Merry Christmas, David!

It's fun being evil. 

Word of my recent Photoshop sorcery has spread! Today, my boss asked me for a little favour. And once again, I was glad to help. I mean, it is Christmas after all. He asked if I could put a co-workers face on the statue of David, then turn it into a poster. {Insert evil laugh here.}

Our new leader

One thing I really love about the office is how carried away people get with pranks. If they can't do it themselves, they enlist the help of someone who can! I must admit, I do love using my Photoshop powers for evil once in a while.

So how did this come to pass? Well, an esteemed colleague of mine noticed how another colleague slightly resembled Kim Jong Un, son of Kim Jong Il — the North Korean dictator who just died. Yesterday he asked me if I could put the other colleagues face on that picture if I had a spare moment. Seeing as I love office shenanigans, I obliged. Since it turned out so well, he got a little more elaborate and asked if I could turn it into an Editorial-style poster. He sent me the words and chose the other pictures and I put this baby together in like 5 minutes. It was rather funny, and the dude in the picture even asked if I could email it to him so he could post it on his Facebook page...

***Amendment***

Since I'd rather not accidentally piss off North Korea, I took the pictures down... Sure they were good, but this still makes for a pretty good story I think.

The Hopman hangover

"Find a picture of Caroline Wozniacki looking sexy," they told me

Oh, the Hopman Cup magazine. There it is, lurking inside today's paper. Again, I had like a week to scramble around and put this baby together. And again, I'm much more fond of some parts than others. I suppose it's my yearly reminder that I'm not quite the designer I wished I was... I do like it, but it could always be better. Anything could be better with more time, I guess. Some of my colleagues can pull massive liftouts and magazines out of their asses in less than a week, and still manage to do a brilliant job with them. I know I shouldn't compare myself to that, but it's just a little frustrating to admit that it'll take me years to be that good. Anyway, I'm relatively happy with how it turned out. Oh well, I'll do even better next year!

It was hard to find a picture of Hewitt not being a humongous douche

Those are silhouettes of players in the tournament!

Nice big montage because there was no ad for this page

More beautiful bargains

So here's the final instalment of book covers from the UWA Save the Children book sale. I'll be doing another post with the rest of the sheet music. It'll be awesome!

This is probably about my eBay exploits!

EPIC LOGO FAIL

Hmm, what does this look like?

Before

After

I came across this epic logo fail yesterday and just had to mention it! StumbleUpon is a prominent social media site and they recently rebranded. All they ended up with was a really expensive penis. Funnily enough, the design agency responsible is called Huge. I wonder how all the people involved in the decision-making process (both design agency and client/s) didn't see it!

Via Brand New.

Beautiful bargains

The place was pretty packed!

Remember when I went to that UWA Save the Children book sale in August? I bought a whole lot of records, sheet music and books! The sheet music was quite amazing. Anyway, they had a section with some really old books, like 20s-50s and even older. I didn't buy all the books here, but I took plenty of pictures. How could I not? I'll do another post soon with the rest of the books. Then more tennis!

This one's from 1929!

Looks a little sus if you ask me...

I bought this one. I have absolutely no intention of learning canasta.

Testing, testing...

My esteemed colleagues work station. Look, a small elephant!

Things are very close to being finished! Plus, nothing super-bad has happened yet either! {knock-knock} At this stage, we take the pages we've made in inDesign and start putting them on the pages created in the newspaper layout program. I suppose that's an over-simplified explanation, but it'll do. 

Above is a test to make sure everything was the right size and fitted okay... It did! Not that I was expecting otherwise. But after what happened in previous years, I just have a health level of paranoia when it comes to this sort of thing. I put on "TESTER" in nice big letters to make sure anyone who saw that page knew.

Also, if you look closely, you may see that the text is a bit short. That's because the baseline grid in the document kinda died, I've fixed that! I felt the need to mention that for any little designers out there who thought I overlooked it.

Losing the plot!

Get it, cause it's a plotter! Yes, I'm so tired I'm making pathetic heading puns...

It's almost done! Barring any unforeseen circumstances, of course. I have a feeling that something unavoidably bad will happen. It always does... @_@

Anyway, once liftouts and magazines are nearly finished, we print out proofs to the plotter. It has newspaper stock so we get a better idea of how colours and pictures will turn out. At this stage, everything gets read by the Subs, corrections are made and headlines are written. Now, I just have to keep my fingers crossed that some major player doesn't pull out or ad shapes change...