Michael Boren - Honest to Blog

Well GRA 217 has taken up more time for me than any other class at SU so far. I'm sure that won't last too long, but graphics was definitely a challenge for me. As a newspaper major, I sometimes struggled coming up with designs. However, I learned that I can still come up with pretty creative designs. Luckily, I had used InDesign before in high school, so getting used to that again wasn't that bad. Illustrator was very similar to InDesign, so I didn't have too much trouble with that either. I'm not going to lie, I bugged the hell out of the lab help people during these projects. They probably just expect to see me by now. So yeah, there were a lot of times when I definitely struggled with these projects. I had to restart my magazine project because I didn't have enough photos, so that was pretty stressful. But when I look back on the projects, it's pretty cool to see what I actually did.

Graphics was something I was pretty worried about before I took the class. I knew it would be extremely time consuming, and that has proven to be true. I basically live in the Newhouse computer labs now (at least they're open 24 hours). The class, however, really allowed me to work on my resume and produce something that wasn't just your typical resume. That was very important since I applied to a bunch of internships for the summer. One of the things that bugged me most about the projects was the marked-up copies. They really just take forever, especially when we do projects in which there's more than one page. And on the magazine project, I spent a lot of time pressing down really hard on the paper with a red pen so it would show up on the black background. But I think Professor Taylor has been very helpful. I've gone to her for just about every project. Overall, I've learned a lot from the class, just at the cost of a lot of sleep time. But that's college in a nutshell for you.