Communications

To be able to communicate your idea visually, you need to be able to engage your reader and make them want to read your project and find out more.  To to do this you need to make it visually appearing.  A good way to help do this, the word CRAP helps when you are designing.
Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity

By following these guide lines, you should be able to create a visually appearing document.
Another way to keep a person reading your document is to create a hook which wants them to read more and find out what it is about.  It could be anything, such as a big title which doesn't tell you all the information, or a large image.

The last tip is to create a feature such as a 'wall' to keep the readers eye in the document.  This is usually a visual element in the right side at the bottom because readers eyes will start in the top left and follow the document down to the bottom right corner.  It can be anything from a picture to text, just anything which makes the readers eye stop instead of wandering off the page.
For example, this picture.  Images on the right keep your eye on the document for longer.

Copyright

When you are making a project which requires others peoples work, such as images, you need to be careful to make sure that whatever photo you use is not copyrighted.
In most places, such as google and flikr, which have photo's which you can use, if you look in 'advanced settings' you can change the settings so you are only looking up photos which you can use.  Depending on how you are going to use the photo, different photos will be at your disposal.  
Work will generally be put under these categories:

• Copyrighted - You can not use the work at all unless it is invalid because it has been over 50 years since it was made.
• Attribution - You are aloud to change, display, distribute, pretty much anything, but you must give the artist credit for their work.
• Noncommercial - This is the same as attribution, but you are not aloud to sell, or make money from it.
• No derivative works - You can use the photo for your intended purpose, but you can not change it in any way.
• Share alike - You can use their work, but it must have the same licence as they have on their work.   

So chose the category which best suits what you want to use it for.  

If you break a licence, the person who made the work will be able to sue you.

Indesign

Layers

One of InDesign features is it's layers.  On the right side panel you will see the layers (the red box).

Parts of the document (e.g. picture, text, everything!) can be put in layers.  These layers can then be arranged from on top of the document to the bottom.  It is also useful to help select the part of the document you want when you have a complicated page.  

Character and Paragraph Styles

Another feature in 'Indesign' is the character and paragraph styles(shown in red).  

These are used to create and save either a character style or paragraph style which can then be easily used somewhere else in your document.  Character styles can include things like font, size, colour and alignment.  A paragraph style will include things like line spacing and bullet points as well as the things in character styles.  They can be based on character styles.  

Naming

It is important that the styles are named appropriately so you can easily refer back to them and see where they were used.  This is also the same for things like swatches.  When you make your own swatch, you need to name it according to what it is being used for, not just the default setting.  

Colour Types

When making a document, the colour and image file types used depend on what the document is being made for.  CMYK should be used for printing because those are to colour that the printer will use to print it.  RGB should be used for things such as web pages because that will give you the best colour.  Refer to previous blog for colour types to be used.  

Shortcuts

Shift, W = Presentation view

Shift, + = Zoom in

Shift, - = Zoom out

Ctrl, R = Rulers on/off

Shift, F11 = Character styles

F11 = Paragraph styles

InDesign vs Word

Layers

One of InDesign features is it's layers.  On the right side panel you will see the layers (the red box).

The oparts of the document (e.g. picture, text, everything!) can be put in layers.  These layers can then be arranged from on top of the document to the bottom.  It is also useful to help select the part of the document you want when you have a complicated page.  Word does not have this feature.

User Friendly

Word is a more self explanatory and user friendly than InDesign.  At the top of the program in the tool bar, are lots of basic options.  These are alot easier to apply to the document than in InDesign. 

 

Copyright

Copyright is a concept which alows the person who created the work to have exclusive rights to it.  Copyright laws allow the holder to have the right to control who is alowed to use their work and what for.  The holder can sell and licence this right.  If you work for someone, then they have bought the right to your work in advance.  You do not need to register or give any notice, as soon as your work is in tangible form it will be copyrighted.  The copyright will last for 50 years after the work is made. 

A brief introduction to copyright can be found at: http://www.templetons.com/brad/copyright.html accessed 7/2/12

Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.

Creative Commons have different licences which people can use to protect their work. They are:

• Attribution - Anyone can use your work but they must give you credit for it.

• Noncommercial - Anyone can use your work but not for commercial purposes.

• No Derivative Works - Anyone can use your work but only verbatim copies, not copies they have altered.

• Share Alike - Others can distribute derivative works only under the same licence which licences your work.

More information about Creative Commons and their licences can be found at their website at:  http://creativecommons.org/ accessed 8/2/12

I hope this blog has been helpful and taught you a little about copyright.

Visual Basic

When working with numbers in Visual Basic, you can use the 'IsNumeric' function to check if something is numeric.  Such as 'IsNumeric(txtIncome.Text)', this is checking to see if the text in the txtIncome textbox is only numeric.  It can be used in an 'If' statement to carry on with your intended program if it is only numbers or stop the program and warn the user if they have entered wrong text.

The 'Val' function is used before a variable or text box to turn the information in the text box into and integer.  Such as 'Val(txtIncome.Text)'.  This is turning the information in txtIncome into numbers.


While using Visual basic, it is sometime useful to edit out some lines of code to find problems or mistakes.  You can do this by putting a ' before the line.  E.g. 'iIncome = Val(txtIncome.Text).  This line will then become green and will not be used in the code.  You can also use this to write yourself notes about what is happening in your code, for example, 'Declaring Variables.

Colours

It is good to reuse colour throughout your document.  You can do this by making colour from a picture you are using a 'swatch' so you can use it easily.  To do this you can use to dropper to select the colour you want then saveing it into your colour pallet.  You can also find more colours by making them yourself or selecting a group of colours from 'kuler'.  In Kuler you can search topics to find colours for that subject, e.g. beach, then download them into your colour pallet.


RGB and CMYK are two different colour schemes used.
When you download an image off the internet it will be a JPG and RGB.  RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue.  CMYK stands for Cyan (blue), Magenta (pink), Yellow and Key (black).  CMYK is best for printing and RGB is best for the internet. When you get colours from Kuler or photos from the internet, they will be in RGB so they will need to be changed to CMYK to get the best results if you are going to print them.