during the

PROJECT

step one: introduction

step two: designing spreads

step three: ad formatting

The way this project began was through me finding Heather Heater through PathwayOS, which was the website we used to find our projects/experiences. After that, I set up a zoom meeting with her later that week in order to figure out what the potential problem might be and what does the project entail.

Heather works for a Cattle Magazine called "The Cattleman" which I found out through our first meeting. During the meeting with Heather, I took notes about what all needed to be done, essentially she was going to teach me the fundamentals of designing a magazine when it comes to spread design and ad formatting. After our first meeting, she gave me an assignment and that was to design a few entry level spreads and to design a section cover.

After the meeting, it was time to get to work, throughout the next week (as the due date was that next Friday), I was using a lot of my free time looking at past Cattleman magazines for inspiration on how I could make the spreads as accurate to the style they used as possible. The program I used during this process was Adobe InDesign which I already had experience with as I used this same program during my time on the school yearbook.

During the week, I faced one major problem when it came to designing the spreads itself. On the "Director Spotlight" spread, the writer of the story had included way too many words for it to fit on the page without taking away the key elements of the spread such as the images to their correct sizes. So through communicating and trying other potential solutions, Heather and I figured out that if we eliminated the caption for the photos (which has been done in previous editions) we could manage to fit all the story on the spread.

After I designed all the necessary spreads assigned to me, Heather and I had another meeting to talk about the final piece of the project and that was learning how to format the ads as all magazines have them in one way or another. She gave me the instructions for how to format ads through spread sheets and how to put them to page in InDesign and gave me the time to figure it out.

Over the course of the next week, I managed to complete formatting the ads and just like that, the project was over. I had learned how to design magazines and although it was just a taste of what designing an entire magazine would be like, I learned a lot of valuable lessons like working through problems with people who have more knowledge or experience and figuring out time managing to get them done on time especially since I already had a busy schedule.