Exercise Four - Typographic Space / Grid

For this fourth and final exercise of the class I thought it was extremely straight forward and shouldn't be difficult at all. To bad I was wrong. I am pretty sure I did the entire thing backwards. What I was suppose to do for this project was to create grey boxes that emulated the same shade of grey that the body of text has created. What I did was make dark grey boxes on things that I thought stood out more and lighter grey boxes as things got less and less important.

This exercise taught me how important it is to read design directions closely and do what is actually asked of me. Although, I was lucky this time and what I did was at least somewhat close to what I was actually suppose to do and it wasn't that big of a problem. In the future, it will be. When dealing with bigger projects and actual work I will need to not mess up for multiple reasons. The first is the bigger the project the more time it is going to take to create and if I mess up and put a couple hours into it I am going to have to put in another couple hours in order to fix it. The second reason is maybe I won't get any time to fix it, what if I don't catch that I messed up in time. In that case I am either getting a bad great or even worse out of some work all because I wasn't paying close enough attention.

Even though I did the project a little backwards this was a great exercise in teaching me how important a grid actually is. How prominent it is in any publication I will need to create. When setting up a grid like this, by just using grey boxes in order to show where certain text will go a person can get an idea of what they are going to do to further there work. Also they are able to effectively show a client what they are thinking for a layout without all the components in it yet, and that client can get a pretty good idea of what it is going to look like.

This exercise also furthered my understanding with photoshop. Up until this exercise all I had done in photoshop was make an image black and white and make a white box. In this assignment I learned how to use guides to line up my grid system. I learned how to make layers so I can work on multiple plans so I can effectively spread out the work. Lastly I learned how to make different gradients of color in order to separate each box from one another.

Going into this exercise I didn't think I would get anything out of it, and thought it would be cut and dry. Yes, it was straight forward (at least I thought so at first) it also taught me a lot more than I thought that it would.