The art of laying out a magazine

Laying out a magazine is a tedious process. I’m sitting next to my three partners as we attempt to pull an all-nighter (we’ll see how far into it we get). They’re much more adept in the ways of inDesign and Photoshop than I am, so as they organize the page layouts and artwork I’m on blog duty.

The one thing I can do, however, is observe. And through my observations I have seen Meghan battle font sizes, hyphenation and line spacing as she expertly places all of our articles into an inDesign layout. And Michelle is at the end of the row, cursing Photoshop because it won’t let her place an arrow where she wants it on the picture. Luke is to my right. He had been editing a story. Then he helped solve Michelle’s arrow issue, and now he’s preparing our cover photo.

Now Meghan’s got the inDesign handbook out and is flipping pages to find the one dedicated to wrap sidebars. Not quite what one imagines when plans are made to lay out a magazine. Where’s the fun? The creativity? The enjoyment? Well, it’s there if you look hard enough.

We got to bring in a real goat brain earlier for our cover shoot. That was fun, placing it on the anchor desk in the news room for pictures with Katie, who happens to be Meghan’s sister and our cover model. Before that, Michelle and I had to try and fasten both halves of the brain together by hand with a paper clip and a staple.

The people in the computer lab are a lot of fun to be around, and help keep each other laughing through this long day.

Pizza and lasagna and juice was a very welcome dinner.

Meghan just mentioned that this experience has brought us closer together.

Michelle is drinking Meghan’s bubble water. Luke’s outside for a quick smoke. Meghan’s still fighting the good fight against line spacing and font sizes. And I’m blogging.

This is a good team.

Teaching Babies Sign Language

More and more parents are teaching their babies sign language to better understand their child’s needs in the baby’s early development stage. Some parents are saying that they are teaching their children sign language to encourage communication and understanding between parent and child.

Simple words such as ‘milk’ and ‘more’ give a child a voice as early as seven months old.

Teaching babies sign language simply as an early communication tool has become more common over the years.

But does this hold back a child’s ability to actually learn to talk? Will this early learning tool make the baby smarter?

Climbing up the walls

A great deal of what I see as important in blogging – as part of this project – is to reveal a little bit of the process that goes into the project. It’s a learning experience first and foremost and I know many of the people involved have struggled to some extent during the this process. As have I. Truthfully, I feel at times that it’s a struggle I’m not capable of overcoming.

I entered into this magazine project with an idealist mind, which is a good thing for sure, but I worry along the way the stress of it has eaten away too much of me. Producing these stories along with writing for both print and online papers as well as producing television material is just too much, especially for someone who also needs to work at least a couple days a week in order to make rent. My concern is that because of this stress I’ve lost focus and haven’t been performing to the extent I would like to be. I feel my work has suffered and that upsets me. I’m doing this to improve, I’m doing this so I can put something into my portfolio I can be proud of and when I pass that portfolio along to people their jaw drops because it’s so damn good. So if I’m not improving and I’m not proud then why am I doing it?

Home on the (free) Range

With article number two finally out of my hands, I’ve become weary of the trend I’ve been following in story choices. As a group we chose to focus on learning over education because we wanted to take a more original angle on the subject. Ultimately they are two sides of the same coing, but while education is about distributing knowledge – learning is about receiving it.

How to be a polygot

I’m having some trouble with my languages story. It was an idea that just kind of presented itself in our very first editorial meeting and I jumped on it.

I love languages! I like word origins and idioms and I like how if you only know one word in another language, it’s probably “shit.”

I don’t know why finding these sources is so hard, doesn’t everybody want to talk about talking?

Bribing our youth for the better

I found this story on boing boing ages ago, but it was so sweet and so wonderful I never forgot about it.

Basically it’s a story about a kid and his video games. He wanted to play Call of Duty, an extremely elaborate Second World War game that is not without its own controversy. Now the father is not an unreasonable man and wanted his son to be able to enjoy all the things that boys like to do. Truthfully, the father is extremely reasonable and clever and found a wonderful way to turn his sons quest to fight Nazis into a great opportunity to learn.

I don’t want to spoil the ending. Read On

Just Google It

I spent weeks doing research on how video games affect cognitive development and how they can be utilized in education. I contacted professors at U of T blindly as well as experts across the United States. I’ve fired of dozens and dozens of emails. These all brought fruitful results for the most part, but it occurred to me on Thursday that I’d never actually done an internet search on the subject at all. I had used my own brain to try and come up with what I thought were strong, well suited sources rather than utilizing the collective power of google and billions of page hits. So, I did. I searched ‘video games education’ and the fist hit was The Education Arcade – an MIT initiative that “focus[es] both on the learning that naturally occurs in popular commercial games, and on the design of games that more vigorously address the educational needs of players.” Basically EXACTLY the focus of my article.

It it is by far the greatest asset to my story and I nearly missed it because of an oversight.

So. Lesson learned. Always google first, always. Its smarter than you are.