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.

YOU CAN'T MISS: Wrong photos and inspiring portfolios

You worked for hours, upon hours perfecting your design. You're so excited to pick up the design in print the next day, but on your way to class you read a Tweet that says: "Check out the embarrassing error in XYZ! Wrong photo on the front page! LOL!" Your heart stops and your stomach falls out. Sound familiar? I definitely know the feeling. During my time at the Maneater, the production process was obviously a lot shorter than VOX, so there was much less time to catch errors and fewer eyes saw the final pdfs before they went to print. More than once, I opened up the paper the next day to see that we had placed the same photo or the same story twice. It's obvious in print, but sometimes it's hard to catch when you're looking at 24+ proofs in the night. It happens to all of us though, including the United States Postal Service.

This week on the Media Unbeige blog, there was a post about the US Postal Service using the wrong photo of the Statue of Liberty.  They accidentally used a photo of the miniature statue in Las Vegas. Whoops. It's pretty hard to tell the difference, but obviously someone could tell. They decided to admit their mistake and just leave it and move on. Still, pretty embarrassing.




If you're like me, you're probably stressing over creating a portfolio website from scratch in Dreamweaver. Never fear! In case you're still searching for some inspiration, here's 90 Inspirational and Creative online portfolios. I really like the look of wood backgrounds (though I know others do not...) and want to create my portfolio site to look like a workspace with the main content on a notebook. I think the one below is pretty cool. Good luck dreamweaving this week!

CRITIQUE: Modern Midwest

 

Modern Midwest is finally winding down and this is pretty close to a final draft. I think it's draft number eight or nine now. It's definitely undergone some overhauls, but I think it got better with each draft, which is obviously the goal. The most recent change to this opening spread was the headline treatment, after I got this new headline from the publishers. I tried to make it similar to the Back to the Future logo. Also, we put an image of the food on the opening spread to show why it's not your traditioanl BBQ. I put the photo on the left to provide some variety, since most of our features start with a full-bleed photo on the left.  

 

We added a section about backyard games to this spread to help explain the photos somewhat and add to the party vibe. I also made the photos and the drinks more prominent.

We added the sidebar about Top Summer songs, one to fill space, but two to give the reader another break on their eyes and provide some fun content. I also moved the fridge photo up to provide some depth to it.

 

This department spread has remained fairly consistent, but there have been a few changes for the better. Mainly, I had to work with providing some dominance to the photos an helping the reader know where to look first. Originally, the right side had three same-size horizontal photos. I also added the photo of the sever so that we had at least one person in the photos. Finally, I did a cutout of the art museum to make my page more consistent with our other department pages. 

CRITIQUE: 30 under 30

 

When I first started thinking about the 30 under 30 issue, the idea of these short profiles was stuck in my head and I was going to make it a social media theme. I was going to break the people into categories, with a different social media website to represent their profession. However, as Jen Rowe would say, after enough time that idea committed suicide. It was just too cliche for it to work, I think.

I decided to go with a LEGO/building block theme in the end. Overall, I was pretty proud of the idea. I think it was outside the box and yet it still made sense with the story. Obviously, the words would have been important. The idea was that these 30 young people were the new building blocks for our community. I liked the LEGOs because they also gave a sense of youthfulness, which was half of the story. 

Executing the idea was more difficult than I thought. I created all of the legos and green backgrounds in Illustrator. Trying to create text with LEGOs was beyond difficult, which ultimately led to a pretty awful result. If I had more time and resources, I would have built the text myself. I also thought it would have been cool to create 30 different LEGO people to match the 30 people in the story. That probably would have taken about a week though. I think it would have made for a cool cover though.

YOU CAN'T MISS: More LEGOs!

I had already planned on finding a site with the top LEGO designs to go along with my LEGO themed spread, but as luck would have it, the Media Unbeige blog I follow also posted about LEGOs this week.  Apparently, LEGO is releasing the Farnsworth House Set as the 10th model in the LEGO Architecture Series. I had no idea LEGO had an architecture series, but that's pretty awesome. I always thought the castle and pirate ships I built as a kid were pretty cool, but re-creating Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water? Now that's cool.

Of course though, I also had to go out and find the best LEGO designs out there. I really wish I still had a bucket of legos sitting around my house. I feel like not only do they help get the creative thoughts flowing, they'd also be a great stress reliever. The site I found with the top 10 LEGO designs, also linked to 20 album covers recreated with LEGOs (like the Beatles Abbey Road on the right!)

