OUGD406 - InDesign Brief - Whales

For my InDesign brief I was given the animal 'Whale' to base my project on. To start off I went on a search for high resolution images to include in my work.

Obviously I haven't had the opportunity and still don't have the chance to go and take photos of different whales so I will have to work with stock images from online. This will be fine as it's not a real publication, however if it was, it'd have to be primary source photography or it would be infringing copyright.

The photos I found and were happy with were the following:

These would consist of two icon photos as well as a background photo. Now I have chosen the photos I have, I can now make some thumbnail designs to play with the layout consisting of the images, header, sub-header and body copy.

[photos of thumbnails]

The one I decided to go with was my favourite of the selection. To start it off I went into photoshop and made a document with the appropriate dimensions of the double page spread including the bleed.

I made some guides to fit the margin and borders, this will match my InDesign document when I set that up.

The photo was then laid into place as well as the header and sub-header for further editing.

For the editing of my image, I wanted the whale to seem as if it was swimming through the words to give it some more character and depth to the image. To do this I lowered the opacity of the type and erased parts of the letters as if the whale was in front of them.

Now my background image was made, it was time to create the InDesign document to lay out my double page spread. To set up the document, I made it so the dimensions were reflected on my brief, but halved the width as I was making it two pages wide. I also added 3mm bleed and 12.7mm margins to reflect my background file. 3 pages were made because the first page is always a single page.

It was then time to display my body copy and my other two images into the four columns. The body copy involved was the following:

"Like most animal groups, whales have subcategories and an enormous range of species within them. In fact, “whale” is the english definition for a variety of different marine based mammals under the name ‘Cetacea’.

The two main categories of whales are ‘Odontoceti’ which consists of mammals such as killer whales, beluga whales, pilot whales and sperm whales. And the other is referred to as ‘Mysticeti’, this subgrouping consists of the whales which feed via a thin comb-like filter in their mouth called baleen which can catch small organisms such as plankton and other marine bacteria. Recognisable names of whales in this subgroup are the humpback whale, the minke whale, the bowhead whale and the blue whale.

Whales have a massive variation of different shapes and sizes but are almost always thought of for their giant structures, iconic examples of different sizes though would be the blue whale and pygmy sperm whale, with a huge difference between them.

The blue whale is the biggest mammal to of ever existed on this planet and is still exploring the deep blue to this day. This incredible whale lives at an expansive 30 metres in length and a minimum of 170 tonnes in weight. On the other side of the spectrum, the pygmy sperm whale isn’t much larger than your average dolphin at about 3.5 metres in length and weighs around 400 kilograms.

The reason that whales can grow to such enormous sizes are because their body mass is supported by water, if they grew to their size and lived on land, unlike mammals that live on land that have strong hard bones, whales have a very soft porous bone structure used to store food supplies in a form of oil, their body would collapse.

Another reason they are so massive is because they travel in cold and icy waters. Their whole body is covered in a very thick layer of blubber which is used as a vital insulation as well as energy reserves, this keeps their bodies at safe temperature and allows them to store up on food when travelling long distances.

A common mistake is that whales do not have gills, and cannot breathe under water. Instead they come up to the surface to breathe air, air is breathed in and out throw a hole in the top of their body near the back of their head called a “blowhole”. Sometimes a whale will come up to the surface to blow out a big shot of air, this often creates a fountain of watery mist, this is called a “blow”. When they sleep they float on the surface with the blowhole above the water whilst they rest.

Here are some interesting facts about whales which you might not of heard before which can be found below:

It has been calculated that a single breath from a mature whale can inflate up to 2000 balloons.

Most elephants weigh less than a blue whale’s tongue.

Whales live in large groups which are called “herds” and a baby whale is called a “calf”.

The heart of a blue whale is the size of a Volkswagen Beatle.

Baby whales grow at an average weight of 10lbs an hour!"

First I cropped the photos I was using into the right size to then place as an anchored file in my text box. This would make everything easier in layout as the photos would move with the text.

And there it was finished! Last thing I needed to do was print it.