Micah

Deadline #3
This spread was alright, but I think that there is still a lot of room for improvement. The best part about this spread is the story and the pictures. There is a large variety of photos, each showing a fun and unique part of the three festivals. They are good quality, and I especially like the up-close picture of Roshdyna. I felt that the story went well and it shows because I got a good grade on it. Johnathan Jackson designed the layout by himself and I did the story and captions on my own. I learned that all empty spaces have to be pushed toward the outside of the spread, and I can do this by rearranging the stories, captions, and pictures accordingly. Some risks I took were: I made three separate stories for each festival instead of one big body copy for all three and I took pictures of many different grade levels. Knowing what I know now, I would change a lot off what Johnathan did. His work brought our grades down and I think that I could make the spread much better. There is no horizontal eye line, the dominant photo doesn't cross the gutter, and there is a lot of space that hasn't been moved to the edges. I would fix all that and maybe give it a few finishing touches here and there.



Deadline #2
This was the worst of my four spreads. There is nothing that I particularlylike about it except the fact that the photos show many different students in various places, because we (Mahmoud and I) did not design the layout or write a story. During this spread I learned that when taking a picture of two or more people, you should always make them stand close together, because otherwise it is hard to edit. Since there was not much else to do, my partner and I took risks by taking photos from all over and in many ways. Knowing what I know now, I would change the fact that many of the pictures are stretched out or flattened, because they do not look as professional when out that way. I would make them proportional to real life.

In my opinion, this is the the best spread I have ever made. I was able to put a check in every single box on the scoring rubric, which I have not been able to do before. There are many things in this work that I like and that I am proud of, including the layout, story, quality of pictures, title, and color scheme. I think the dark blue background goes well with the orange writing and light blue arrows. Also, I find the title catchy and attention-drawing. Although a portion of the photos were not taken by me, their quality is good and they fit nicely into the spread. The story took me quite a bit of time to complete, but in the end, I was satisfied (there are three great quotes by three great athletes that keep the attention of the reader. For my layout, I had a dominant photo that wasn't centered but still crossed the gutter, and surrounding pictures that helped add to the effect. There is a horizontal eye line stretching across the page and, as a symbol of running, there is a roadrunner in the top right-hand corner. During this spread, I learned that you should always look at what you are doing from every direction, focusing not only on one step, but on all of them. This way, there will be no mistakes because there will be nothing that has been missed or skipped. I have done other spreads differently, by going one step at a time, and I sometimes had to go back and fix something which then changed my whole spread. My risks included the title, story, and layout. I wanted a title that would match the theme of the spread and be outgoing at the same time, and I finally found the right one after much debating. In the story, I didn't want the writing to be boring, so I wrote anything and everything that I thought would have even the slightest chance of capturing the reader. The layout was a very difficult decission for me, as I had not one clue about how I was going to do it. I sort of plopped the pictures onto the spread randomly, and it luckily turned out fine, except for an empty space in the top-right corner. But this was not a large threat, because I soon found a picture of a roadrunner that would fit perfectly into the space. I can only think of one thing that would improve this spread: putting three dots after the "CATCH ME", three dots before the "//IF YOU CAN!//", and adding two more exclamation points to the "//IF YOU CAN!".// The reason I did not do this is because I was not allowed to.



Deadline #1
I was actually surprised at how ell this spread turned out, despite the fact that it was turned in late. The mix between circular and rectangular photos gave it a nice touch; the pictures themselves were great examples of students' activities during flex and were also of top-ten quality. The story wasn't bad but it wasn't exactly a masterpiece either, and my later spreads are proof of that. I thought the title was fantastic and that there could be no better fit to the theme of the spread. An addition that brought the pages together is the green bar going across the top. It runs into and is the same color as the tabs located in the upper-outside corners of each page. Personally, I like the four square photos on top of eachother. This was my very first spread, so I learned many things, one of which is that every picture must be edited through Adobe Photoshop. I also learned that the 1-point stroke helps a lot, as do the arrows, and that the spread is useless unless all edited pictures are saved in the "edited" folder and all of the original photos are put into the "original" folder. Some risks were that we overlapped the two circles on the left, we overlapped the circle on the right with the rectangle beside it, I made such a grabbing title, we put the four little circle pictures at the bottom-right, and we made the bar at the top match the color of the tabs. Another risk was that Mark and I put ourselves in the spread. Now, I would re-edit the little circle photos because three of them are extremely pixelated, which means Mark must have done them wrong. I would also move the green bar a bit higher and rearrange the captions and the story on the left page.