Hello and welcome to Max Evans' profile website! This is my 5th project during my time at Freestyle Academy, as well as my first senior project. The name of this project was "Profile", which was one that required us to go out and find a special individual who we could use as our star profile. This person should be someone who is interesting, does something interesting, and/or has an untold story that deserves to be told. The end goal of the project was to have shown off the individuality and interest of our chosen person. We wanted to show our audience who this person is, what he does, what he believes in, what he likes, what he dislikes, and everything else that defines what makes a person.

For my profile star, I chose Mike Sanders, who is the Santa Clara County Emergency Services Coordinator. Mike also teaches a class called CERT, which stands for the Community Emergency Response Team, and aims to teach community members the importances and how to be prepared in case of future disasters such as earthquakes. Mike is able to make sure that when these situations strike, which is a matter of 'when' rather than 'if', the citizens in his community are prepared.

In each of my Freestyle classes, we were given other supplementary assignments to be done along with writing a paper of the profile. In my English class, we were tasked with interviewing three people, including the star profile, and writing a paper about the person that showed off their personality. In my design class, we learned how to use Adobe InDesign to create a magazine, which we put our English papers into. We also learned how to shoot photos in Raw to better edit them in programs like Adobe Photoshop. Finally, in Web/Audio, we learned how to use javascript in our websites, as well as Adobe AfterEffects to create animations, like the commercial I made shown below. I'll be honest, as it's not the best thing I've ever created at Freestyle. However, it's a learning process, so thanks to the commercial, the next animations I make will be even better. Why not check out the commerical for yourself?

I thank you for clicking on the link to my website, and I hope you enjoying exploring it to your hearts content!

introduce the magazine assignemnt and process in English and Design, add thumbnail linked to magazine article on issuu.com, and reflect on the magazine production process

For the design portion of my profile project, I was asked to make a magazine that showed off my profile's personality. The magazine itself is just my English essay copy and pasted into an InDesign file. I also took several pictures and incorporated them into the magazine in order to make it look interesting and not just a bunch of text. There are also some design elements that help make it nice to look at as well.

As for what I learned while making the magazine, I was able to remember everything I had learned last year about InDesign, as well as learn several new techniques to enhance my magazine. The photos were also shot in Raw, which allowed me to edit them in more finer details before putting them in the magazine. With the English paper portion of the magazine, I learned how to actually interview people and ask important questions, because I knew I would not only need quotes for the magazine, but also research to enhance the writing. This made it so the magazine was not just my opinions on my profile star, but also about a bigger picture that more people can relate to.

Making the magazine itself was very entertaining, as it was a lot of fun to try out my new InDesign skills, as well as incorporate the many pictures I took with the paper I wrote and combining them to make something nice too look at. It was a challenge, and while I didn't make it into Freestyle's top 10 magazines, I am still very proud of the magazine I created. If you would like to view the magazine, click the large picture to the right of the page. It will open another window where you can see the magazine and paper in full.

 

As this project was also considered my Senior Project, we were also required to give a presentation on it. In our design class, we were also tasked with using Google Presentations in order to make a simple, good-looking, and informative presentation. The presentation itself was suppose to last 5-7 minutes, though many would go over. The goal of the presentation was to show my teachers and fellow peers that I did know what I was talking about in my paper, and that my person is indeed interesting and a good profile star choice. Making the presentation in design class was a lot of work, but also quite enjoyable. I liked picking the photos I didn't use for the magazine and being able to still use them in the presentation. You can see the presentation down below, which is just a quick version of the full presentation (without me needing to be dress up, luckily).