And while we're on the subject...

...the subject being graphics and design, here is the image I made for The Anchor's new twitter profile picture.

Adventures in Publishing

A lot of my time recently has been taken up by one particular project.  I joined my college's Literary Magazine (which is also a class) not because I have any outstanding interest in creating literary works but because I was interested in doing the layout and publishing for the mag.  For the first semester this meant playing "Art Editor" which, because we didn't really have contributors yet, mostly meant making fliers sometimes and playing with the thought of building a website to streamline our submission process.

I do enjoy reading (mostly in the SciFi/Fantasy/Jane Austen realm), but I'm not exactly a literary person. This has led to some interesting moments as far as communicating and collaborating with my literary cohorts (though mostly the difficulty has been with our Faculty Advisor/Professor).

In any case, production time finally rolled around this semester.  I have put something like 20 total hours into building, tweaking, and editing our 120-page magazine as well as the cover art pictured below:

The process has been extremely tiring, frustrating, and harrowing, but I am looking forward to holding the finished product in my hands.  I feel like this has been an extremely valuable learning experience for me and I think I'm actually looking forward to doing this sort of work in the future.

So much so, in fact that, now that I've (hopefully) touched Shoreline's for-print file for the last time (knock on wood), I've found myself looking more into the realm of "self publishing".  Right now, specifically, this means ePublishing for things like Kindle and iBook, etc.

I was pleased to find that InDesign, the program I used to layout Shoreline and most other page layouts I do, can export to the .epub standard.  I've been learning how to best prepare and format your project to properly convert into .epub.  I think I'm going to try and do it with Shoreline.  I may end up with a version of Shoreline that I can read on my iPod.

I feel like this is a very productive road for me.  Being competent in publishing in .epub could be a potentially very marketable skill in the coming years.  I look forward to the challenge.

In other graphic-related news, I also made the following spread for The Anchor two weeks ago:

I utilized a bunch of new tricks I learned at the conference over spring break.  I feel like I'm truly growing as a designer.