GSPA

At the GSPA conference on Thursday, Sept. 23, I chose to attend 2 seminars related to my field. The first was about literary magazines. The group consisted of only a few high school students that are in charge of their school literary magazine. Two student speakers from Odyssey, Iliad Literary magazine, served as a 'panel' for a discussion and Q&A session with the students. The information about how to decide who you publish in a magazine was helpful. With my editor in chief position with a fashion magazine here at UGA, I found this helpful because choosing articles to publish can be a difficult task, having to tell some people no. Good advice was to make a policy about publishing and stick to it. Know what content is appropriate and what is inappropriate. With a fashion magazine (Little Red Book), however, there is less room for inappropriate content, since most articles are about style, music or shopping (to generalize). Advice was also given on how to incorporate a set theme throughout the entire magazine, from the fonts used to the design as a whole. I found the lecture insightful, but probably not as useful for me as it was for the students who run a literary magazine.

The other session was an InDesign 'how-to.' I was most looking forward to this session because I am on a mission to learn how to use this program. I need it to design my magazine, both for a class project and Little Red Book. Unfortunately, it seemed that everyone there already knew how to use the program to some extent, so it was more of a Q&A session. I took a good deal of notes on how to do things like convert picas to inches, show/hide text threads, the difference between preview and normal mode, guide lines, and placing photos. Clearly, I have a good deal to learn. I suppose I will start with the basics, but all of the information was good to know for future reference.