Workshop Week - InDesign Tutorial

InDesign is a software used by a majority of designer to create books, documents,  presentations, newspapers, magazines, posters etc. In today's workshop tutorial we learned how to use some basics of this software by Jeffrey Bowman. We  worked on different 3 different briefs throughout the workshop which each tackled a separate subject on InDesign.. First we started off on looking at how to set up a new document and how different platforms (such as annual reports or mood boards) would have different document settings. Below are all the details of the briefs, which we received in the workshop.

Brief

Exercise 01 - Making a basic moodboard using 02 techniques

Specifications

Size: A3

Orientation: Landscape

Margins: 15mm

Columns: 4, with a 4mm gutter

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Moodboard 01

Place 8 images onto your moodboard and lay them out using the grid structure

01. Make a new document using the above specifications.

02. Press CMD + D or go to File>Place.

03. Locate the Exercise 01 folder on your desktop and select the image 01.jpg.

04. Now your cursor will be loaded with the image.

05. Click and drag out your cursor on the art board and a picture box with the image should appear, let go when you are happy with the size.

06. Repeat this process until all the images are on the art board.

07. Now arrange the images to the grid lines.

08. To scale up an image box, use the Selection tool (black arrow) and hold down SHIFT + CMD and grab the anchor point around the selected image an scale up or down.

09. Make sure you arrange your images so they all fit on, look neat are aligned to the columns and inside the margins.

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Moodboard 02

Making a moodpboard form a structured picture box.

01. In the page pallet press the 'Create New Page' button.

02. Now from the Tool Palette you want to select the Rectangle Frame Tool.

03. Now click and drag out a picture box that sits from the top left of your margin to the bottom right.

04. Now delete this and do it again. But this time once you have dragged out the picture box, do not let go of the mouse, instead keep the mouse pressed down and use the arrow keys on your keyboard. Press up and down to add rows and right and left to add columns. This will split up the picture box.

05. Using this technique, split the box into 8.

06. Note, this may be tricky so try it a few times.

07. Now using your Selection tool (black arrow) click on one of the boxes and then press CMD +D or File>Place and locate the Exercise 01 folder on our desktop and select image 01.jpg

08. Now the image will be inside the picture box.

09.Now select the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow) and you should be able to pick up the image inside the picture box - a brown box will appear around it when you have got this, and you can then move the image around inside the box.

10. You can shrink the image down by pressing shift and grabbing one of the anchor points and scaling it up or down. Make sure you always hold SHIFT to keep it in proportion.

11. A shortcut to shrink it into the box is simple - Click the image and press CMD + ALT + SHIFT+ E (the claw).

12. Practice this for the other 07 remaining images.

Now all your mood boards for the rest of Uni should be presented like this!

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Brief

Exercise 02 - Formatting type

Specifications

Size: A4

Orientation: Portrait

Margins: 13mm

Columns: 4, with a 4mm gutter

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Styling up text

01. Set up your document with the specifications above.

02. Select the Text Tool from the Tool Palette.

03. Draw out  text box over 03 columns.

04. Open the TEXT.rtf file from the Exercise 02 folder. Copy it (CMD+C) and then come back into InDesign and paste it (CMD+V) into your text box.

05. Now turn on Hidden Characters. Either press ALT + CMD + i or go to Type>Show Hidden Characters.

06. Delete these 03 Hard-Returns, but leave the ones that are at the endow the title, sub-title and each the 03 paragraph sentences.

07. Now open your Character Palette, either press CMD + T or go to Windows>Type & Tables>Character.

08.Highlight all the text and go to the Character Palette and select the font:

Helvetica Neue and 55 Roman.

Set the point size to 8pt

Set the leading to 11pt

09. Now highlight the top line including the hard return:

10. Set the text to:

Helvetica Neue and 75 Bold.

Set the point size to 30pt

Set the leading to 30pt

Delete the word (title)

11. Highlight the second line 'sub-title', include the hard return and then set the font to:

Helvetica Neue and 65 Medium.

