Panic & Design

In a moment which is a rather accurate summation of my entire approach to, like, school and life, I decided to start applying for jobs only to come to the realization that a) I'm really interested in the design and production side of book publishing, over the editorial side, and that b) I didn't really have any portfolio to speak of to show employers and say 'see, I can do things!' And thus this weekend I ended up spending an incredible 16 hours at the school doing design stuff (the school's computers have Adobe Creative Suite, including InDesign and Photoshop, and while I would love to have those tools on my computer, I'm afraid that *might* kill the poor thing). While you can see all of the things I did this weekend in the 'design portfolio' page in the sidebar (over thataway ---------------> ), I'm going to post some of my favourite pages here.

My totally bad-ass setup Saturday

I have to say, though designing things does that a lot of time (like, I spent 2.5 hours redesigning my CV, and each magazine layout takes 1-2 hours), I absolutely love doing it, and even though I spent 16 hours at school on my days off, I really enjoyed it, and am not even a little bit upset about having done so. Which bodes well for my career choice (hooray!).

Also, except for Alix on Saturday afternoon, I had the mac lab to myself, and was thus blasting my jams while I was working, which was pretty awesome. I went and saw the Lego movie the other week with Kate, which was awesome, and it is a really good movie, but I've had the main song stuck in my head ever since, so I played that a couple times (Alix sung along with me though so its cool, I wasn't annoying her too much).

In other news, I still suck at photoshop. Happily, Alix was there Saturday afternoon to help me when things began to go awry.

Another note: while the page layout and photographs of all the spreads below were generated entierly by my brain, the mock magazine and book cover designs, which were photoshop files, I actually downloaded from graphicburger, which is a really great resource for designers, and is also were I got all the nifty wood backgrounds. Also, I wouldn't bother trying to squint and read the text - besides the title and quotes, all of the text is lorem ipsum, although a very special and awesome kind called cupcake ipsum that I got from this text generator (and which Alix introduced me to). While my lecturer made the argument for getting text such as Kafka from this generator, as it more closely mimics the spacing and flow of ordinary English text than lorem ipsum, I can't help but feel that since cupcake ipsum is basically the best thing ever, and makes placing holder text far more entertaining than it ever is usually, I'm probably going to keep using it.

Oh, actually, the text on the book reviews layout is real text, but its just reviews copy-and-pasted from Alix and I's goodreads, and aren't necessarily very good (Alix's were so long that they actually cut off - so actually, hers are pretty good. Mine are mostly snarky - the one for Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis reads "This book had so many genuinely terrifying moments, its really a shame it was written by Bret Easton Ellis and not a less pretentious and egotistical author." ... if you can't tell, I really don't like Bret Easton Ellis.

And without further ado...

The book cover is a WIP, but I got tired earlier Saturday than Sunday and stopped.

Totally Judging A Book By Its Cover

So last night I curled into my bed at 9 pm to start reading... and the next time I looked at the clock it was 1:40 am and I had just finished my book. In sum: if you are a fan of YA fantasy, I really recommend Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments series. 

After Rachel and I deciding that we were too brain dead after an entire day at the school to do French Club Wednesday nights, we have moved French Club to Sunday afternoons. Which was really fun and leisurely, and, y'know, we didn't stay so late we got kicked out, which was a nice change of pace. My french continues to get better and better (22 day streak on Duolingo) and French Club remains fun and chill. 

After French Club was over, we inevitably ended up wandering around the bookstore - I didn't buy anything (go me!) but it remains a very real danger, and is definitely the (somewhat questionably) downside of meeting in a bookstore (its also kind of an upside). We also engaged in quite a bit of criticism about cover design and fonts, which was very nerdy. Below are some of my favourites. 

Also seen: my pretty pink nails :)