We were to complete the assignment in both QuarkXpress and InDesign. I am very familiar with Quark because that is the program I have been using for the past few assignments, but I hadn't used InDesign in over a year. I begain working in Quark since I knew how to use most of the tools anyways. My first task was trying to figure out what font Esquire used to make their famous title. I found online that the font is unique to Esquire and I would not be able to reproduce it. Instead, I took a screen shot of it from online and edited the photo on Photoshop. This was surprisingly more difficult that I thought it was going to be. Eventually I got an image I was happy with. The next step was finding the picture of Daniel Craig that appears on the left side of the BiBi Card. I found the image fairly quickly on google images but could not access the image without a photobucket account. I then made a photobucket account searched for the picture on their website. I was lucky enough to have found any form of the picture but, it was not exactly like the one on the card. It was slightly narrower, a problem I would later encounter.
Once I found the most difficult pictures I set out to find the right font. There are three different fonts that appear on the card. I began looking for the font that appeared the most. The closest font I could find to the one on the card was Arial Bold. It is almost a perfect match, the only time that a difference is evident is when I typed out numbers. The second font I found was Prestige Elite Std. This font was used for the numbers and letter that appear at the bottom right hand corner of the front. The third font was cracked, used for the words Best Deal, underneath the subscription prices.
Once the fonts were found I measured each piece of the BiBi Card. When I was actually reproducing the card I tried my best to get the exact spacing. I went through the BiBi Card and wrote down next to each word what size font I thought was used. I didn't always turn out to be right. After printing my first draft I made adjustments to make sure the fonts on mine and the original matched nearly perfectly. I began by placing the Esquire title into Quark and choosing the proper size for the title. I slowly worked my way down the card to complete each line. For the most part this was not too difficult, the spacing and sizing was tedious though. A small red arrow appears on above the words Best Deal, I made the arrow in Illustrator. There was another symbol at the bottom of the card that I could not re-create. It was a small red mouse. Once the right side of the card was complete I moved onto the left.
There is a dotted line, a perforation line dividing the left and right side. I made the line with the line tool and simply changed it from a sold line to a dotted line. Since the picture of Daniel Craig was not big enough to fit the space without distorting him I decided to place two black boxes next him and center his photo in the middle. This was a good alternative because my look is still very believable.
Now that the front was complete I attempted to work on the back. My first step was to turn the Esquire title from black to white. I did this in Photoshop by inverting the colors. I made a black box for the smaller right hand side of the card and filled in the few words that there were in a white fill.
The left side of the card was a bit more difficult. I had to re-work many components of this side before it looked right. I began by making the postage stamp that appears in the upper right corner. This was not too difficult, but I did have to change the width of the lines a few time before they were correct. The next thing I did was to make the text boxes that appeared on the card. Again, this was not hard, but getting the perfect spacing took a bit of time. The last part I did was make the bold lines that appear near the perforation line and the ones below the postage.
After completing the Quark BiBi Card I began work on the InDesign one. I did not know how to do everything in InDesign but I found that this program was actually easier to use than Quark. The InDesign card went much faster than Quark because I had already done the hard parts in Quark.
This was a very time consuming project, and one that I am very happy I started well in advance. Not only did I have the opportunity to work on the project in pieces, time away from it let me get a new perspective. If I've been looking at the same thing for too long I can't see my mistakes. I am very happy with how the card turned out, but there are things I would change. I would have liked to add the mouse to the front of the card and would have liked if the picture was perfect, but there is never enough time to make something completely perfect.
This is the front of the BiBi Card from InDesign:
This is the front of the BiBi Card from InDesign:
This is the front of the BiBi Card from Quark XPress:
This is the back of the BiBi Card from Quark XPress:
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