California's Dark

I am now sitting in the kitchen of my parents house, a mere 43 hours since I was here last. Since I left I have turned in one take home final and designed a front page of a newspaper for another final. I am truly happy to be done with school, I finished today, but there is something strange about having free time. I just got home and I am already bored. I wish I brought home my room mates Playstation two so I could play guitar hero or something. Hell, I would even play the original Tony Hawk game if it were the only thing available.

I keep forgetting to explain the titles of my posts. So I will go back ans explain the last couple ones in case people were confused or think I was making up my own. Back when I wrote, "Happiness is a well organized iTunes," I was listening to The Beatles' White Album which was created in 1968, which has the song on it "Happiness is a warm gun." I was just busy making my itunes all nice and organized for the possible arrival of my iphone.

The post above that is titles, "Punch the keys for god's sake." This post was the first post that I had done in a while because of the hectic schedule the magazine forced myself and others to be ruled by. The title comes from the infamous website, Your the man now dog, (www.ytmnd.com) where Sean Connerey's quotes have been immortalized. This post was sparked by a discussion my friends and I had about using the Ctrl+Z command in InDesign (undo) in real life. It's a laugher to us anyway.

The next post up titled "Sing till your lungs give out" was really made by me and just came out of my reaction to the vocals of the lead singer in Paramore. She just hits all the notes and impressed me. Read the review if you want to know more.

And the post before this one's title called "When you were young" comes from The Killers' 2006 album Sam's Town. It's also on Guitar hero 3, but I kept hearing it at the wedding and it sparked my disgruntled comments about my relatives.

I understand that is post is a bunch of referrals to old posts, but maybe if people commented there would be more to discuss. I am looking forward to this winter break and I think I am going to start it now with a nice coma. Oh, before I forget, I am a huge fan of Rage Against the Machine, so I was happy to see that Tom Morello made a new album with his band the Nightwatchman. If you like Tom's stuff I would suggest picking up a copy of the album called, "One man revolution." The title of this blog is from the first track on that album and I am listening to it right now. So far I like all the songs I have heard.

Punch the Keys for God's Sake

Another awesome title courtesy of Sean Connery and YTMND.
My friends and I who have been working on the magazine reached a new level of procrastination. You know you have been working on something too long when you start to make jokes about the program applications that you are working with being part of real life.

In a discussion that we were having, we joked about how InDesign's Ctrl+Z command is one of the most glorious inventions. Not only that, but how it would be awesome if you could Ctrl+Z something in a real life situation. The immediate quick fix I thought of was for when that pick-up line fail miserably. Ctrl+Z that baby and poof, your back to where you were before you mentioned the line to try another one in your repituare. But it would have other applications as well.

Another example that comes to mind is like in the movie "Click" where is boss is being a jerk and he just pauses time, hits him across the face and then rewinds. Well I think of it like that, but you could hit him in the face and then see the reaction THEN Ctrl+Z and laugh about it later. But yes, the possibilities are endless with what you could Ctrl-Z. As a designer it makes me laugh at the possible applications of programs in real life.

Cut and paste? Duplicate? Transform? Rotate? The whole effects drop menu? I mean, I know that only Adobe users know what I am talking about, but at least we thought it was funny.

What I've Done

Today in class I finished my editor's page, which is for my newspaper/magazine design class that I am taking with professional magazine aficionado, Tim Mitchell. He is spearheading the class now that we have entered the magazine portion of the material.

For our first assignment he wanted us to re-produce an editor's page from a magazine we like to read. I had Wired, Motor Trend and Men's Health and the only one with a distinguishable editor's page was Men's Health. So I opened to page 28 to start diagnosing the project that I would have to undertake. The first words out of my mouth were, "Oh shit!" For such a tabloid magazine, I was surprised at the amount of design that went into their pages. My understanding of InDesign and Photoshop is limited and there were some things I was going to need help with. One of those things as you will see in my design were the top header bar and the bottom page and label bar. They took the longest amount of time to do.

Here is my re-production of the Men's Health editor's page. I don't know if the real one is online, but I forgot to scan the real one today so you could see what it looks like. Oh yeah, thanks to Andrew and Megan for helping me get InDesign figured out.
So once again, I ask you for your comments. I spent a total of six hours on this, trying to get it right. The images and text are purely of the placeholder variety. Literally, seriously.