Since we’ll be learning about InDesign this semester, I think that I will take the time about my experience in learning this new program technology at a young age.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I was a part of the journalism academy at my high school. One of the technology programs that we had to learn to be desirable in the industry was InDesign. I remember from previous experience of what my teacher showed me was simple, clean and very useful if we ever decided to be a part of the newspaper or yearbook staff. Our first assignment was to design a simple advertisement about ourselves on one simple sheet on 8.5 x 11. I remember putting a picture of myself on the assignment and laying out some of the activities I like to do and the goal I wanted to do when I grew up, which was obviously, a journalist. After several days of trying to perfect the project, I was done and my teacher praised me and gave me suggestions on how to make it even better, if I wanted to use it for my capstone project during my senior. From there, I decided to join the newspaper staff and things went along a bumpy ride from there.
In my junior year, I started as a staff member for my high school’s newspaper staff. Not only comes with new responsibilities, but becoming more in tune with InDesign and laying out stories on pages to produce an actual newspaper. The training that I received to do layout on InDesign was very confusing and hard to understand. I’m very much better in doing stuff hands on.
A month after school started, it was time for us to put together the first issue. I was one of three people getting the stories onto the InDesign layout page. It took a very long time for me to put it on the pages because I had to make sure the dimensions were aligned and sized proportionally correct. After an hour of getting things in place, I finally had the hang of it. When everything was laid out, it was sent to our advisor for a final look over before heading to the printers. Our teacher told us that everyone did a great job in putting together the first issue.
Ever since then, I didn’t feel a lot of pressure in terms of putting together pages for a newspaper or a yearbook. Over 10 years later in grad school, now I will have to re-learn InDesign and make note of huge changes that have been added to the program and taking baby steps while doing the best for these projects for digital rhetoric.