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:

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:

Book Cover Design

Did you know that you can LEGALLY make some serious money by taking something that someone created a long, long time ago, repackaging it, and selling it yourself?

Copyright exists on everything that you create. If you compose music, create art, design a logo, or even take a photograph, you have the right to choose what happens to that creation and nobody can take your creation without your permission. You don’t have to do anything other than prove that you are the one who created something in order to own a copyright.

However… those copyrights don’t last forever! Copyright laws are kind of different in different places, and I’m by no means a lawyer…

There are many places on the Internet where you can go and download a book that’s already been written and you can do whatever you want with it! Legally! Isn’t that insane? Ain’t capitalism grand?

You could go and create your own version of any of the following:

  • Frankenstein
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • Dracula
  • Alice in Wonderland
  • Sherlock Holmes
  • Peter Pan
  • The Wizard of Oz
  • heck, even Winnie the Pooh is in the public domain now! (but watch out if you’re going anywhere near Disney…)

Sources of Public Domain books:

https://www.gutenberg.org/

https://www.google.com/intl/en/googlebooks/about/free_books.html

https://archive.org/details/texts

 

You’re going to pick a book and design a cover (front and back) and lay it out. What you do with it from there is up to you… just don’t get me involved!

When it comes to the layout portion, I recommend finding one that has a PLAIN TEXT version. For example, here’s a link to download Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I used to love Mark Twain when I was a kid. I was a weird kid.

The plain text version looks like this

I can download the whole book just by pressing Ctrl + S on my keyboard!

 

That book has been published countless times by countless jokers looking to make a buck!

 

Now, I do not expect you to read the book or have already read the book. You can pick whatever you want. I’m not about to read the thing and make sure that you’ve portrayed the book accurately, so feel free to pick whatever you want and have fun with it. The thing is, you have to come up with your own design and use images that are not protected by copyright.

Photos and images can be used from Creative Commons sources such as:

How & where you create this is kind of up to you! Keep in mind that sometimes you need to revise your design, adapt it for physical or digital releases, or your book gets turned into a movie or a stage production (hint, hint…)

Your first job is to pick a book and design a cover and the back of the book, which usually has a little summary of the book and perhaps some testimonials from others who have read the book.

Ideal dimensions for ebook cover files are 2,560 pixels in height x 1,600 pixels in width.

Examples (although not necessarily good or creative ones…):