Your job is to create your own photography magazine. You will provide the photographs, the design, and the layouts to create a new and dazzling magazine. Although you may have done things like this in the past, this will combine several skills together in a bigger way. This is the major assignment for term 3.

The topic of your magazine can be:
A) Hair (go work with Mr. Scarpino’s class and show off some different hair designs!)
B) Fashion
C) St. James Collegiate
D) Computers/Technology
E) Woodworking or Electronics (if you have an interest, work with Mr. Rogers or Ingram to find projects & tools to photograph and cover in your magazine.)
F) Something APPROVED by me. If you haven’t chosen one of the above, you need to TALK TO ME FIRST! You will have to start again if you do not follow that simple instruction.

You have been put in charge of a magazine showing off your best photographs related to a topic. You are responsible for taking good, high-quality photos of the subject of your magazine. Make sure that it’s something that you can easily photograph in school (or at home, if you really wish, but you need to have those ready to go so you’re not wasting time in class!) These will be the major photos in your magazine and you will need a LOT of them!

You need to SHOOT RAW images and then FIX THEM UP in Photoshop! Use your Photoshop skills to bring out the best in your photos.

For the layout & design of the pages (and perhaps logos, etc.) you could find good quality CREATIVE COMMONS images from one of the APPROVED sources to use as minor elements in the magazine. You will NEED TO PROVIDE ATTRIBUTION INFORMATION for ALL photos that you use!

Whatever you choose to do, you must have:

• Make your document 8.5″ x 11″ so that we could print it out if you want later on. Use facing pages and have a .25″ bleed.
• An appealing cover page that lists some of the content inside of your magazine.
• At least 10 pages, all containing good quality content
• At LEAST 3 different topics/sections. These should follow the same topic, but have a different focus. (eg. you could do sections on men’s hairstyles, women’s hairstyles, and kids’ hairstyles or if you’re covering fashion, do sections on pants/skirts, tops, and accessories, or something like that.)
• Pages must be numbered! No page number on the front or back cover! You can decide whether there’s a separately numbered table of contents page or index. InDesign must do the numbering for you! (ie you can’t just add a text box on each page and write in your own number – CHEATING!)
• It’s rare for a magazine article to contain only one photo. You could have one larger photo alongside text or multiple photos on most pages.
• Remember that magazines have different articles with different authors. While it isn’t important for you to write a lot in your magazine (especially because it’s a photography magazine), you should have some appealing text setting the different articles apart. You should have an author listed close to the article title, and there should be some kind of text alongside the image(s).
• PLACE all of your photos and modify the fitting options the way that you’d like.
• Place AT LEAST one document file (an article or something that is written in Microsoft Word or something like that.)
• Magazines contain advertising. Often, a lot of advertising…

KEEP YOUR WORK ORGANIZED! Keep ALL of the files you use in ONE folder. If you drop off the InDesign file without the pictures and other files you use, it will not work well and you will lose marks for sure!

The first step is to decide on a topic and create some content. This is going to be very important, because you’ll be marked on how realistic/interesting your magazine is. It should look like something that someone might actually buy.

You have a fair bit of creative freedom here, but you have to make sure that your content is appropriate and that it makes a good magazine. You also, of course, have to use all of the tools you’ve learned in InDesign to create this properly. You may wish to integrate work that you do in Photoshop as well. (ie create the logo for your magazine, create advertisements, etc.)

I have student samples that I can show you, so ask me if you’re interested in seeing what’s been done in previous years.

Congratulations on your new position! I look forward to reading your magazine!

Adobe’s InDesign can do everything that Microsoft Word can do and MUCH more, and it does it all so much better. It’s a souped-up super powered version of your usual word processor. It also incorporates the power of Photoshop and other programs to create one killer creator of documents.

One of the many things that InDesign does much better than a program like Microsoft Word is handle multiple pages. Our yearbook is put together using InDesign and it makes it so much simpler to make the pages look good and organize pages and sections. You’ll be using InDesign to put together your Yearbook pages near the end of the year. In the meantime, we’ll create a bunch of other useful documents.

Watch the tutorials below. Those teach you how to use the program. Much of this stuff you WILL NOT figure out on your own, so pay attention to those.

Part of our job as the yearbook committee is to encourage students to buy their yearbook, and it’s time for us to do another “push” to try and get some more books sold.

Your job is to come up with a poster, a web ad, and/or a video that we can use to promote yearbook sales. If you like, you can use this year’s yearbook cover to show people what we’ve been working on. Use photos from the year so far (available from Mr. Robson) to get people excited about what they might see in the book. If you want, we can try to come up with some kind of contest or incentive to get people to purchase.

You could:

• Use Photoshop or InDesign to create a poster. Make it 11 inches by 17 inches (or 17 x 11), with a resolution of 300 dpi. If you want to make something larger, you can, but we should talk about sizes and quality first.
• Use Photoshop to create an advertisement for the school website. Make it “Web” size in Photoshop (800 pixels by 600 pixels, resolution of 72 dpi).
• Do a video only if you know how to use iMovie or Premiere Pro well enough to do a good job. This isn’t about trying to learn how to make a movie, but it also needs to look good. If you don’t know how to do things like turn off the Ken Burns effect, add titles & transitions, adjust timing, etc., DON’T CHOOSE THIS!

Yearbooks are available in the office for $26 or online. You can use this QR code on your poster (click to see the full version, then save the image to your computer):

or you can add the following link: http://ybstore.friesens.com/stores/331349

Remind people that this is the one book that most people keep for the rest of their lives, and you will look at it regularly over the years to remember the people and events that happened during this important time of your life. High school is a big transitional time for you, and one that you’ll remember for the rest of your life. This book provides the best way of keeping track of this school and this year. It truly provides a lifetime of good memories, and is a great investment.

Use the text effects, borders, masks, adjustments, and other fancy tricks you’ve learned in Photoshop (you did complete those tutorials and exercises, right?…). Make your poster vibrant, interesting, and appealing.

The more tools we have to promote the yearbook the more successful we’ll be. Consider making more than one project. You have to come up with at least one promotional item, but if you do more, you’ll get marks for that as well.

Please be honest, fair, and provide feedback for the ones that you deem worthy!

In order to get working on creating some different files & documents in Photoshop, I’d like you to follow a series of short, simple tutorials designed to get you started with the program.

For each of the projects, you should download the supplied files and create the sample project. Do NOT hand these in.

You will use the skills learned in each tutorial and create an ORIGINAL project using your photos/designs, which you WILL hand in.

Today I would like you to go on Flickr and explore photos. Explain what you like about 3 different photos. Not the content (yeah, that flower is beautiful) but what did the photographer do to make that photo amazing?

Example

Below this post you should post a comment where you provide a link to the photos you choose and then EXPLAIN what you like about the photo – what did the photographer have to do or think about in order to make that photo so great?

Post a response as a comment attached to this post. You will need to include a link to the photo and you will need to EXPLAIN what the photographer DID to make it a great photo.