Continuing on from our previous In Design session, we looked at some of the different features that the programme can offer in terms of creating something that could be more interactive. Initially, I found this a struggle to get my head around, as this required a lot of trial and error originally, but once I got the hang of it it seemed simple enough to do.
Our first section of the session allowed us to go back and re-do what we've previously learned. This meant that we had to adjust preferences for our document, learn about paragraph styles, which enables us to keep the same text preferences and paragraph preferences for each font, making it far easier to switch between two styles in comparison to other Adobe Software.
We had to re-create one of the album covers selected from a PDF, I chose "Pervasive Percussion" as it seemed the easiest to do and the buttons were easy to design. For the workshop, I learned how to use colour swatches to save current pieces of colour I'd previously selected making it much easier to keep to a colour scheme, and how to select a colour from the image and not just from the hex code sheet.
Using the align palette, which is used to align objects spaced around each other properly, I was able to match the circles up precisely to the album cover behind it, making sure the space was an even a mount of pixels between each other. This tool would be particularly helpful for a lot of objects that needed grouping together or anything that required precise measurements.
Using the rectangle tool, we inserted "Swing of Change" - an animation - into the document. Although seemingly simple enough, this was a bit difficult as the individual video and frame move separately, so it was difficult to align without breaking this on the PDF. We were also able to modify the video so that it was interactive inside the PDF, the user could pause the video or adjust the volume.
The final thing in the session was to save this as a PDF and import it to check for any errors. I had to do this several times because I wanted to perfect the alignment of the text. Using the buttons to navigate around the page spread was quite a simple process, the "text" acted as a way of navigating around, by making the button a link to the text - not the page.
Although this entire session was quite a struggle for me to keep up with, the satisfaction of finishing this and actually producing something that was successful was ideal at showing me that I can learn In Design, despite at the beginning really struggling with it. Although it's not perfect I'm quite proud of how the PDF turned out.
