Final Project

We reached the end of our Visual Journalism class and I have just completed my final project. It took me a little over a month to complete this, but I think it came out very well. When I started my sketching back in April, I thought this project would be pretty simple. But I was wrong. Fitting and cropping all the photos, text and headlines was a big challenge. After roughly six hours of creating a transparent map with multiple layers, fitting in the text of my stories into the columns and making it fit on one page, I came out with the finished project. The picture of Lorenc came out a lot better than I originally thought and i converted the raw photo to both .TIFF and .JPEG files. After editing my story and sidebars over and over, I had to do a text wrap so I could fit in the flag of Poland. I made sure that each headline would stick out to the reader and that each story could be found and read easily. Also, I changed the background color of my sidebar about Poland. I believe that the color really makes the map stick out. I also did this becuase my main story and this sidebar are closely related. I used a pullout quote for my most important piece of text and cropped the size of my main photo of Lorenc to really stand out and fit over the two-page spread. I put a lot of time and effort into this spread and couldn't be happier with the result.

Cover Art

For this project, we were assigned to create a magazine page based off a page of information that we received. We had to include all text and add pictures, headlines and captions. I had to resize and edit some of the pictures to fit them on a page and place them in an effective manner. My headline is in red because i wanted it to be noticed immediately by the reader. Overall, I think this page design turned out pretty well.

Midterm web page

I am very pleased with how my midterm project turned out. At first, I really had no idea how to create a webpage, but using Indesign, I quickly learned that it was not impossible. After studying and observing countless homepages of various websites, I sketched out my desgin and started the project. Although I changed a few things around in the end, my sketch really guided me to the creation of this page. It took a few hours to complete, but I am very satisfied with how it turned out.

Photo Restoration

Although this assignment was pretty straight forward, I still struggled with it. This was probably the second time that I have used photoshop. Overall, I think I improved the quality of the photo. I fixed all the holes and other color disfigurations that I saw. Also, I thought I brought out her face more by adding some color and definition to her facial features. The bottom half of the shirt was dull and pretty much erased, so I did my best to fix it. It was a tough assignment that took me two days to complete but I have a lot more knowledge about photoshop now that I have restored an image.

Toned photo vs original

The assignment for this project was to tone a picture, fix it up and post it on the blog. After working in photoshop for a bit, i realized that the only way to properly tone and fix the new picture was to remove the man's giant forehead. In addition to cropping out his head, I also changed the coloring and patched up some of the rough spots. The new picture on the left is more clear and the colors are more definied. I removed the darkness and shadows from the crowd and I think it really stands out in the new image. I really wanted to put emphasis on the scoreboard and skyline of the North Side and I believe I succeeded.

Infographic Project

The infographic project was a bit more straight forward than my other recent projects. This time, instead of creating something new, I just had to present data in a table. It was a difficult task to find a way to not bore the viewers to death with just words and statistics. So, I decided to include some images from various websites that, in a way, define what each state is about. I also had to make each photo proportional to each other. I think the project came out pretty well and the images definitely enrich the data.

Composition Project

For my third project in visual journalism, I was given the assignment of re-creating a page from a magazine. The object of this assignment was to mimic the details, colors and pictures as much as possible. After viewing my re-created image, I think that I achieved a lot. The colors are very close to the original while the pictures are nearly identical. But the one part that stood out to me was the fonts and their size. The headlines were very difficult to identically match and it was even harder to get their sizes correct. But, overall I think this project was a good start and a close re-creation of the original.