Final Slide Show

What I was hoping to achieve with my design was a beautiful slide show that told a story. I really wanted unique, high quality pictures and an interesting narrative. Also, I wanted them to blend together.

First I wrote my narrative. Then I found pictures to describe the narrative on Flickr. Then I edited my narrative and added music and sounds to it. I have a lot of songs instead of sounds because I think it is appropriate for what my slide show is about. There are not that many sounds in dance besides music.

Finding nice pictures I could get online for free was challenging. I had the same problem finding free sounds. It also took a while to edit the audio and it was awkward to record my narrative but all and all I think the end product turned out well.

This is probably because I just kept at it. I searched for a while until I found all of the perfect raw materials. Then I just spent a lot of time putting everything together and it ended up not being that hard at all actually.

I am proud of this whole project, I think it turned out really nice. I like the look of it. I also like how it flows and how the pictures and audio blend together. I am also proud of myself for getting it online!

If I had more time I might have edited audio more carefully. Or I might have done fancier things with the slide show as a whole. I might have touched up the timing a little more too.

Bind In - Blow In Card

In my design, I was simply trying to to achieve a similar look to the original. I wanted to be able to use both Quark and InDesign to create almost exact copies of the actual card. Realistically though, I ended up just trying to have them come out similar instead of exact because this was really difficult!

I decided to start with Quark because originally I disliked it. However, when it came time to use InDesign I realized it was much more difficult for this particular project. (The card from InDesign is at the top. The other and the back were done in Quark.) I decided that these two programs both have their pluses and minuses, choosing comes down to what kind of project you are doing. For example, I found making shapes was much easier in Quark which was very helpful because my card is filled with circles.

This circles were a pain and took forever to do over and over again. What was also difficult was finding the exact same fonts as the one in the original. I am not sure how often I was even successful with this. Also, getting everything to fit in the right positions was very difficult. One thing I do not like about InDesign is the way it works with pictures, it is much more difficult than Quark and this took me some time. One thing I found impossible was making an arrow like the one in the original card. I could not find a single easy was to make a triangle! Also, all of the little lines on the back are not straight because this would have taken an hour all by itself.

Like many projects in this class though, with enough perseverance most of this problems fixed themselves through time and effort. I just had to search for fonts, move things around over and over again, and play around with the photos. Although, I could do more with more time.

However, I am proud of finding good images and mixing accurate colors. I am also proud of myself for sticking with this project, it was very frustrating. One of the things I am most happy with is that I am starting to master not one program but two because of this project.

I can not even image all of the time I could spend on this if I had forever. I would definitely touch up everything actually. What I want to fix most though are the arrows, the fonts, and all the little lines on the back.