Blog Post 3

8-10-10
On my last posts, I was wondering when I would get the chance to start learning the ins and outs of learning how to create a yearbook. Not long after that, work on the 2010 yearbook finally began.
I was busy helping Mrs. Froke with an environmental science project over the summer, though, and that took up my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Most of those days I went up to work on the yearbook after I was done with work. I also came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I spent a lot of time in school this summer. Overall, we worked on the yearbook July 5th- August 6th, working five days a week. When I say we, I mean the staff: Marissa Jung, Sierra Trower, Morgan Trower, Shelby Weston, Christina Maher, Ashley Krogstad, and myself. And lets not forget Mrs. Rahn!
I was gone the day they went over how to set up the general layouts of the pages, so that's something I'll need to learn. All these days of working, I was learning how to use the InDesign program. Then Mrs. Rahn told me I won't be using that program for my project anyway! Apparently, there is an easier way of doing the yearbook on the Josten's website, where I could access it from home. Sweet! That'll work for me.
So this is how the yearbook creation went: Everyone had about the same number of articles to write. I had about five. This was before some people failed to finish theirs, however, and Marissa and I spent a lot of time finishing up articles. I also did a lot of the captions, and since we were scrambling to get the yearbook done before the next school year started, it was basically anyone working on anything that wasn't done. I ended up being stuck finishing the golf article, and that took quite a while. That's not counting my first attempt at working on the track story (the original draft contained a paragraph on the benefits of being in track, like wearing sweatpants. It wasn't pretty.) After that I passed that article on to Marissa and found work elsewhere.
Suffice it to say that writing articles was about my least favorite part of the yearbook. It was still fun and all, just not my favorite. Hopefully, my staff will help me out on those next year.
The best part of making the yearbook was proof-reading. That was my job. I basically had to read every page of the yearbook and circle all the mistakes (on the printed pages). Then I had to go in and access the page in InDesign and correct each mistake. A lot of the time, I was asking Mrs. Rahn, "Does this have to be capitalized? Doesn't a comma go here?" and stuff like thatProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

And then of course there was the occasional, " 'InDesign unexpectedly quit?!' What the heck?!" So if there's any uncorrected typos, that's probably my fault.
I also got to design and pick photos for the Colophon page. That was really fun, because I chose a bunch of funny pictures of the staff working over the summer.
I feel like working on the yearbook this summer really helped me out. I got a good idea of writing articles, fine-tuning captions, making sure the same picture doesn't appear twice, lining up text boxes, making sure the font size is correct, and all sorts of other fun details along that line. It was definitely good practice.