Set the point size to 15pt

Set the leading to 20pt

Delete the word '(sub-title)'

12. Next we want to open up the space between the paragraphs. This is called SPACE AFTER.

13. Open the Paragraph Palette by pressing CMD + ALT + T or going to Window>Type & Styles>Paragraph.

14. In the paragraph palette, set the SPACE AFTER to 3pt.

15. Now try playing around with the different values for the title and sub-title, maybe they are too big, maybe the space after needs to be bigger or the leading  (space between the line).

These are basic ways to typeset text.

- Body copy can be 8p-12pt in size with always 2pt extra or leading.

-Leading refers to the space between each letter.

-Kerning is the space between each word.

-Space After is set between 2pt and 4pt as a rule.

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Obviously the above is specific instructions as to what I did on the tutorial, however, the basic points and helpful shortcuts can be seen by anyone and used on any InDesign task/project.

City In Flux - Further Idea Experiment

My first go at Adobe After Effects (Film Trailer)

My first go at After Effects at Uni from Junaid Arshad on Vimeo.

This is the result of my first try on Adobe After Effects in the Uni workshop/lessons. The process of this was actually quite easy; I got some images of my own and then imported them to the After Effects composition. I then got some audio clips and the rest just consisted of editing (cutting, timing the audio clips to the images etc.)

City In Flux Stop Motion (opening) - Final

After looking back on the test piece for the animation, for the final thing I decided to move the location from the ground of the mill to the roof of the mill. I also chose to change the size of the black line in the animation. I also have kept the speed of the animation the same in this video (0.1s per frame) but this is something which I may change in the final one  and I will probably make it faster. I have also made this video black and white and I really like this effect although I still may keep it in colour when it comes to final one. The music used in the animation will stay the same.
City In Flux Stop Motion (opening) - Final from Junaid Arshad on Vimeo.

First test on my Stop-motion piece

After getting the equipment together for my stop-motion piece, I headed down to the location where I was going to shoot the animation, which is an old abandoned mill in Bradford. I felt like this mill was a great location for this project as it epitomised the story which I was trying to show in my stop-motion piece. The topic which I'm talking about in my City In Flux project includes how buildings decay & new ones take place and how people only recognise the new buildings and forget the old ones when thinking about the city they are in. The mill has a history itself of once being full of people and being known as a part of Bradford, but now since it has been wrecked and abandoned, people only think of Bradford as the place where the National Media Museum is and where the first IMAX cinema was made.
This video is only a first draft to see how the footage in video looks overall and is meant to show us what we can change next time for the final thing.
City in Flux Stop Motion 1st test from Junaid Arshad on Vimeo.

City In Flux Stop Motion production - Storyboard re-draft

After having an assessment on my work so far with my tutor, I got some advice from him on my stop-motion piece in terms of what it should show, how it should look, where it could take place. After taking this into account, I made a rough re-draft of my storyboard.

City In Flux - More Idea Experimentations

Bradford Animation Festival visit with Uni

Today, I visited the Bradford Animation Festival again, but this time with my class at University. I went to see a collection of animation pieces from people all over the world, sat in a lecture with a visual effects/computer animator from Double Negative (a Visual effects company), sat in a Q & A with Michael Ocelot (a French writer, character designer, storyboard artist, director of animated films and television programmes and a former president of the International Animated Film Association). Double Negative have worked on big budget Hollywood films such as 'The Avengers', and in this lecture, the animator from Double Negative showed us a showreel for his latest piece of work, which was work on the film 'Hercules'. His work showed the process of how they made the monsters in the film - idea generation to how it would look on screen. He also showed us various CGI techniques from before the finished result to when it was finished. From today's experience I have gained some knowledge on the world of animation such as how things are made and what kind of subjects are used in animation, and I have also been inspired to open my mind towards other aspects of art in the world of art, design and animation.

Bradford Animation Festival - Aardman Animations visit with Peter Lord

As I am about to make a stop motion  piece for my City In Flux project at Uni, I decided to go and visit the Bradford Animation Festival held at the National Media Museum. I went to a lecture with the co-founder of Aardman Animations, Peter Lord. Aardman created animations such as Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Morph etc. and are well known across the UK and beyond. I gained an insight into the world of stop-motion animation and also achieved some knowledge regarding camera work in stop-motion. This will hopefully show through my stop-motion piece for my City In Flux project. After the lecture with Peter Lord, we we then had a 1 hour talk with Peter Lord and 2 other animators, each from different companies (Ian Mackinnon from the company Mackinnon & Saunders & Mark Shapiro from the company LAIKO). From this talk I gained an insight into the world of animation and help on how to try and apply for a job in this field of design when leaving from uni.
However it wasn't just animation we were told about in this talk, we also got given advice on how to excel at skills which you are already good at and work towards that skill, whether it be skill on graphic design or animation or filmmaking. Below are some pictures I took while at the talk.