Below are some other cool LEGO designs from the site. I have no idea how they made the engine actually work... that's impressive. It's a bit like taking our print pages and putting them into Mag+.

 

 

RESPONSE: Graduate Portfolio

Last night as I was putting together my graduate portfolio, it finally hit me: The end is near. While it doesn't count for a grade or anything, I still found it extremely difficult to do. How do you boil down your college career to four clips? Not an easy thing to do...

I ended up choosing two clips from VOX (a cover and a feature), one feature from class and a full-page infographic I did for the Missourian. It was tough because there are a lot of clips I'm proud of but many of them I didn't think worked for this portfolio. Also, I think a lot of my stronger clips came from more than two years ago, so those had to be thrown out the window. A lot of the work I've done for internships is clean, but very simple, such as post card and flyer design.

Putting together the portfolio was a lot like designing for a magazine. You're trying your best to impress people you don't know and who you'll probably never meet. You'll only receive some written criticism at the end (kind of like letters to the editor).

The process also asks you to evaluate the journalism experience as a whole and share some of your experiences. For me the most obvious question was: Looking back, if you were a pre-journalism student again, would you... No I doubt, I would do it all over again. There are other things I wish I would have done (like designed at the Missourian, gotten more involved with SND, taken a photo class and graphic design classes), but overall I'll walk away from the Missouri School of Journalism feeling like I made the most of my opportunities.

CRITIQUE: Photo Typography

 

This is the postcard I came up with using letters from signs and typography I took photos of. Unfortunately, I got back to Columbia and realized I didn't have a picture of an "M", so you might recognize that M from around campus. Most of the letters are from store fronts or advertisements painted on brick walls. The E with the slash through it is their no parking symbol. One of the a's is from from my new favorite ice cream place Sarita. Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. I wish I would have had time to seek out more interesting letters, but I kind of had to go with what I had. I think it's a good souvenir from the trip though. I wanted to buy postcards while I was there, but they really don't sell them.

RESPONSE: Photo A Day

I traveled to San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala over Spring Break for a mission trip. It was an absolutely amazing and life changing experience. Below are are a photo a day from the trip, as well as the stories behind them.

Saturday, March 26 — This was the view from or hotel balcony, overlooking the beautiful Lake Atitlan as well as the mountains (and some volcanoes!)

Sunday, March 27 — This photo was taken in Santiago, Gautemala, which was across the lake from San Lucas. We took a boat trip over there on Sunday. I saw these two kids (on the far left) walking down the street with their arms around each other and couldn't get my camera out of my pocket fast enough to get a good photo of them, but I still like how it turned out. There was such a sense of companionship and family and brotherhood there, which was really inspiring.

Monday, March 28 — This is a photo from my new favorite ice cream place, Sarita. On Monday after a day of work, we saw this couple walking down the street carrying the most delicious looking ice cream creation I'd ever seen. Through a group effort, we figured out how to ask them where they got it in Spanish. Best idea ever. It was called La Bomba and it was magical. Three flavors of ice cream, fresh fruit, toppings, whipped cream and a cracker. Needless to say, we came back to Sarita a lot.

Tuesday, March 29 — This would be my laundry hanging outside to dry... The airline lost my luggage and it didn't arrive in San Lucas until Thursday. So, for six days, I had to wash my clothes in the sink with hand soap and hang them out to dry. It was actually one of the best things to happen to me. I had packed waaay too much in my checked baggage and it was a good lesson for me to learn than I don't need that much to get by.

Wednesday, March 30 — These cows would pass by our work site just about every day. We named some of them and one girl in our group tried to pet one of them. Not a good idea. There was also a single cow tied up by our work site one day, which we named Victor. We came back the next day and he was gone. We had had hamburgers the night before... Hmmm...

 Thursday, March 31 —This was one of my favorite memories of Guatemala. We helped worked on this septic tank that these two guys (including my new friend Pablo in the yellow) had been working on for four months. They were only about halfway done. All they had was a pickax, a shovel, a chisel and a pulley system. We helped lift rocks out of the hole with the pulley. The best part was getting to know Pablo and Noe who we exchanged jokes and expressions with and learned about each others' families.

Friday, April 1 — This might be my favorite photo from the trip. These three kids would play with us outside the mission almost every day. Our last night there, we took tons of photos with them and they loved to grab our cameras and take photos of us. This little guy took my sunglasses off my face to try them on, so I also put the cowboy hat I was wearing on him. (Btw, a common debate on this trip, was whether the cowboy hat I bought was pink or beige. It's totally beige. Thoughts?)

