I don't have a strong design "eye" or sense of how things should look. I'm more involved in the details -- do these lines have the same spacing and width, does the text wrap around the photo OK, etc. But I can replicate a design as a template and fill it with new content pretty easily. And if someone ELSE says "hey, what if we did this?" I can usually figure out a way to make it so.
Case in point: puzzle pieces.
What if we made the cover for this document a puzzle with different pictures in each piece?
Uh...
It took me a couple days (really just a few hours over a couple days), but I figured out how to do it. There's a
puzzlify script for Illustrator. I did that for one picture, making it into 12 individual "pieces." Then I released the clipping paths and pulled the pieces over to InDesign, where they became image boxes. I then replaced each copy of the original image with 12 different images and resized as normal to fit each piece.
It was a lot of trial and error at first -- trying to use the pen tool over a drawing of a puzzle to make the image boxes in the puzzle piece shapes, etc. I'm such an amateur and the pen tool was really hard for me/I never got it to work quite right.
But I was really happy with the solution I found, and I gave two options: a solved puzzle and a puzzle with the pieces kind of "exploded" and spread out.
Of course the puzzle idea got killed immediately and it will never see the light of day. BUT I learned a new trick, and maybe I'll make a puzzle with Jane pictures just for fun.
Also today I figured out something to correct a screw up I made in terms of a URL and how it was created in WordPress. I was freaking out for about 45 minutes though until my Google searching got me what I needed -- a simple uncheck of a box in the settings and a reload of the PDF and I was back in business.
It's the little victories that keep me going... But who knows for how long.
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