Category Archives: GT40G S1 2023

Live Job: MHSAA Provincials Banners

Westwood will be involved in the Manitoba High Schools Athletic Association Provincial Hockey Tournament in the spring. We need a series of banners designed that will hang outside dressing room doors and behind the bench for each team.

Mr. Christie is the contact for this job if you have any questions.

Here is the logo for this year’s tournament. Make sure you properly download the .svg file and place it into your design.

There will be a banner for each team, but we don’t know all of the teams just yet.

For now, design two banners for Westwood’s hockey team. One Landscape:

30 inches high x 72 inches wide 

and one Portrait:

30 inches wide x 72 inches tall

Live Job: Westwood All-Stars Tournament

Westwood is hosting a basketball tournament in February, and Mr. Wiebe would like to give each team’s best player a commemorative shirt. We need a logo design for that shirt. It is a Westwood tournament, so incorporating the Westwood colours and logo is not a bad idea, but this is not specifically a Westwood team, so you could be somewhat creative and do something different.

Westwood All-Stars

February 9 & 10, 2024

Live Job: Canteen Cards

Your friend and mine, Mr. Schmeichel, has asked for help designing some canteen punch cards for an upcoming hockey tournament. Unfortunately, he’s Mr. Schmeichel, so time is limited. He needs these before Christmas. We need to put them together on a sheet, print them out, and cut them apart, so the last day to submit will be Wednesday, Dec. 20.

This is for:

Varsity View Golden Falcon Tournament

Each card should contain an area to punch off:
Chips
Drink
Treat
Treat

You need to use THIS LOGO

The setup for one ticket is:

3.5 in by 2 in with a .125 inch bleed

These could be designed in Illustrator or InDesign.

InDesign:

Illustrator:

You don’t have a lot of space and there’s a lot of text to include, so don’t add in too much more, but feel free to work a logo in or just use shapes & colours and more interesting fonts to make the card look much more appealing!

Here’s what we came up with last year:

Yearbook Cover/Theme

Your job is to come up with a creative and original design for the yearbook cover!

Often, the cover design is tied to a theme that will run through the entire book.

We’ve got a team of talented, hard-working, amazing students working on our yearbook. They’ve got a theme that they would like to propose and work with. You can choose whether to use their theme idea and help develop something along those lines, OR you can come up with your own suggestion!

They would like to use the idea of incorporating streaming music playlists and going with a theme that would visually reflect the idea of streaming music.  The problem there is that we have to be kind of careful NOT to use images or ideas directly associated with any particular streaming platform! So you can come up with something “in the style of” your favourite platform, but can’t use the name or logo that belongs to a particular platform.

Again, if you want to come up with your own idea, GO FOR IT!

In order to put this together properly, you need to know how to use InDesign. You can design elements in Photoshop or Illustrator, but they must be put together using InDesign.

You will need THIS TEMPLATE

Look in the Hand Out folder for some SAMPLES that were submitted this year

If you need help getting started with InDesign, you could check out some of these Tutorials:

Get Started with InDesign

Explore InDesign Basics

Work with Master Pages

or just find your own tutorial at the Adobe Help Page or on YouTube (just try to find newer tutorials that use the same version of the program that you have.)

Your background image or colour needs to extend out to the edge of the page, but part of it will wrap around the cover and will get cut off. That WRAPPER area should be covered with whatever you have in the background, but don’t put anything important there.

You should also have writing on the SPINE of the book. This is usually just the name of the school and the year.

There is a rack of Westwood yearbooks from years past. I also have a whole rack of yearbooks from other schools that you can look at. There are many more examples linked below.

One last thing to mention, If we choose your theme for our yearbook it is important that it does not contain copyrighted images or we will not be able to publish them. To ensure that your pictures are licensed for creative commons, search using a site like Unsplash or take your own photos or use the BACKGROUNDS and CLIP ART provided by our yearbook publishing company!

Publication Planning – To Theme Or Not To Theme?

Every publication begins in the planning stages with the question of whether the design will follow a theme or not. A theme is an idea or guiding principle that ties all elements of the publication together. It is not necessary to have a theme, but some of the most creative publications have come from theme development efforts.

For our purposes, we need to decide if we will adopt a theme for our yearbook. If we do, we need to decide which theme we will use and how we will carry it throughout our book.

Theme Builds Team

The major advantage to using a theme is that it forces many people working on different parts of the book to make some design choices before they begin working. As a result, the book comes out looking more consistent from start to finish.

Here are some samples of themed yearbooks

Here are some theme ideas

As you can see, there is a lot of creativity that goes into pursuing a themed yearbook. Just to give an overview, the most common way to carry themes throughout the yearbook are:

  • Cover
  • Dividers
  • Font choice
  • Lines, Shapes or Common Graphic Elements
  • Theme Based Titles

No Theme… No Problems… Right?

Some people argue that going without a theme is in fact harder, because there are many people working on one book with no idea that ties their pages together.

