RESPONSE: Semester wrap up

There's a good chance this could be my last blog post ever. I'd love to say I'll continue posting on here, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. Thank you to all of you who have been reading my blog this semester and providing some helpful feedback. This has been an extremely busy and challenging semester and as thrilled as I am that's it's over, I'm going to miss not only this class, but college design and Mizzou tremendously.

While I was working at The Maneater and Move Magazine, I used to ask myself why on earth I had chosen this career path that kept me up until sunrise more than a few times. But looking back, those late production nights follow by trips to Waffle House were some of my best memories from college. This semester has felt the same way. The class can be extremely stressful and time consuming — not exactly what I was looking for my last semester — but it's so incredibly rewarding. My portfolio and knowledge of design has grown exponentially. When I first started designing I just wanted things to look cool. Now, I still want it to cool, but I really want to convey a content driven message that the reader will get. It's sound simple, but I think there are so many designs that fail at that, even at major magazines.

Thanks for a great semester everyone!  

YOU CAN'T MISS: Freelance design

This week on the Media Unbeige blog, there was an interesting post about 99designs receiving $35 million in funding. 99designs in a company that brings designers and companies together online. Essentially, it's a lot like what we did for the SJI project. A company submits a brief description of what they need designed, designers submit samples and the company picks a winner (who gets mulah). It sounds like a cool idea, but it seems to be kind of a rotten deal for designers. For example, more than 1300 designers submitted a sample for a job that pays $600, meaning 1299 designers just did a lot of work for nothing. It's cool that you have the opportunity to design for so many different companies, which could improve your portfolio, but at I don't think it's a sustainable way to make money.

Another site that offers a similar service is freelancedesigners.com. What I liked about this site was that it appears clients can hire a designer based on that designers uploaded portfolio and resume on the site. That way, you're not wasting the time of thousands of designers. However, the downside to this is that it would be harder to break into this business. On the other site, you could not have a very extensive portfolio, but you might blow someone away one time with your design. That doesn't seem quite as possible on this site.
 

CRITIQUE: Careers splash page

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Yesterday, I went into the Vox office to make a last minute switch-a-roo on the careers splash page. My original draft (featured at the top) was designed based on one of the cover ideas I had come up. However, as pointed out later, it kind of lost the classifieds look to it. It had clip art, typical to what you would find in a classifieds page, but the decks for the stories didn't look like they belonged. I was struggling with how to make it look like a classifieds page, but without having to include so many words to fit in the smaller columns. I debated using the leads from the stories, but ultimately I ended up just designing all of the story teasers to look the same (not shown above). 

Tuesday afternoon I got an e-mail saying the editors wanted me to overhaul the design. Honestly, it was the last thing in the world i wanted to do at that minute. I had already spent much of my weekend working on it, and when I stopped in on Monday to check on the pages, there were no design changes. I also hadn't slept in about 35+ hours... But, such is the magazine world. I got a small taste of what newspaper designers must have gone through Sunday night with the Osama bin Laden news. And overall, I think the second draft looks a lot cleaner. We actually ended up using a pdf from a Missourian classifieds page, which isn't shown here. I'm glad the editors gave me the opportunity to revise my work, rather than than throwing something together themselves that I couldn't use in my portfolio.

CRITIQUE: Careers Cover

Originally, the careers issue was supposed to be like the travel issue, with all the departments and features revolving around one theme. So, I designed my first three covers to try to reflect that overall theme. However, after a restructuring this weekend (causing headaches for many designers), it was recommended that we focus on either the salaries story or the story about rising and declining jobs. Without any photos, I thought about doing an illustration. However after reading the rising/declining jobs story and scrolling through numerous pages of stock photos, I got the idea for this cover. Personally, I really like covers that directly address the reader. That's why I like having the nurse hold out the stethoscope and the question headline. I think it would encourage a reader to pick it up to read about their job security, a hot topic these days. I don't love using a stock photo, but it's all I had for now. I imagined that it could be re-shot, or a higher quality version of this image could be bought. 

YOU CAN'T MISS: Graffiti Art

It seems like one popular style design style these days has become graffiti art. I think it's a fascinating style, but it is very tough to execute using computers. It looks so much better in it's natural habitat, aka on the streets. The media unbeige blog posted a link to Art in the Streets, the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art. There has been some debate on whether graffiti qualifies as an art form, especially since in reality, most graffiti "art" is a criminal offense. What do you think? Can graffiti be called art? What class of art would it be?

On that note, here's a link to Smashing Magazine's 50 Beautiful Graffiti Artworks. Below are some of my favorites:

It's funny how the person advertised their website with this one.

RESPONSE: Designing a magazine across platforms

This week, most of my time was spent designing iPad pages and helping Erica with the website home page for Modern Midwest. The first thing we did was look around on some city magazine sites to see what we liked and what we didn't like. Then essentially, we put together our site by combining a lot of the pieces that we liked. Erica did a fantastic job making the header look fun and modern, establishing an online brand for our magazine. We tried to incorporate a lot of the same typefaces from our magazine into the website, in order to keep them somewhat consistent and further establish our brand.

Designing the iPad pages with Mag+ turned out to be a lot less difficult than I thought it would be, but it was still somewhat limiting. I struggled to find photos that would work well both horizontally and vertically, especially since most of the photos I used for my BBQ story had people in them. It is also kind of strange covering up people with the scrolling text. In the future, I just think it's something to keep in mind when taking / editing photos. Be careful not to zoom in too close on the subjects with at least some of your photos. That way that extra non-essential space around them can be utilized when designing for the iPad. Right now, the page I showed in class is functional, but I'd like to make it a little sleeker. We're also planning on adding some other elements to it that you wouldn't find in the print edition.

RESPONSE: Portfolio Design (mini and online)

All of my spare time this week has been put into working on my portfolio site. I really want to get it completely done in the next few days because I feel like it's a necessity when applying for jobs. I took two web design classes at Mizzou, but my coding is a little bit rusty. It's been fun getting back into it, but it's also been very frustrating. I finally caved and bought a domain name (www.joe-bradley.com) and hosting space this week, rather than hosting on bengal space, which I think would expire when I graduate anyway.

I'd really like my online portfolio, resume and mini portfolio to have a similar look. That's why I've decided (for now) on a notebook page look. I think having that consistency in design is really important in branding yourself. In some ways creating an online portfolio is easier because you have somewhat unlimited space. You don't have to print out all of those designs. I'd also like to include my writing, multimedia and web design work on my portfolio site. That's pretty difficult to do in print. Screen shots really don't do it justice. Plus, no one wants to see pages and pages of text from a story in a mini portfolio. That's going to need some creativity.

Next week, I'll post some screen shots from my (hopefully finished) website.