Adobe Session 1 – The Lookbook

InDesign has always been a software I’ve wanted to explore, particularly after I’d gotten to grips with Photoshop a few years ago. However, I guess I never really had the motivation, nor the time to explore it for myself, which is why I feel this term of Adobe lessons will be so incredibly useful. As someone wanting to pursue the creative industries, skills within the Adobe suite can be so vital to one’s list of skills on their resume.

In this first Adobe session of the term, we were introduced to some of the basics of InDesign, including how to put in images, framing, text and create shapes. An immediate issue I faced was the fact that my software was the 2018 version, so after class I immediately upgraded to the 2021 version, in order to be able to access the newest features. Anyway, I enjoyed exploring these different elements with no particular guide at first and really getting to understand these basic tools. I don’t think I ever realised how different this software’s purpose was to Photoshop, and I learnt that InDesign is a really great tool when it comes to creating book style documents. This intrigued me, as I could immediately see how useful software like this would be in creating magazine spreads and various lookbooks. Below are some of the pages I experimented on initially.

After being introduced to all of this, we were then tasked with creating a fashion lookbook for our customised shoes. I was quite thrilled to have a task to focus these newly acquired skills onto and was quite pleased with my outcome from the 30 minutes time set. I was able to play with framing, images, text and even the drawing tool which I found rather cool as an abstract shape tool. I also enjoyed this guided style of class where we created during the session, although understand the rest of the lessons won’t be in this style and instead will be focused on reflective learning from work we have completed outside of class time.

After receiving helpful feedback from Sing including repositioning my text and shapes, I made the decision, for my SDS, to start anew with a fresh spread on InDesign. For the final lookbook I ended up creating, I used very similar colours, images and shapes from my practice one, but refined them a little more and also added to the layout so it wasn’t as empty. I also edited my images in Photoshop beforehand so they didn’t look as dull in the spread, particualrly focusing on increasing their saturation and colouring.

I kept to quite a rectangular theme and neat layout, as I just wanted to work on understanding the software and learning where to place things first, as well as seeing mostly rectangular layouts when I had googled fashion lookbooks. However, from my feedback, I expect to get that my work is too controlled and hope to receive advice on how I could make it more playful (flashbacks to my Toolbox customer profile layout!). Frankly, the whole lookbook itself is quite bright and colourful, quite the opposite to the vibe I’d normally opt for which is more minimalistic and toned down, but I thought the boldness really matched my shoes well.

If given the chance to further develop this lookbook, I think I’d like to incorporate some of my artist influence and research into it to demonstrate where the ideas for my shoes came from, as well as use some more high quality images.