Category: Job 11

I enjoy using blending modes and seeing how different colors blend together.

In spirit of the arctic man weekend I thought I would combine various pictures I have of my family winter outings.   The background is a picture I took of the HooDoo mountains and my son is featured in the center on a trip we did down in Cantwell powder playing.   The green sled is of a graphic he downloaded years ago when he made a “wish list”.

I was kinda getting peeved – the title of my cover would not show the text in yellow.   If I hid the background it would show yellow but as soon as I made the background visible again it would go light blue – Took me damn near an hour to figure out what was going on.   While playing around with the overlay and opacity features – I forgot to return the font back to NORMAL and 100%.

Anyone else interested in sharing their cover? I’d love to see them.

As someone who regularly uses blending modes in photoshop, I really thought this should be easy. But it actually was not as easy as I thought. It turns out  that the first two colors I tried to use didn’t work so well with the blending modes. First I tried magenta, nothing was happening, then I tried yellow, also nothing happened.

I too was wondering how to create the star burst and as I posted on a comment – use UAF’s library web page and go to lynda https://www.lynda.com.proxy.library.uaf.edu/sdk/InDesign-tutorials/InDesign-CS6-Essential-Training/96305-2.html

You learn a lot from the videos.   The text book assignments help but they have preformed graphics and I get frustrated wanting to know HOW to make the graphic 🙂

Along with printing – be aware of changes saving to pdf.   My circle on my second image did not show like it did in the ID view.

I found this assignment frustrating. While not ‘difficult,’ it is certainly challenging to get all the components to work right and when they do not, re-doing the steps does not always help. One thing I find frustrating with the text is the lack of troubleshooting skills that could be taught.

I could not get the TOC or index to work right however, I DID get the chapter formatting to behave like I wanted to so I am pleased with that. The page numbers given in the assignment was very helpful.

I can say with fair certainty that while this is a great program that has powerful tools, I do not see myself really using it after this class is over. It’s a shame too, since the program cost $350 (yay student discounts!). Perhaps if I had had some exposure to the program prior to this class or had a need for using it, I would feel differently. I am not a graphic designer, nor do I expect I will be in any serious capacity. That being said, I am grateful for the exposure to the program and who knows? Maybe it will help me in the future!

LeAnn