We made a magazine!

Here's the thing about CreComm. When you have a big assignment, you don't sleep, you don't eat, and you shed tears. You live and breathe CreComm. You go to school for 8 a.m. and you don't come home until they kick you out at midnight. You hate life and resent schoolwork so much. But then, all of a sudden everything comes together, and it all suddenly feels worth it.

The past three months, I have been working on creating a magazine from start to finish with three of my classmates, Stacia Franz, James Hawboldt, and Christa Campbell. We chose the concept, wrote all the content, created all the advertisements, and designed and laid out the whole magazine - quite a process, especially for people with little design experience.

I have resented this project for three months. It got off to a frustrating start. We had to come up with a concept and how it would hang together - how it would be marketed, ideas for editorial content, color schemes, target markets, etc. - in the first week. And I had just met my group members.

Creating our feature articles was frustrating - it required a lot of research and rewrites - but that turned out to be the easy part.

InDesign was my worst enemy. I have trouble with design - I don't know what colors go together well, how to lay things out in an aesthetically-pleasing manner, and when I had a vision, I didn't know how to transfer it onto the page. And close-cutting a photo in Photoshop took hours sometimes.

Not to mention keeping all of our files (I think we have about 50) organized and with the document. Ugh.

But today, we got our first proof of Wait - a magazine for servers, by servers - from the printers. A physical manifestation of all of the tears, sweat, stress, and fatigue we've experienced the past few months. We were all giddy. (OK, maybe partly because we're way overtired and jittery from all the caffeine we've consumed this week.

We have a little bit of tweaking and proofreading to do, but I'm really proud of all four of us, and seeing the printed copy really has made it all worth it. We have a great portfolio piece we can be really proud of - something we never would have thought we could do when we started this program.

So thank you program. Even though most days I resent you, days like this, when I reflect on the skills I have learned and how far I have come in such a short time, I'm so thankful and proud to be in the program.

Stay tuned for some clips from Wait magazine, once the final copy is done.