#approach1

So much got done this weekend. Just today, I worked on Capstone from 10am to 6pm straight. I conducted two interviews, scheduled another interview, had an interviewee make a 10pm appointment for tonight to get interviewed and then not contact me at said time (the current time is 11:44pm), wrote most of my first person point of view body copy. I did photo treatments for both interviews and inserts, made some pacing-centric page layout changes, backed up my computer three times and even had to calculate a couple of percentages for survey statistics. I went to the gym because my eyeballs were going to fall out of my head if I kept working through the 6-7:30pm time slot. I’m very tired and it feels like I didn’t do homework for any of my other classes this weekend. Hmmm.

Things I still need to do (this is more of a personal checklist than a blog post at this point):

-Finish writing body copy (including personal anecdotes) (not that much left)

-Insert page numbers once all the pages have stopped being shuffled because of indecisiveness and pacing issues

-Interview two people and drop the copy into its placeholder spots

-Interview myself ahhahahha

-Finagle some potential photo treatments for the reoccurring images of texting hands, which are currently placeholders

-Do the InDesign to Illustrator to Photoshop type treatments for my anecdote inserts, not that this takes a lot of time or anything

-Decide what kind of photo will take up the full bleed spreads: hands texting? Seems repetitive. Better option is glitched faces of other guys I’ve been involved with, kind of like the spreads with the inserts, except sans insert

-Spellcheck, I guess

-Come up with a witty title

-Print, trim, bind and laugh before, during and after aforementioned processes

-Go to sleep for 5 minutes and then study for Thursday’s quiz

😊😊😊😊😊

This has not been the productive weekend it should have been, because I hit a sort of huge roadblock.

My first draft was originally a specific set of dimensions that were too big for a spread to fit on a tabloid piece of paper. To save time and realistically print, cut and bind my first draft, I just scaled the spreads down to 80% so they would fit on tabloids. Then I cut and bound my book accordion style. That being said, I really like the size it was--roughly 7.5in by 9.25 in.

In order for me to give my document to a professional printer at the end of all this, I shouldn’t be giving them a PDF, I should be showing up with an InDesign document that is to scale, I think.

So what I spent this entire weekend doing was creating a NEW 150 page version of my book, with many adjustments. I had to change all of my paragraph styles to get the body copy, images and compositions to fit in this new dimension. I’m extremely frustrated because this weekend could have been used to write more content or further curating my images and text but instead this is what I had to do to move forward.

OUTLINE

Last week I created an initial content outline for my book. It took an incredibly long time to figure out which sources would fit best under which categories. I think this was a very helpful task to moving my whole project forward because it really makes me realize where the gaps are, and what tasks still need to be accomplished.

My advisor and I had a really constructive discussion about clarifying the "point” of my capstone, and forcing myself to ask what I “bring” to the table as a designer. What makes this project differ from a research paper?

Something else we discussed was the clarification of key terms I used when looking at my outline. Smartphone, ghosting, messaging, dating. These terms are of the utmost importance when it comes to understanding my project. I don’t know, necessarily, if I need to create a glossary, considering my target audience, 18-24 year-old millennials, would all be familiar with these terms. That being said, similarly to the evasive and unclear etiquette rules we “follow” when messaging, there are vague and morphing definitions for some of these key terms. That might be important to reiterate. That even the terminology our culture is using isn’t clear cut, and perhaps derives from our increasing indecisiveness when it comes to intimacy.

ANECDOTES

My advisor recommended incorporating more of my own voice into the book. This kind of goes back to the question of what makes this different from a research paper. While I originally intended to include snippets of my own personal experience with messaging+intimacy, my advisor suggested making more of the book self-generated. She recommended using my own anecdotes instead of relying so heavily on those in Aziz Ansari’s book, Modern Romance. The prospect was both exciting and terrifying to me--divulging my own romantic history out for everyone to read and sift through. This wouldn’t be the first project I’ve put myself out there for, so at least I’m somewhat used to it.