Saturday. April 2 — Saturday was a long travel day, but that didn't stop us from having fun. The two girls in the photo wrote a song dedicated to me and another guy on the trip called Bad Bromance (obviously to the tune of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance). It's pretty epic. They performed it in the middle of the Guatemala City airport, which got us some weird looks from other travelers. You can watch the full length music video here.

YOU CAN'T MISS: Unusable Stock Photos and Royal Wedding Buttons

Being the first week back from Spring Break, I thought I'd share some humor with all of you. Check out this list of 60 unusable stock photos. There are some pretty great ones on there (Like this dog with a doughnut on his head). I challenge you to try to use one on a design this year.

 

As much as I don't care about the hoopla surrounding the royal wedding (seriously, I saw a magazine on the news stand the other day completely dedicated to it), I couldn't resisting posting about button design. Did anyone else have one of those cool sets as a kid where you could make your own buttons? Maybs I used mine to run for Student Council... I don't know. Anyway, some of these buttons are pretty cool and are worth checking out, no matter how much you hate the royal wedding.

YOU CAN'T MISS: Five second test and bike rack design

 

Last Thursday I attended the MAP Conference at Stoney Creek Inn for Magazine Editing. I went to the session called: Design Secrets. For the most party there weren't too many design secrets revealed, but they did post some cool websites, especially http://www.fivesecondtest.com/ Essentially, you can upload a design to it and then post questions about the basic idea or concept of the design, which users must answer within 10 seconds. I can't tell you how may times I've had to ask someone "Do you get that ___ is supposed to look like ____?" This is a great way to get some opinions before proceeding with an idea. 

 

On the Media Bistro Unbeige blog this week, there was a cool post about bike rack design. Apparently, the UK had been having some problems with bike theft so they came up with a competition to design bike racks / locks, which could be implemented around your own home or around the city and yet not look as ugly as a traditional bike rack. There were some pretty cool designs you can check out on that link, they the one above which is connected to a flower pot. We need some more of those around campus.

CRITIQUE: Modern Midwest Draft 1

 

One of the features I'm working on is about throwing a backyard barbecue party. Ideally, I would like to capture that atmosphere with the design. We're hoping to do a photo shoot of younger crowd barbecuing as well as photoshoots of the fridge with leftovers and some drinks. I'd like to incorporate some drink recipes with the drink cutouts as well. I'm going to work with the headline and subhead typography a lot as well as the illustration. I might do a infographic breaking down the fridge with leftovers. The no hamburgers or hot dogs signs right now are pretty week. I've been toying with the idea of making a white picket fence with the signs on the fence, kind of like a no dogs allowed kind of sign that you would see on a backyard. Or maybe a KEEP OUT sign. Also, I need to work with fitting the recipes. 

 

This is a department page I'm working on about a trip to Des Moines. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to find images of these spots in the creative library, so we're going to have to figure that out. I'm thinking about creating a map graphic for this page or at least at some infoboxes to break up the text. I like the clean feeling of the right hand page though. I'll need to move the headline off the photo and also come up with a dek.

RESPONSE: In-class Critiques

It was great to be able to see all the hard work people have been putting in on their magazine prototypes today. I know there's still a long way to go and they were just first drafts, but I think our class is coming up with some fantastic products that I'm excited to see presented in May. As per Jan's request, here's come comments about each of the prototypes:

NOSH: If we had to go to the printer today, I think NOSH would definitely be in the best position. I know they talked about not being happy with the cover photos, but I thought they looked pretty good. I just thought some of the sell lines in black were a little difficult to read and didn't pop as much as everything else in the magazine. There was obvious flow throughout the design and it had a consistent style with the arrows and colored circles. The recipe pages were obviously loaded with text, like most are, but they still looked clean. Great job NOSH team!

Plaid Dad: I really liked the use of the diamond plate along the side on the department pages. It obviously goes well with the theme, but it was contained enough to not be distracting. Also, great job with the typography on the Burnt story. I was a little confused by the title "Stick 'em up ketchup" because it didn't seem to have much to do with the gadgets on the page. I liked the typography, but the color seemed more like a mustard color, which I think would be fine if the headline didn't have the word ketchup in it.

