On Monday, the magazine photo & graphic design project I was working on all week was due for our class critique.

I got to school a few hours early to print out my pages, but my photos came out REALLY DARK. You could barely see anything in them, which meant that the structure of the entire page pretty much vanished – you couldn’t make out that the rest of the elements on the page were in alignment with key points in the photos. (Many others had the same problem. Bonus lesson learned: things come out darker in print. Err on the side of being too light. Always test on the actual printer you’re using.)

I still had a couple of hours before our critique began and I had to appear in the room, so I decided to try and lighten the photos in our school’s computer lab and then reprint. I was unsure about how it would go because I hadn’t brought the original photo files, so I was counting on being able to extract the pictures from my Adobe Illustrator file.

However, I started having problems from the beginning – I couldn’t open my pdf OR the original illustrator file without all of the text on my pages being messed up, because the computer didn’t have the fonts. Something was blocking me from installing the fonts on the PC, and while I was able to install them on the Mac, it still wasn’t reading them, so when I opened the files my carefully sculpted text just went BLAH.

After bashing my head on it for about 40 minutes I resigned myself to just handing in my prints the way they were and possibly failing the assignment. I reminded myself that, really, it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. Even if I failed the WHOLE COURSE, I don’t think it would affect my life all that much.

I just needed to remember that there is no need to worry. There’s no point in wallowing in negative emotions. What will happen will happen. Let it go.

And then I figured out the solution.

I tried opening the pdf in Photoshop and it miraculously converted all of my paragraphs to pixels and they were perfect. And I could edit the images without having to take them out, adjust, and plunk them back into the pages. I was done within about 5 minutes.

It turned out to be a BETTER way to do it than what I was even attempting to do before!

The more you try to pound at one specific outcome, the more things will push against you. Just let it go and the solution will appear! The trick is to not become attached to a specific way of how things MUST happen.

Oh, and my instructor said that my photos may have been the most beautiful ones of the entire day (out of about 60 projects that he had seen so far). And two teams asked me to join them afterwards. HOORAY. I hope things will continue to flow with this class.

Posted on January 26th, 2011
Filed under: Creating, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: graphic design, lesson learned, letting go, school

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