; I've already mentioned the page outline I made a month or two ago, and in addition to that, we've also had to select the colours and fonts to be used in the book. The colour selection was fairly easy, but choosing the perfect fonts was a difficult decision. You don't want too many or the book looks cluttered and disjointed, but with too few you don't really have any options to pick from. We settled on five, and choosing those was no small decision. Some were really neat, but they were a bit too crazy to be of any practical use, and others seemed too juvenile. I should also mention that most of the options were essentially facsimiles of existing fonts, made 'completely different' by using a hip name to appeal to a teenage audience.
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| Case in point: "Baby Maker" |
We ended up going with "Coolvetica" (a shameless Helvetica clone), "Burning Facts" (having a sci-fi, digital clock-ish feel without being too out there), "Modern Art" (Agency FB meets Impact), "Ebony" (an innocent enough sans-serif), and "MacBeth" (a bit more ornate and perfect for graduation and more classy things like that). We also got the default font, "Lynn" (it's definitely not Times New Roman at all).
A few days ago we had our first layout meeting. Since I had the outline, I ended up having to organize the handing out of pages, making sure everybody had something to work on and no two people thought that they were in charge of the same page. I ended up with a pretty eclectic array of pages to work on myself; I decided to do all the dividers so that they would be consistent, and since the software forces you to edit a two-page spread at a time and two people can't be working on the same two-page spread without a lot of technical blunders ensuing, I therefore became responsible for all the odds and ends that happened to be beside a divider: Student council, best of the year survey, sports candids, and the runners up from the cover contest. Jessica, Adrian, and I are also teaming up to make the IB page, seeing as we all have a vested interest in making sure it's awesome.
All in all, we managed to get most of the pages accounted for. Someone is going to have to deal with all the staff, grad, and class pictures, but that won't be relevant until later. There's also a few sports pages that have yet to be found a home, but as other pages get finished, I'm sure that someone will end up needing something more to work on.
I haven't got to spend a lot of time with the software yet, seeing as I was busy with organizational duties during our computer lab meeting, but from the bit I've got to play around with it so far it seems quite similar to what we used in junior high, although with a few changes. It'll take a little bit for me to get used to the new format, but hopefully I'll be on my way to mastery in no time.
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