This assignment is essentially the Missing Persons’ Poster (3.5 Stars), just tweaked a bit to better fit my story. (I did a missing puppy, not a person).
This assignment was actually a little more challenging than I anticipated. There were LOTS of steps. I opened Microsoft Word to get started. Thinking of Mr. Vignelli, and his adoration for Helvetica, I chose that font in bold. I did bold so it is easier to read (since it is a poster). I created my header (MISSING PUPPY) and added in an image of a dog howling using clip art. I mean hey, Enzo is part husky after all.
Next, I added in the picture of my pup, Enzo. I did this by hitting insert, then image, select image. Similarly, once I was happy with the location and dimensions of my photo, I hit insert, then text box to add the description next to his image.
Then, I inserted another custom drawn text box and made sure that it was a narrow rectangle. In this textbook I wrote a fake phone number. I then rotated the text box 270 degrees, so that it was in the correct orientation to be a cut-off phone number, since that is common for fliers of this nature. Then, with the phone number text box selected, I hit command c (to copy it to my clipboard) followed by command v (to paste) that way I had duplicates of my phone number without having to create a new text box and orient it every time. I repeated this step several times as I placed the phone number along the bottom of the page.
At this point in time I decided I needed to make my poster a bit more aesthetically pleasing. To do this, I went over to the design tab and hit page color. I selected a nice shade of light green that was eye catching without being obnoxious. The page color tool did not shade in my text boxes, so at this point I had to go over to the home tab and select my text box, then hit the bucket fill tool. I repeated this step for each text box so that the page was one cohesive color.
The last thing I wanted to do to make everything look more professional and complete was to remove the text box boundaries. To do this, I selected the text box, then clicked on the “Shape Format” menu option. I then clicked on an icon similar to the bucket fill tool, (screenshot below) then selected “no outline”. I repeated this step for each text box.
Now, at this point I thought I was finished. I was not!! I saved it, only to find out that saving it as a Word document completely messed up the formatting. No problem, I thought. I exported it as a PDF, only to find out that WordPress would not embed it as a PDF (excuse me) AND the phone numbers at the bottom were cut off.
Determined not to give up, I went back into Word. I selected custom margins and made all of them 0, to be sure that nothing would get cut off. Then, I saved it as a PDF again. Fortunately my phone numbers were not cut off. Then I opened the PDF and took a screenshot of it. For some reason I will never understand, WordPress let me embed the screenshot of the image, even though it would not let me embed the original. So, it was a lot of steps, and a few roundabout issues on my end, but I got it done.
