I began a life of football just watching high school games at Lake Stevens, Washington. From there I would always watch college football on Saturday’s with my family. Then on Sunday’s my dad and I would watch the Seattle Seahawks. It wasn’t until I turned ten years old that I wanted to give football a try in real life.
Going into fifth grade I decided to put the shoulder pads and helmet on for the first time ever. It wasn’t until that first practice that I realized how hard football can be. If you want to be a good football player you always have to put in a lot of work. However, playing football that first year pushed me more in love with the great sport.
The second college football game I ever attended was right here in Pullman. The Cougars came back from eighteen down in the fourth quarter to win 31-28 in overtime. I remember leaving the game as the crowd flooded the field. As we started the walk to my brother’s apartment, we took a picture of how many fans were on the field as something to remember.
After fifteen years of living in Lake Stevens my parents decided to move us to my mom’s home town of Pateros. A small town of about 650 people. What I learned from this experience was that eight-man football is very different from eleven-man football. I felt that this taught me a lot of things. It introduced me to a lot of good and fun guys that shared my love for the game.
My junior year we made it to the first round of state playoffs but lost to a really good Sunnyside Christian team. That year we had a lot of fun games. The one I remember the most was a come from behind win against Republic where I felt we showed a lot of grit. We showed passion and got a 31-24 victory.
Senior year I became one of the captains. However, senior year I missed two games because of a concussion I suffered in practice. Those two games were probably the hardest two games of my career. I say this because I felt like I couldn’t do anything to help the team and I was so powerless in the game.
In the end I felt like playing football was one of the most important parts of my life. Even now I miss the game but that is why I am trying get my degree in broadcast news so one day I will hopefully be able to announce the game I love.
Zane Dodge 
Zane,
Great job piecing together a coherent and quality draft that showcases some of your experiences with the game of football! I too cherish those memories I’ve made while playing the sport. As far as the design elements go, I would consider adding some stylistic adjustments to your project such as borders, drop shadows, gradients, etc. The addition of these features will add more appeal to your project and will give add a unique element to the flyer. Another suggestion I think you could use is potentially making the text a different font rather than having a basic font. By changing the font and making a consistent capital case throughout the title, I feel like your project will be greatly enhanced. Overall though, I really love how your project tells a story of your progression through the early stages of football to high school and now to broadcasting for a team like Washington State.
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In my project I will have to work on trying to work on creating the layers so I can use separate colors for my separate pictures. In addition to this fix I will try to had boarders, drop shadows, and gradients so I can give more appeal to my project. Also, I will work on trying to make the font a different style font rather than just basic because it will make it look better. Also, I will try to make consistent capitalizing the letters in the title. Another thing that I believe that I could do to improve my project is that I think I could try to work a little with trying to change the position of the picture by rotating them a tiny bit but much. If there is one more thing, I think I could try to improve is maybe trying to make the pictures into different types of shapes to make the project look better.
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Your collage is very straightforward and to the point. It’s easy to assume that you play football and that it means a great deal to you. Your design is easy to understand, clean and straight to the point. One thing I would critique is making “a life in football” a much brighter color. The black blends into the design and sometimes people could miss it. Using a unique font could help too. Another thing is, instead of putting what each picture is in the caption put it in the design so people can read right off the design itself. So for example, “bottom right coin toss senior year” add a text box and put it in the design itself. It helps give your design a certain element that is more than just photos. Describing what each photo is can help people truly understand what you do and why you do it. Keep working on it and I am thrilled to see the final product.
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Zane –
I truly enjoyed how informative your graphic design is. It follows the guidelines very well. After reading the description behind the pictures I got an insight of your background and your drive for football which adds to the experience. One thing I think would be great to work on is the display of the images. I can see there is a collage going on, which is great, however, perhaps adding low opacity backgrounds to each individual picture could create a clear vision of where the pictures are located rather than having them blend in without the background. Another suggestion would be to perhaps add a rectangle with low opacity behind the title. I think this would help bring clarity to the title. One thing I really enjoyed about the overall look of the graphic design is the theme of collage! I think a collage is a great way to show a brief insight on a specific topic. Adding pictures of yourself throughout different stages in football is a wonderful representation of storytelling! I truly enjoyed reading about your experience with sports!
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Zane,
I enjoyed getting to read your story and looking at your draft graphic design project. It was very interesting getting to learn about how you grew up with football and how it helped to shape you. I like the photos that you used for your project as well and how you decided to organize them. I would recommend to add a frame for these photos and to maybe change the font and color of your title. But also try to make your photos the same size so that you don’t interfere with your central photo.
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