Producing an eight page magazine for one of my university modules was a number of different adjectives: exciting, fun, stressful, time-consuming, sometimes maddening. After weeks of editing and tweaking, it’s finished and I submitted the final piece yesterday.

The brief was fairly open – all we needed to do was write three articles about wildlife locations in Cumbria, then add a contents page, editor’s letter and design the front and back cover. Sounded simple enough, but Adobe InDesign is both a blessing and a curse. No error goes unnoticed, no matter how miniscule. For a neat freak and general perfectionist like me, this was quite refreshing at first. But even I grew exasperated at the exactness of the letter spacing, margin size and colour matching. Eventually, InDesign and I became friends, and now I feel fairly competent using an industry standard design programme that I’d never used previously.

This has been one of my favourite modules so far, and I’m really happy with the end product. Here’s hoping my lecturer is too!