City In Flux Idea Experiment (further experimentation)

Here is another one of my city in flux experimentations. With this piece I started off with the top  picture and then messed around with it just to see how would it look. At first I wanted show that besides City Park in Bradford (a well known and popular hub in Bradford for people) there are other areas in Bradford which are full of rich culture (Great Horton Rd, Ingleby Rd, Leeds Rd)

Photoshop first tutorial - Tree in a lightbulb with reflection

I know a bit about Photoshop from before, but with this tutorial I learned some new features of Photoshop. Our task was to place different layers of a tree and lightbulb and make it look like the tree was inside the lightbulb. Once I had finished, I was told to change the hue/saturation of the tree to give it a bit of colour. Below is the finished result.

City In Flux further idea experimentations

These are some further experimentations for my city in flux project...

My City In Flux stop motion - Storyboard

Here's the 4 shots for my stop-motion piece for the City In Flux project.

I've created a storyboard to give a rough idea of how my stop-motion piece will look. I have chosen to use the wall of my house as the canvas to do the stop-motion piece. This is because it is easily accessible to me. The piece starts off with blobs of paint emerging on the wall which eventually widen and create the skyline of the city centre in the heart of Bradford. This skyline then starts to pour down the wall and drips emerge. From some of these drips, a certain aspect behind Bradford shows through (such as a silhouette of a mosque, a road sign etc) and these then pour onto the pavement and eventually drain down into the gutter.
The message I'm trying to show in my stop-motion piece is that cities such as Bradford are labelled (Bradford being the City of Film), and most people only relate the city to certain aspects. For example, Bradford being related to as the city which has the National Media Museum or the first IMAX cinema in the UK, or Liverpool being related to as the city in which the Beatles were born. However, there are lot more aspects to the city than just these few, but the majority of people don't see these because they are not as highly praised as the other things. Bradford for instance has rich cultural heritage, it has beautiful moors and countrysides, it is the Curry Capital of the UK, it used to be the wool capital of the world, and the list goes on.

Adobe Illustrator first tutorial - Marilyn Munroe

So, I have just had my first tutorial on Adobe Illustrator and have actually enjoyed it very much, even though I'm a Photoshop user. Our tutor (Steven) told us that for graphic designers it's the holy grail of softwares (so I need to get practicing!). I quite like that Illustrator uses vectors instead of pixels (which Photoshop uses), so this means that when I blow up an image it won't pixelate. In our first lesson on Illustrator I learnt how to use the pen tool and various other basic things regarding colour and layers. Our group had to create a pop art style picture of Marilyn Monroe befits starting out with a real picture of her. Below is the finished result.

Friday meeting (week 5) Animation starts to come into the picture

Once we started our meeting with Sarah, our whole group showed what we had done so far. I showed my 4 test pieces which I had made and Sarah told me that she loved the 'dripping silhouette' piece (shown below)

and told me that I should try and stick to this kind of visual look (simple, but clearly displaying my message of the different aspects which make Bradford).

I am still going to be experimenting with different visual looks to portray my vision of the concept on Photoshop or Illustrator. Also, in this meeting, Sarah showed us examples of an animation storyboard/mood board and told us how they worked. We were shown 4 slides from the Sherlock Holmes film opening title sequence. We were now told to make our own 4 shots/scenes for our animation on City In Flux showing the transformation of the animation, from it's sketch to how it will roughly look in the end. I have been looking at different visual styles which I can try and use as inspiration and have ended up choosing the music video of Coldplay's 'Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall' as my main influence. The stop motion style of the video exaggerates the visuals and music, plus, the stop motion technique can create a different kind of vibe depending on how the video is edited and what type of music is played along with the visuals.

Coldplay 'Every Teardrop is a Waterfall' from Pulse Films on Vimeo.

