It seems my worries about having to possibly cut out some of my text were unfounded, as it in fact turned out that I needed to add more text to try and fill up the space! In an ideal world I still would have liked to have written a bit more, so that the text reached the top of Kerry's head on the right-hand page and there would have been less white space. However, I can try and do this in a later draft.
I used the software Adobe InDesign CS4 to create my double page spread. I used this rather than Photoshop (which I used for the cover and contents) because Photoshop is primarily a photo manipulation program, as I learnt the hard way when manoeuvring the different pieces of text one by one on my contents page. InDesign is different in that, as the name suggests, it is a program for designing things, such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines and books. I found using InDesign quite challenging though, since it functions almost completely differently to Photoshop and therefore took a lot of time to adapt to. Once I got the hang of it though I found it to be extremely useful, so I am glad I persevered with it.
I still used Photoshop in the creation of the DPS, insofar as I still had to use it to edit my photos. On both the pictures I pumped up the exposure and cropped them, and the band picture on the left I also placed into a polaroid-camera type frame. The right-hand picture took an amazingly long time to crop as I had to go through the usual process of lassoing and then erasing stuff a bit at a time, and then perfecting it all with the blur tool. That probably doesn't sound too strenuous but it really was, since I had to be careful to cut away only the background and not accidentally cut off any of Kerry herself, and the picture was of a really large size which didn't help. I think that some parts of her still look slightly as if they were cut out, but overall I feel I did a pretty good job.
I found it quite difficult to arrange the text in a way which I deemed to be interesting, and it was mostly a process of trial and error in which I tried many different layouts and combinations (some of which I'll post later in a step-by-step DPS section). After the headline of the article I had what I considered to be the "background information" paragraph (though its official name is a standfirst): a section of text which gives the reader a brief overview of who the article/interview is about/with and why this person is interesting. Underneath this I had the names of the interviewer and photographer (both fictional of course, as putting "Chris Coales" for everything would be boring). I placed the names here as I noticed from my research on music magazines that this is the usual place for putting them; in fact there are very few instances indeed on double page spreads where this isn't the case.
After this I began arranging the text in columns, with the first section of text in the columns being an introductory paragraph: a section written in prose which sets the scene and possibly describes the interviewer meeting the interviewee. I used this section to provide more contextual information on Kerry Anne and briefly describe the surroundings. I typed this section in the font Georgia, the same font I used for the "background information" paragraph, because I wanted to use a different font from the one I was to use for the actual interview so as to distinguish between them. I think I achieved this quite well, and I don't think that the fonts clash too badly at all.
The next, and longest, section of text was the interview itself. I used the font Calibri as it is sans-serif which distinguishes it from Georgia which is serif. I also feel personally that Calibri has a comfortable simplicity, the kind that can be put to good use in magazines where there is a lot of small text to read. I put the questions in bold to show when the interviewer was speaking, and separated each set of question and answer by a single line for uncluttered readability. I also copied a quote from the text out and enlarged it and coloured it red, as this technique of taking an especially interesting quote from an article and drawing attention to it is used regularly in music magazines.
I wrote more than I originally meant to here, and there are less stages involved in making something in InDesign than in Photoshop, so I will not need to do a post this time showing step-by-step information of how I made my double page spread. As always, comments are welcomed.
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