Project Brochure Reflection

     The theme of this project was respect for all. Respect for all week was going on in our school so for this project we choose a topic we thought was a problem going on in the world and wrote a brochure about it. We started by drafting a layout of a brochure on paper. No real content went into this draft but we were figuring out what we would put and where we would put them. It was during this process the major framework of my brochure as developed. On the cover was going to go a cover photo with large lettering for the title. Inside on the second page would go my introduction. After my introduction was my first story which extended on to the next page. On the page next to the second page would also be my data which would extend on to the page after that and finally another story. The back panel was planned to have all my sources listed and on the third page on the back would be my solutions page. Then we planned out the content we were going to put in to those sections of our brochure. These were specific fact in specific sections of our brochure. This is where we chose a topic to write about and then researched facts for our sections. I decided to write about climate change which changed a lot of my draft. I had renamed sections so they fit in line with the approach of how I would present the material. The first story became an explanation of the greenhouse effect, the data section became the causes of climate change, and the third story was broken up into 2 sections about the impact of climate change. The last section on the back became a message to the reader about what they should do to help. The choosing of my topic and the facts I researched forced me to change a lot of the draft since the first draft didn't help me present my material in a logical fashion.
     Then we were up to the part of creating something in InDesign. We transferred the draft of our layout to InDesign and put in our content we planned. We obviously used the text tool heavily to do this. Many of us, however, had typed our content in a word document and were copying and pasting back into InDesign. We would frequently end up with overset text which was easily fixable by linking text fames but for some sections that was not possible. This is where I discovered the story editor which allowed me to see all the text in the frame and told me where the overset was. I was also able to edit my text from the story editor to make scetions that were too long fit within the space alloted. There was also the matter of creating a background. For this heavy use of the rectangle tool and the associated tools was required. Some of the text did not look good aginst the background color so the color of the text needed to be tweaked frequently. The typography was tweaked a lot for spacial issues, these issues almost always being that the text did not fit. So font size, leading, and tracking were some of the things that needed to be tweaked to conseve space. To inset images and data tables we used text wrap so the text wouldn't overlap the image and vice versa. Finally, the printing part. After we printed our brochures for the first time there was an obvious problem with folding. The spacing between the three panels was wrong and the brochure did not fold properly, some of the content was creased. So it was back to InDesign where we learned about gutter and margins/bleed. Gutter and bleed are areas the printer need to grab on to which means nothing is printed in those areas. Taking into consideration the gutter/bleed we fixed the spacing of our brochure and called it a project.