Editing & Publishing Project Revamped

So in my editing and publishing class this semester we learned a lot about Adobe InDesign and worked closely with the program for a major project we had to do. I thought this kind of went hand in hand with the material we have covered in this class. At the end of every project, we did a reflection just about the overall project: what worked well, what didn't, what our rhetorical choices were as far as editing and the design principle in this case, etc. Here's my reflection:

            Project 3 was by far the most involved project yet. There were a lot of elements! Honestly, I probably enjoyed this project the most (likely because I made myself stay on track and work on it little by little so I could finish by the deadline). I treated this project most like a “real life” project compared to the other two. I think that was because I was more used to the format of copyediting. The edits weren’t difficult (although they typically aren’t too involved as far as grammatical/spelling errors go) because there weren’t many to do! It was kind of hard figuratively “biting my tongue” when it came to things I wanted to “fix” and it was pretty tedious having to write down ALL the irregularities since sometimes there were so many. Otherwise, that part of the project was pretty breezy. We got to throw in an extra stressful (but rewarding) element into the mix as well with InDesign. I was very frustrated with that at one point because it’s very difficult to be thrown into a program kind of blindly. We didn’t get to cover much in class when the program was introduced so I felt like I was sort of thrown to the wolves in a sense. I figured it out, of course, so it wasn’t terrible in the end and I’m pretty proud of how our Table of Contents turned out! As far as that goes, there were some design principles that I sort of went against the grain in choosing. Here’s why:

•           We chose to keep stand-out text a blue color (although we did change it from the turquoise to more of a readable blue and I deleted the lines under the author’s/artist’s name so it wouldn’t be mistaken for a link) because we felt that we really liked the contrast and interest that a different color provided.
•       I kept the quotes from the prose as they were in my very first design edit. They aren’t all the beginning sentence of each piece BUT they were all chosen to create intrigue and the first sentences of these particular fiction stories weren’t always very attention-grabbing. Also, the volume that we wanted to emulate (Tin House) only used the first sentence in two cases; all the others in the fiction section of the contents were pulled from the middle of the stories. Furthermore, some of the first sentences in descant’s fiction section droned on and on and were not going to work aesthetically with the material on the contents page.
•        Lastly, I chose to keep the page numbers italicized because in the fiction section the quotes pulled from the text are all italicized to differentiate them from the actual titles, so visually it looked better to keep the following text (the page numbers) homogeneous and unvarying. Although the Fiction section is the only one with italics in the text, I kept the italicized page numbers throughout the contents to remain consistent. (And again, Tin House’s contents utilized this same principle.)

As you can see, there were several things that worked well and a lot of stress as far as InDesign goes. This program is used in SO many publishing companies and if you want to go into copyediting (which usually doesn't entail a whole lot of design elements), you should be familiar with this program just to say you have it under your belt (anything to help you stand out in the industry!) My professor did respond to my reflection and she said a lot of people tend to feel the same level of stress and I was not alone. But once you learn it, it's actually fun! Try it out if you're feeling artsy and inventive.