My time management skills have been none existent so far, which scares me for the future, and I thought I had learnt all my lessons I needed to in 2nd Year... turns out I hadn't. The last 2 projects have opened my eyes to the importance of prioritising and knowing when to stop/start.
But, more on this later.. as I said.. I need to catch up.. so...
Jumping back to the start of the year saw the 7x7 collaboration project, between ourselves at Stockport and the creative writers from MMU, come to a close with all of our finished illustrations being compiled into a book which was sold on the night of the event. We'd all pretty much finished this work before the start of 3rd year, but when it came time to printing, a lot of editing/tweaking was needed. It was agreed that we should try something different this year and make the book a little more appealing - design wise - and enlisted the help of Olivia and Mike from the 3rd year Graphics course. Through a mix of their ideas and our own, we came up with having a square format to the book and limiting the colours due to printing cost... none of us knew just how awkward this was going to be when we settled on it.
Long story short... I'm not bragging that I am amazing at using photoshop, but basically... no one else understood how to firstly convert their artwork into only 2 colours, or how to set it up ready for printing (after Rick kindly explained the process). It ended up with the majority of people editing their artwork to so that it appeared to be in 2 colours (blue and black with the white being the colour of the paper beneath) and some managed to crop their work to the new format sizes given. But in the end I was having to remake everybody's artwork... colouring photos to 2 colours, eliminating white from the images, separating blue and black onto different layers, cropping to size, making the spot illustrations into circles and then passing this on to Olivia and Mike, as well as editing a few other images used in the book in the same manner. Now, I'm not having a go at anybody here, as I understand some people just don't know how to use photoshop, but I pretty much did the entire job for at least 3 peoples artwork, who otherwise would've missed the deadline and not gotten printed.
I'm actually happy with the outcome of the book on the most part...
I am one of these people (like the character, Dr.Cox, from Scrubs) who likes to complain about having to do peoples work for them, that they can't do it for themselves.. but secretly I enjoy feeling like I am useful for something and that people come to me because they trust me.. but NOT because they are lazy and just dont care!
Anyway, things got sorted... Olivia and Mike did an outstanding job on the book design and everything went to plan.. except when the printers got a hold of it... We had done everything we possibly could to set it up so there was no mishaps when it came to printing.. yet somehow... out of the 125 books we ordered.. we firstly only received 115-120 of them, approximately 70 of them were legible/sellable but the rest had missing pages or illustrations. Some pages were duplicated, others were printed correctly and about 20 books were a complete right-off.... so... all in all this was a successful real life learning curve. We understand that problems can happen during the process and we did everything we could to make sure that it didnt go wrong on our part... but it just felt like a bit of a kick in the teeth, right at the last hurdle...
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