The Long and Winding Road (Week 29)

“The longest journey starts with a single step”

We are down to the final stretch in the school year. For Seniors you have SEVEN weeks and the rest of you EIGHT weeks to complete your final projects and portfolios. This is the time of year when many start to slack. Remember, in the Mac Lab participation is key to your grade. If you were smart, you would have made sure your participation was solid for the first half knowing that you might slack off.

New Media

We explored Illustrator during the 1st half of the semester and we are going to finish off with exploring Photoshop. They are the two most used programs in the Adobe Suite. Photoshop has a myriad of uses and can be overwhelming at first. Often times there are 5 ways to do the same thing. Even after using Photoshop for years you’d be lucky to know half of what it can do. We are going to explore some of the most important tools in Photoshop as it relates to design: layer masks, blending modes, adjustment layers, and more.

Be sure to follow the exercises on the Intro to Photoshop page under New Media Projects. Also, don’t forget that we design everything for high resolution print first (360dpi). High resolution stock photos are available under s-maclab-resources. Open Finder –> Click On ALL on the left of the Finder Window –> Scroll Down to s-maclab-resources —> Click on stock_photos. The best way to look at all of the pictures is to use Bridge. Once you go to the stock_photos folder, open Bridge –> Go to Computer (upper left) –> Click on st0ck_photos. You can then drag onto the Photoshop icon to open.

Multimedia Design

The current job market is the worst I have ever seen. Unemployment is at the highest since the Great Depression and your age group (18-24) has the highest rate at over 20%. That means that over 20% of the people 18-24 who actually want to work and are searching for a job, can’t get one. The most important thing to finding a job is have skills. In order for employers to know that you have skills that they need, you have to tell them. This is done using a Resume. A Resume highlights your skills and strengths and is used to sell you as a valuable asset to a company.

Last week you were to create a rough draft of your resume. Today (Monday) you are going to submit your rough draft to the shared rough draft folder and have a partner critique it. I suggest putting a fake e-mail, phone numer, and address for this so that others in the class don’t have access to your personal information.

Save your resume as rough_last name+first initial (ie rough_hayesr.doc) Using Open Office, open your partners Resume. Under the INSERT menu is INSERT COMMENT (or OPTION + COMMAND + N). Wherever your cursor is, Open Office will insert a comment. This is where you give suggestions on what can be improved. Once you go through and add comments, save the document and add review (ie rough_hayesr_review.doc). Don’t save as anything else. No CAPS. It isn’t that complicated.