Story and illustrations: Johanna Lievemaa
One of the large 10 credit courses for us 10IMPs this autumn was Print Design. It was a kind of a continuation from the previous design theory and Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator loaded course Visual Design (also 10cr). The main topics this time were typography, illustrating and interactive elements. We had 4 different teachers to guarantee a wide range of information. The final task of the course was to create a poetry book as an interactive PDF. We had to pick our favourite poems and then illustrate them and compile the book in Adobe InDesign.


The main software used for for learning to prepare images for print was of course Photoshop. Jussi Jokinen gave us really good details about colour management and the printing process. Tuomo Joronen also introduced Inkscape as an alternative for Illustrator.  Most of the other tasks especially in typography were done in InDesign, which we learned to use very well during the course, thanks to Pekka Lähde.

There was also a less digital and more hands on approach to illustration with Carita Forsgren. We would all pose and do sketches and gesture drawings, which was fun of course. Animal anatomy was very helpful for me. We also experimented with various media from oil pastels to inks in the real life world of art and illustration. We almost did calligraphy, too, which would have been a nice pair for all the typography we did with Jussi. All in all it was a lot of fun as well as educational and I ended up with a huge pile of papers filled with different kinds of scribbles, textures and illustration exercises. It's not a bad idea for us to invade the third floor art rooms every once in a while!

The resulting interactive poetry books were enchanting, each very good in its unique way. It is obvious that IMPs are a bunch of amazingly talented, creative students.

Johanna is a student of our international media programme
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