Cupboard: There were some beautiful features in this one that caught my eye, especially the one with the two jars on the left-hand page. I also liked the 10 ingredients one. It seemed like a big improvement from some of the ones from the first mockups. I like the color slash behind the nameplate and even the tilted C, but I thought the slogan or sell line above it was a little awkward.

Shindig: This was another one that I thought flowed pretty well design-wise. Very consistent. I loved the incorporation of the elements like the wide arrow from page to page. The nameplate typeface matches the mood of this magazine perfectly and that theme is carried throughout.

YOU CAN'T MISS: Nelson Mandela's Fashion Line and Seer Outfitters

This week on the Media Unbeige blog, there's a post about the fashion line launched by Nelson Mandela called 46664, which is also the name of his non-profit organization that focuses on humanitarian efforts. "When you buy a 46664 shirt, you are not just buying apparel, you are investing in a process that will help spread the legacy of Nelson Mandela by supporting the long-term sustainability 46664,” Board member Achmat Dangor said. “You will also be empowering young people in communities out there and creating a platform for global change.” I love examples like this of design being used for great causes.  The shirts look pretty cool too.

 Another great example of cool t-shirt design being put to great use is Seer Outfitters. The clothing line  is run by my favorite former Creighton basketball player and current Chicago Bull, Kyle Korver. The proceeds from the shirt go towards his Kyle Korver Foundation which among other great things helps build handicap ramps and does roof work for those who can't afford it. I think the t-shirts are awesome too. Each shirt has a theme to it. My favorite one is the "RESPECT" shirt (on the right). I wish I was better at t-shirt design. There's such a creative style to it, which is important since the design is really the only thing driving sales.

RESPONSE: Putting together a portfolio

It's mid-March (and still snowing), graduation is sneaking up on me and I still don't know what I'm doing after May. Often times I feel like I'm too busy to even think about applying for jobs or look for them. However, it's crunch time now. A good first start was working on putting together my portfolio for class. Fortunately, I have been able to save most of my stuff over the last four years. However, a lost flash drive wipes out some infographics and page designs I did for The Working Press.

Putting together a final portfolio can be extremely difficult. Picking one design and leaving another out can be like abandoning a child. I was stunned to find out that come time for my portfolio review in April, I will only get to pick four clips to present. YIKES! I have absolutely no clue which clips I would pick. That's why I'm thrilled we're doing this exercise in class. It's even set up to help you pick the top four. Personally though, I feel some of my better designs were done years. I used to not care about rules, so I felt like I had more creative power and I also had a lot more time to work on things. I would spend a lot longer thinking about my design ideas. Hopefully, I'll have a good idea after this week about what I want to include. The clock is ticking!

CRITIQUE: Final travel cover and SJI logos

 

Above is the final cover I came up with for the Travel Issue. I wanted to keep the concept of the paper airplane from from the first cover, but since there wasn't a big focus on air travel, I wanted to make that idea more local. I started trying to create a paper car, but that's not a very common thing that people could relate to. So then I thought of one of those power wheels cars I always wanted as a kid, but knew images of those would be copyrighted. So then, just by chance I came across a series of photos featuring this guy in a toy car. I added it to a road background and created the napkin navigation for the sell lines. I thought about using GPS images, but I wanted to make it look more like budget travel and road tripping. A lot of time for a road trip, you would just stop and get directions somewhere and scribble them on a piece of paper. 

 

On the right are the (close to) final drafts of my SJI logos. I incorporated the slogan on all but one of  them (granted, it was the wrong one). I worked with the color and typography on then to make the meaning more clear and also to try to make the diversity meaning more clear. Jan, Erica and Greg went with the ones in the second image, which I revised. My favorite was actually the square one with the X and O and arrow. But, I know it didn't really get the diversity message across so well. I'm excited to see which one they pick.           

                         

CRITIQUE: SJI logos and travel covers

This week, I worked on designing 20 logos for the Sports Journalism Institute. The most difficult thing I ran into was trying to find a balance between diversity, sports, journalism and great typography. I think designing a diversity graphic is always hard because you want to be inclusive and obviously not at all offensive. That can be hard to do sometimes. I think it was also hard to include the sports angle because there's not really a universal symbol for sports. I had a lot of ideas that involved different sports balls, but I felt like if I couldn't include all possible sports, then I shouldn't include any.