Not having a theme, doesn’t let you off the hook. There is still the question of consistency, which is a must from page to page. This means having the same font styles, sizes and colours, picture box style and common layout elements from page to page. A few things you would still have to decide on are:

  • Cover
  • Heading, Subheading, Body Copy & Caption Fonts (size, style, type)
  • Picture Box Styles (shape, stroke)
  • Spacing between elements
  • Divider Pages
  • Common Design Elements (lines, shapes, colour, etc)

In the end, to theme or not to theme will depend on the creativity level of the group

If you’ve chosen a theme you must decide how you will carry the theme through the book. Your ideas should include plans for the following:

  • Cover
  • Dividers
  • Font choice
  • Lines, Shapes or Common Graphic Elements
  • Theme Based Titles

SAMPLES:

 

 

 

Drama Games poster

We have been asked to help create the poster for the upcoming Drama Games.

Here are the details that need to be included:

Westwood Drama Department Presents:
Drama Games
January 19, 2024
7 pm
Westwood Collegiate
360 Rouge Road
Tickets at the door
$10 Adult, $5 Student

The “Games” feature a red team competing against a blue team.

Posters are usually printed at 11 inches by 17 inches. Resolution needs to be 300 pixels per inch.

Use HIGH QUALITY images & elements! Use sources like The Noun Project or Brands of the World, Unsplash, or another source of high quality images & icons, preferably vector.

Here are some photos from last year. You could use them, but they may not be great.

Here is one concept that has been created for this year:

Here is the poster that has been used in the past:

Athlete Hall of Fame

We’ve been pretty fortunate to have some pretty incredible athletes attend Westwood over the years. Mr. Schmeichel has a bit of a Hall of Fame in the trophy case outside of the gym. The problem is that he did the work himself – on Word(!) and it shows.

Let’s fix that!

Come up with a template for a new and vastly improved Westwood Athletics Hall of Fame!

Design a document that can be used and adapted for various athletes.

Here are the documents/athletes we’ve got up so far

I, personally, need to see one added for the legendary Chris Jericho! (yearbook photos!)

Use Westwood logos and colours from HERE: Westwood logos

Book Layout

It’s time to create the layout for your book!

Hopefully you’ve chosen and downloaded a book, as explained in the previous instructions

When you set up your file, we’ll act as if we’re making a book for print. Set it up with the page size of Letter-Half (5.5 in by 8.5 in.) I recommend an even number of pages (4 or 6) and make sure you turn on Facing Pages! You can adjust margin and gutter settings if you wish. I also really like to set up the Primary Text Frame now, but you could always do that later if you forget.

Of course, you need to SAVE your file in your OneDrive folder!

The most important work takes place on the Pages panel. In particular, it’s very, very IMPORTANT that you take the time to properly set up your Parent pages!

Go into the Pages panel and double-click on A-Parent:

First, did you turn on that Primary Text Frame option when setting up your file? If not, you want to create a text frame that fills up your page along your margins:

Then you want to make sure that the pages are linked so text will flow from one page to the next.

At the bottom right of the page on the left, there’s a little box. Click that to link that box…

Once you’ve clicked the bottom right of the first page, link it with the top left of the next page:

Now your text will flow and all of your pages will be created automatically!

 

Next, we’ll set up the page numbers. Go to the bottom of your page and create a text frame.

Put your cursor into that frame and to to the Type menu, then Insert Special Character/Markers/Current Page Number (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + N – if you have a lot of flexible fingers!)

That will insert a capital A into the box, but it’s just a placeholder for the page number. Highlight that character and use the Properties panel to choose your own font, colour, size, alignment, style, etc.

Now we want that same marker on the opposing page, so make a copy! The easiest way is to use the Selection Tool (V), hold down Alt and Shift, and drag a copy over to the other page!

You may wish to change the alignment or any other options on this page:

Generally, at the bottom of a book there would be the title of the book or chapter, as well as possibly the author’s name on every page. You can set up different sections for different chapters, but let’s make things easy and just have the same thing throughout the book.

I have the title of the book on my left page:

and the author’s name on the right:

 

 

 

Lincoln Lawn Sign

The folks at Lincoln Middle School have asked for some help designing a lawn sign to be used on a parade float.

Here’s the information I got:

A staff member at our school is part of an organization called “Never Alone.” They spread gifts and joy to folks with cancer. Each year they participate in a parade and use a sled from Lincoln drama dept.

This year, a group of students with special needs helped to paint and fix up the sled and we were hoping to give them credit.

We’re looking for one of those lawn signs like the high schools send out for grads.

The message could read:

Sponsored by “Lincoln Middle School’s Elves”.

The sign should also include the Lion logo. (DOWNLOAD THAT HERE)

 

A typical lawn sign is about 24 inches wide by 18 inches high, so work from a file with those dimensions. We’ll have to print a sticker and put that on a piece of plastic. This could be printed or cut out of vinyl.

 

Screen Printing

Screen printing is one of the most common ways of decorating clothing with a design. There’s a lot of setup and cleanup involved, but outside of that, it is very quick, easy, and inexpensive. You can incorporate multiple colours, but this increases the time, difficulty, and expense. We will keep it simple and use one colour.

Basically, your design needs to ultimately be printed out in BLACK and WHITE. Not greyscale. One colour of ink on one colour of material. The design needs to be printed as BLACK. You can apply whatever colour of ink you like after that.

You will design something that is made up of simple shapes and text. Using text and things like icons from The Noun Project or simple shape-based drawings would work.

You can design this on whatever software you wish (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.)

Set up your page to be 8.5 inches by 11 inches. You can decide whether it’s landscape or portrait.

Here are some examples of logos and designs that have worked well in the past: