Playing With Technology

            Today I converted all of my ideas on paper to the computer. I created a storyboard on Pages by making small boxes to represent each page of the book. In each box, I typed the featured letter in the corner and wrote out my small blurb for the letter. I also wrote a bulleted list of illustration ideas in each box so that I could refer to them in the future when I start creating my illustrations. I really liked this part of the project because I could finally see my ideas coming together to form the story. Looking at the different boxes together, I could easily decide which words should go under broader categories. For example, I decided that I could talk about the hammocks under the “Gazebo” page because the illustration I plan to use will have the hammocks in it. I feel so much better after creating this online layout because it allows me to see how much work I am going to need to do for each page in the next few weeks. I can also see how many pages my book will approximately be (e.g. how much my book will cost to publish).

            The most fun part of today was starting to play with the Blurb software! In eighth grade, I wrote a children’s book with Charlotte Lee. We used Blurb to publish the book and were incredibly happy with the results. Blurb is a really cool program because it enables the user to have lots of flexibility with the page layouts. For my book, I hoped to have text overlapping the illustrations. However, once I started to really play with the program, I realized that it was very difficult to see the text over the illustrations. Although I really like the flexibility of Blurb’s software, it would be even better if users could create shapes where text could be seen over images (much like in Pages). After realizing how difficult it would be to have all of my text overlap illustrations, I decided to choose a layout where the text resides below the images. This will allow me to use different colors and fonts for the text.