Friday meeting (week 4) (Development on my sources)

After gathering many photos for my City In Flux idea it was time to try and create some experimental  visual development to try and see what would look right. I started off on Photoshop as I know my way around this software. I tried to experiment with a couple of my photos and wanted to visually show my message of the city of Bradford being labelled as the city of film and only being popularly known by the National media Museum and the Alhambra Theatre. None of the pieces are fully finished, they were just done to give an idea of what the piece would visually look like.

Gathering sources for my City In Flux idea in Bradford

I have just been around Bradford taking a mass amount of photos for my City In Flux project. Because I have so many, I cannot put them all up on this blog but here's some to give an idea...

Friday meeting (week 3) (Choosing 1 idea and development on it)

For this weekly Friday meeting with Sarah, we had to tell our 3 topics for our City In Flux project and then choose the strongest one out of them. As for my 3 concepts, Sarah gave me feedback and told me that my strongest idea was the topic about the city being labelled as one aspect. She told me to go and gather sources for all the 'different aspects' of Bradford and then in the next meeting we would gather them all up and try to develop them.. Basically, I had to go around Bradford and take photos of all the main places Bradford was known by to other people (places like Bradford City Hall, The National Media Museum, The Alhambra Theatre, The IMAX screening in Bradford (which was the 1st one in the UK etc) and then all the other places of Bradford which most people don't know about (places like its old industrial buildings, asian boutiques, take-aways etc). After given my task, I had another idea which involved sampling. In my spare time I often use the Garageband app on my iPad and create songs. The app allows you to sample sounds as well and so this got me thinking, maybe along with visuals of Bradford I could include sounds from Bradford and try to create a piece to go along with my photos. I told this to Sarah and got told to look at more artists such as Hexstatic and I chose to look at someone I already knew and this was the song artist, Mark Ronson.

Friday meeting (week 2) (Moving on towards our own ideas)

Every Friday, our group has a meeting with one of the tutor's for our course (our tutor is Sarah), and the main reason for this meeting is to show where we are in the project. For myself, in the first meeting, I had researched 5 artists so far and had looked at their influences and interests. Once all of our group showed what we had done, we got told to come up with 3 ideas/concepts to base our ideas on and develop on, and then in the following week we would choose 1 of these concepts to take forward. Throughout the week I had one topic which was based on the city being labelled, in particular, I looked at Bradford. I wanted to show that even though it is labelled 'The City of Film' in the UK, there is more to Bradford such as its countryside, moors, asian residency, cultural and industrial heritage etc.  My second topic was influenced by Banksy's and Shephard Fairey's work. This was to campaign about a satirical subject. After coming up with 2 topics, I had difficulty thinking of the last one, and so to help me think of one I listened to a podcast which our tutor (John) told us listen to. The podcast was called 'Urban' from the 'Digital Human' series by BBC Radio 4. It talked about how every week, a million more people move to live in cities and whether 'smart' cities are the answer to the city's constant expansion. After listening to the podcast, I came up with the topic of technology bringing a change into life (modernism). much part of the design as the bricks and mortar.

A trial piece from my city in flux artist research

 

I made this experimental piece after looking at Banksy's work. I looked at the different kinds of satirical topics he had portrayed in his works & also the use of black, white and minimal use of red colours in his stencil pieces. I also noticed that Banksy uses a minimal amount of words with his pieces. Then after all this, I tried choosing a satirical topic to base my experimental piece on and eventually came up with the topic of underage gun usage in America.
To make the piece I:
1 - Found an image from google images. However this image wasn't a straight-forward stencil, it had shading.
2 - In order to get rid of the shading I inserted the image into Photoshop, went on to Image>Adjustments>Posterize, then Image>Adjustments>Threshold and this made the image into a solid black and white fill stencil for me to cutout.
3 - Once I cutout the stencil with a craft knife and cutting mat, I went back on to Photoshop and did a couple of trials with the stencil image in order to see how it was going to look (i.e. what was the typography going to say, where was it going to be placed etc.) In the end I realised that what I wrote in the above picture was too long and just settled for, 'I'm Only 11' as this was short just like Banksy's work, and also like Banksy's work, this made people think about the phrase and how it linked to the stencil.