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January 22: Subway Style Journaling

tkradtke

tkradtke

Professional Brainstormer
Joined
Dec 28, 2009
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Hello everyone!

I am so excited to be hosting my first MOC challenge! My challenge is a journaling challenge, but it’s not so much about what you say, but how you’re saying it. Subway style posters have become very popular over the past few years and you see variations everywhere. Some examples of subway style signs are:

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The basic things that you see with the subway style signs are that the words are fully justified (left to right and top to bottom) and they mix different font styles and sizes to fill the space.

For your Day 22 page, your challenge is to create a page with journaling done in the subway style. Your page must follow these guidelines:

  1. Your journaling can be either full sentences, or list form. Whether you choose to journal as sentences or as a list you must have at least five lines of text. Song lyrics, poems, book quotes, etc. are also acceptable as journaling.
  2. You must have at least three different font variations. This can be in font size, style (bold, italics) or the actual font. Your font variations must be listed in your credits.
  3. Your journaling must be fully justified across a rectangular space (filling the entire space, left to right and top to bottom).
  4. For your subway journaling, you cannot use premade word art, journal cards, or elements that are done in the subway style. You also cannot use alphas to create your signs; you must use fonts.

For my first page, I journaled about my daughter’s outfit choice for one of our days at Disneyland…



In my example, I journaled in sentence form with variations in font size, style and actual to emphasize certain words within my journaling. It was a little daunting at first, but once I got going, it was fun to pick out which fonts to use.

I had so much fun with the first one, that I decided to try another sample with a list...




There are various ways to journal in the subway style, but the most straightforward way I found was to go line by line. I opened a new canvas in Photoshop in the size 3x4 with a transparent background. I would type a line in a normal font size (I used 12pt) and then began to try out different fonts. Once I picked a font, I would use the move tool to expand the line to fill the horizontal space. Then I moved on to the next line. When my journaling was complete, I merged the visible layers and dragged my journaling onto my page. You can also do a version of this directly on your page by using the show grids feature to give you guidelines for the width of your journaling.

And if you need any more inspiration, check out these amazing Polly pages by @Iowan and @AnneofAlamo...

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To recap the rules:
  1. Create a page with subway style journaling. It can be in sentence or list form, but must have at least three different font variations, and be fully justified. There must be five lines of journaling. Your font variations must be listed in your credits.
  2. You may use song lyrics, poems, book quotes, etc., for your journaling
  3. You cannot use alphas, premade word art, journal cards, or elements that are done in the subway style.

Your page must be a new page in order to count for the Month of Challenges. Your page must be posted in three places:
  1. Uploaded to the TLP Gallery (not an outside hosting site).
  2. Posted in your page thread you created in the MOC Layouts Folder. You should have one post per completed challenge page. If you complete all 31 challenges, your thread should contain 31 posts. Please do not comment in the participants’ page threads so we can keep them clean.
  3. Posted in this thread. People can comment here if they wish.
Pages must contain at least 75% current Lilypad product (currently for sale in the store from either permanent designers or guest designers).

Have fun with this challenge and I can’t wait to see what you create!!
 
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Updates and clarifications to the guidelines will be posted here as needed :)

Do we have to have pictures?
Photos are not required for this challenge.

Two shortcut options for justifying text in PSE:
Ctrl+Shift+J (Cmd-Shift-J)
or
Ctrl+Shift+F (Cmd-Shift-F)
If one doesn't work, try the other! I don't know when the shortcut changed.
 
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Your blue example that has destinations on it - Caribbean, Aspen, etc - has some words that are horizontal and some that are vertical. Everything is still justified along right and left, but a few words are rotated. Will that be OK for this challenge?
 
PSE 2018 doesn't have justified text. I don't want to distort the text by just changing the size of the text box. Does anyone know another way in PSE 18?
 
Aerobigirl said:
Your blue example that has destinations on it - Caribbean, Aspen, etc - has some words that are horizontal and some that are vertical. Everything is still justified along right and left, but a few words are rotated. Will that be OK for this challenge?
Click to expand...

Yes... as long as everything is justified left to right and top to bottom, words can go either vertically or horizontally. The Seattle Seahawks layout in the Polly pages section of my post is a great example of mixing it up.
 
kirstiegai said:
PSE 2018 doesn't have justified text. I don't want to distort the text by just changing the size of the text box. Does anyone know another way in PSE 18?
Click to expand...

I don't have PSE, but how do you usually resize an element and keep it from getting distorted? I resized my text by using the same method I use with elements. In my previous version of PS, I had to hold the shift key to keep things from getting distorted. Here's a tutorial I found online for an older version of PSE (and the basic instructions I followed when making my first example).

http://www.oopseydaisyblog.com/2011/03/readers-request-create-your-own-subway.html

I'll keep looking and see what I can find out for you.
 
kirstiegai said:
I just have to do each line of text on its on and then line them up. I will also check the shortcut key
Click to expand...

Honestly, that's what worked best for me. When I tried fully justifying lines, it would space the letters out with big gaps some times. Line by line gave me more freedom to get things the way I wanted them.
 
WOW! GREAT challenge! I've never done this but like the look. Nothing like pushing us out of our comfort zone! Thanks so much for putting it up so early! Woo hoo! It's only 5 pm here. They often aren't up until much later for me, often after midnight here! :) SO many ideas and pages and photos to choose from! :)
 
@tkradtke Looking at your second example, I am assuming we can have other journaling on our page. Is this correct?
 
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