Week 14 Projects & Objectives

We ended last week by working with Illustrator's Shape Builder tool and many of you had ah-hah moments as a result. We're going to continue to use this Illustrator tool this week with a new project that we'll be working with in InDesign.

InDesign has undergone quite a few changes because of how publishing has moved towards different medias beyond the printed page. The designed page can now have interactivity, animations and motion never before possible with paper and ink. The advent of digital readers allow us to use motion in our designs. That will be our focus this week. This web page explains some of the new features that allow InDesign to do basic animation work.

The finished project that you will be creating this week will be a choice between an animated cover of your favorite book or a poster design of a favorite movie.
Here are the steps we'll be following for this project:

• Monday - Brainstorm, Thumbnail  and Storyboard ideas for a simple animation. Hand in your thumbnails and a comprehensive storyboard before the end of class.
  
• Tuesday - Using Illustrator, create the graphics necessary for all components of your animation. This will include background, characters and text items. Remember to save each of these as separate Adobe Illustrator files. If you wish to use Photoshop for some of the graphics they need to be transparent or masked.
  
• Wednesday - Create a finished InDesign static (non-animated) cover or poster
  
• Thursday - Begin to work with InDesign's Digital Publishing tools to create your short animation. Keep this simple for now - you can always expand this after your first attempt.
  
• Friday - Export your finished animation and post it to your journal. Fix any problems or issues you might encounter.

If you are caught up on this project finish the calendar project or the join the crowd project. We'll also be taking photos of the staff over the next two weeks. These portraits will be taken on a drop-in basis and the portrait camera will be set up all week for this purpose.

Below is a sample animation of the project for this week