Amidst the turbulence of knowledge we receive every week, week 9 of Making Media stood out as a more practical session that was less about hearing and more about doing. 

After being greeted by Prof. Felix, the class settled down and began their work session. For those who needed assistance with InDesign, Prof. Felix did provide some more tutoring on a few tools and functions, as well as a way to bring images edited in Photoshop into InDesign and make live edits. Meanwhile, I joined my team in discussing some layout choices for our magazine. Specifically, An proposed that we add a dark green color to our palette of white, black and yellow to use green as an accent color for our titles and pages. 

After nearly 30 minutes of experimenting, we called upon our lecturer to decide whether green was right for our magazine. We showed him two versions of the magazine, with and without green. The feedback given was rather interesting to hear.

Prof. Felix told us that he preferred the original palette, saying that we did not need to explicitly use green to show ‘going green’. This was because yellow was a more striking color that could draw in more attention and yellow also represented sunlight and warmth, something that would be closely connected to plants in nature.

I found this explanation particularly intriguing, as it is a way to justify not being too direct in the way we used color, as well as to be very purposeful when we make a creative decision. In this case, we chose to stick to the black-white-yellow palette to maintain a simplistic and consistent identity for our magazine and to make it stand out on the shelf (should we ever publish it!). 

Another very exciting thing that happened in week 9 was the release of the marks for our first two assignments. After all these weeks of waiting, we were finally made known of the fruits of our work. And even better, both our podcast and presentation got an HD! 

I would be lying if I said I did not let out a little scream of joy upon receiving my first two HDs. Hopefully, these won’t be the only HDs I get this semester. But to make that a reality, I’ll first need to put in some serious work this week.