The dreaded week 6 has finally shown itself. Why dreaded you ask? Because week 6 brings with it 2 deadlines for both my podcast assignment in Making Media and my presentation in Contemporary Approaches. Now that’s a lethal combo.

Given the heavy workload, one of the first things Prof. Felix told us this week was to be prepared to lose sleep. Luckily, since I had finished the second draft of my team’s podcast in week 5 and sent to Prof. Felix for his comments, the only thing left to do was to put on a few finishing touches. 

I re-recorded a few of my own bits in the podcast to make myself even more convincing as a host. I also tweaked the telephone effect applied to An’s voice to make it a little more pronounced and added some background ambiance to each sound bites by Vy and Nu. Once that was done, it was time to write a reflection of my podcast, which somehow was double the required word count, coming in at 1200 words(!). 

This week’s Making Media session was also the perfect time to begin thinking about the magazine assignment. After a few notes on the podcast, Prof. Felix quickly moved over to teaching us the basics of magazine layouts and Adobe InDesign, the industry standard for editorial design. With his instruction, I soon grasped the overall way InDesign worked and a few specific tools. Thankfully, this software was not much different from Illustrator and Photoshop, since it belonged to the same ecosystem.

I also learnt of the importance of planning out pages before actually working in InDesign. This was something that I had already unknowingly done by creating page mockups in Photoshop. Thus, based on those, I was able to quickly produce most pages in our magazine.

So that was it for Making Media in week 6. While I was relatively tired walking into class, I did come out with some useful knowledge on the process of creating a magazine, from page planning to actual execution in InDesign. Having put off learning this industry-standard tool for so long, I feel lucky to have a chance to be formally taught how to use it by someone with much experience.