Progress.

Beautiful, beautiful progress.

Table of Contents Colors

I finally found colors I like for the table of contents:

And it'll be continuous with the rest of the magazine, because the little circles in the corner of each page can match the colors.

Quirky.

This took a little longer than anticipated. I was going to do two designs today, but now that I have a little extra time I think I'll start designing more spreads after vacation. I looked at this:

And then I copied it and made this:

The only thing I might want to add to this is captions for both photos. But that should be easy and I'm otherwise pleased with it.

And on the fifth day, he created spreads. . .

Today I designed another example design for people to use (the fourth one below). All of the designs I've made so far are based on previous Carpe Diem spreads, but on Friday I want to look up cool professional spreads and copy them.

Just for reference, here are the four designs I've made so far:

Opening pages!

At the beginning of class I helped Sarah and Nate get started on their designs by putting the bare template and the finished templates on the server. Then I designed this:

Obviously I'll continue to tweak the colors on the table of contents.

I want to have pictures of the editors in all of the bubbles, looking coyly at the letter or otherwise being silly. However, I am exceedingly proud of the Robert Downey Jr. gag and would be perfectly willing to keep him there.

Little Circles

Today I experimented with a new idea:

I don't know if this is a good idea, but I like it. We'd replace the galaxies with pictures from the next and previous page. We didn't have much time today, so this is really all I did this class. I put it in all the designs I have so far.

My table of contents design!

For most of this class and last class, I was creating this:

I really like this design so far.

This is just a first draft. Obviously I'll have to tweak the colors and the layout. It looks a bit strange at the moment, especially that "GALAXIES" thing on the bottom. I don't know what I was thinking when I made that. Also, the number of dots will have to change once the actual stories start coming in.

But I was thinking - wouldn't it be cool if there were a theme of pictures in circles throughout the magazine? Maybe we could have at least one circle-picture on each page, or else have little "Previous Page" and "Next Page" previews on the top corners of each page, with little circles depicting what's next.

Cool table of contents designs!

I googled 'table of contents' and found several cool designs. My favorite one was this:

This is an interesting one-page design. There are no visuals from the rest of the magazine, but the circle is eye-catching and infinitely cool and might be interesting to copy. Instead of the picture with the bag, I would put the circle on the right page and have a standard letter-to-the-editors layout on the left.

The other design I found was this:

This is actually from a birdwatching book. But I'm not so much enthralled with the specific design - more with the concept. Having a little box for the table of contents with a visual in the background could be interesting.

If I were to copy this design, I would have one big, singular photo in the background and have the Editor Letter and the Table of Contents in little gray boxes, perhaps with some cool little additions in other boxes.

OR, alternatively, I could have a whole big collage of photos from the magazine with numbers referring to each thing in the table of contents. In that case, I would still have the text in little boxes, but I wouldn't make them transparent and put pictures behind them. They'd just be scattered all around.

Over the next few days, I'm going to try copying the first design, with the circle, as it's far easier to construct without yet having photos.

Oh, I'm Sorry - Google DRIVE! (Journalism Final)

Oh, I'm Sorry - Google DRIVE!

Why Google Docs Can Be Both Awesome and Infuriating

by Aaron Lockman

In the spring of 2012, Google released its new cloud storage service, Google Drive. It exploded in the general public right away, gaining 10 million users in less than a month and receiving generally positive reviews from critics, who called it “among the best of the free synchronization services” and “the best known free alternative to Microsoft Office.”

Yeah, all the critics love it. Except this one. You know why?

Because it’s the EXACT SAME THING as Google Docs.

Google Drive was hailed as this revolutionary new breakthrough in technology, whereas in reality it was just Docs with a few tweaks here and there. Docs allowed you to upload videos and pictures and other files as well. It gave you 5 free gigabytes of space. The only difference is that the system of organization is just different enough to throw the user off guard, but not different enough to be any more or less efficient.

Don’t change the name if it’s just going to be the exact same thing.  It’s like if YouTube suddenly changed its name to YouScreen but continued being the same site. This change results in nothing but confusion for everyone.

“But Aaron! You’re just bellyaching about how the system hasn’t changed! What do you think about the actual system?”

That is an excellent question, I’m surprised you thought of that. And the actual system is not too bad.

To those organizationally stunted wretches like myself, being able to access one’s work on any computer in any location is priceless. And the fact that each document is sorted in perfect chronological order from when you last edited it makes finding things easy. Wrote a thing two months ago that you need? No more searching in the six million sub-folders you have on your hard drive. Just type in what you remember of its name, and POOF there it is. It’s like a huge document buffet table with butlers that put the food on your plate.

So for organization Google Docs gets an A. So what’s holding me back from a glowing review?

The creative side of things.

For those people who write creatively and want to be able to access their art anywhere, Google Docs seems like a dream. But when writing poems and short stories and the like, concentration is key. You need a quiet space with few distractions, and to be satisfied with making slow progress. Writing does not lend itself to multitasking, which is what the internet is all about.

The average teenager is becoming more tech-savvy and signing up for more and more services, which means more gleaming insignias on the bookmarks bar, more exciting and wonderful places where somebody constantly might have updated something. More things to look at besides the blank page. That’s why the emigration of the written word from the document to the cloud is worrisome to me.

Sources:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403546,00.asp

http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/software/1292647/google-drive

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/google-drive-now-has-10-million-users-available-on-ios-and-chrome-os-offline-editing-in-docs/