Monitoring week 6 - Finishing off

This week in my schedule I allowed lots of contingency time to be finishing off my magazine pages development on InDesign, which proved necessary as I was still working on my Contents page on Tuesday, and I also allowed plenty of time to check over all my final products, and to export them and upload them onto moodle to be marked. Luckily, although there have been setbacks throughout the production I tackled them quickly and efficiently so this week I was right on target to where I need to be in my schedule. I used my time wisely to check over my products, make little adjustments and correct things like spelling mistakes or other faults, and the extra time I allowed for exporting and uploading my product came in particularly handy as I had a few problems here. I had problems exporting a few of my documents properly for a number of reasons. The first was my front cover which I made on photoshop which when I exported as a JPEG came out blurry, despite having use high definition images, I soon found the problem which was that I had created it on a low resolution document, although of the correct size, which explained why even the text was blurry, having fixed this I had to make a few amendments to the document because of the new resolution, which didn't take too much time, but it all adds up. The second problem that I had was that some of the objects imported into my InDesign pages that had been created on Photoshop such as the common paint splatters I have featured throughout my magazine came out blurry when I exported the InDesign documents as JPEGs. I had overseen this before because it is common for images to look blurry in InDesign so I didn't realise there was a problem. I then found it was because the orignal photoshop files were too small and of too low a resolution. I then created new identical ones of a more appropriate size and resolution and replaced the objects before exporting again successfully. Having to re-do these did not hinder the overall outcome but it did take time. Finally another problem was that I hadn't set up one of my InDesign pages correctly, with it 5mm too short in height and so I had to change this to match the rest and then re-arrange and resize all the objects on the page appropriately to fit the new proportions, again which was time consuming. Even following these problems when I came to put all the exported JPEGs of pages onto one big InDesign document, I had to work out how to do it because unlike most peoples' products, I had three triple page spreads not doubles which made them awkward to fit onto InDesign pages, having to have the third page of each article on a double page template, with the other page left blank, so this part was quite time consuming. However I predicted that this stage of production would take a lot longer than I would expect and that various problems would crop up which is why I allowed a lot of time for it and additionally lots of contingency time.