On the right are the five designs I'm going to work on for next week. Greg Bowers said that the only thing he was disappointed in was that we didn't reflect the diversity of the organization in the logos, which is really the most important part. I tried several different types of logos with the phrase "Equal Access" a play off of the "All Access Pass" that get sports reporters on the sidelines. I like the lanyard one as an overall design, but it doesn't work very well as a logo to put on the header of a website. I'll have to get creative with that one. There was also the suggestion that I shouldn't include any other words, but I think taking out "Equal Access" takes away the whole concept behind the design.

One design that I just decided to work on after hearing Greg talk is the Tiger-striped one. I thing it can be very symbolic of diversity and I think SJI said they were open to including a Mizzou theme, since the organization is moving here. I didn't see many people try to go for that angle, so I think it might stand out. It obviously needs a lot of work though.

I tried to work in the woman's symbol to the bottom one, but Jan thought it was a bit feminazi. My favorite logo was the top right one, but I think I need to make it more apparent that the line on the right is an "i."

 

This week I'm also working on my final draft of a cover for the travel issue of VOX. Above are the three drafts I came up with. While the editors got a kick out of the baby one, they ultimately agreed that it probably wasn't appropriate to run and didn't really fit the target market. They said I should work on the first two. I think I'm going to try to do a combo of all three. I might stick with the Stay-cation, google map theme, but also include something like the paper airplane (but not, since the focus isn't on flying). I want to bring take the vibe of the baby cover though and incorporate some humor. It's a fun issue, and I think making someone laugh is one of the best things you can do. Not to mention that it encourages people to pick up the magazine.

YOU CAN'T MISS: IDEO and iPad Inspiration

This week on the Media Bistro Unbeige Blog, there's a posting about IDEO.org, which launched this week. The site is designed for “spreading human-centered design throughout the social sector in order to improve the lives of people in low-income communities around the world and focus on challenges related to poverty.” It will partner with non-profit organizations and foundations to create inspiring designs. Often times, non-profits don't have a whole lot of funds to use on design-work or even marketing. At Big Brothers Big Sisters, we would love to advertise in the newspapers, design billboards, flyers and brochures galore, but we simply don't have the resources to do that. It will be interesting to see the kind of impact IDEO.org has. They also have a fellowship posted on there that you can apply for.

On the topic of iPad design, I found a great site for inspiration called iOSpirations. Essentially, the site is a collection of screen shots from some of the best iPad apps and games. It also has inspiration for iPhone design and directories of Top 10 apps. Just a little something to get you going as we start to think about what our iPad apps should look like. Plus, the site itself is pretty sleek.

RESPONSE: iPad Conference — Expanding the Editorial Brand

Monday, I attended the iPad conference session called “Expanding the Editorial Brand,” given by Matt Bean of Rodale, Inc. Matt is the associate vice president of mobile, social, and emerging media and works on publications like Men’s Health and Women’s Health.

After hearing a lot about how to develop iPad applications in my Advanced Magazine Design class, it was great to listen to Matt talk about the decisions that have to be made before the design process begins. Matt immediately eliminated the perception that it’s easy to make an app, or that once you have an app, it will be successful. In fact, news apps are pretty low on the list of top-sellers or most downloaded. Only one percent of those who download an app turn into long-term users. Fortunately, news and reference apps lead the market in repeat engagement.

Matt said that before you start coding and designing the app, you have to get to know your customers, know the different platforms and define what type of product you want to create. You have to think like a user, an editor and an engineer. While Matt doesn’t do any coding himself, he thinks that it will be a big help to at least understand the language and be able to convey your ideas to a developer.

So much of the iPad craze has been this perception that you should just spit out an app as fast as you can, or make an app for everything. However, after listening to Matt’s presentation, it’s far more important to take the time to make important decisions about the app, including whether or not the app is even necessary.

YOU CAN'T MISS: Moleskins and Jann Wenner

This week on the Media Bistro Unbeige blog, there was a post about moleskin expanding their product line. I only own one moleskin and I feel like I don't use it enough to consider myself part of their cult-like culture. However, I think they're pretty awesome. This Christmas, I bought my sister a moleskin designed for music lovers. It had sections for playlists, concerts attended, favorite lyrics and other thoughts. It was really cool. The lady at the cash register said her friend Yanni (yes, THAT Yanni) uses it, so it must be good.

Anyway, moleskin is really stepping outside it's niche by bringing in designer Giulio Iacchetti to create news items like bags, pens, reading glasses and USB-rechargeable booklights. Somehow, I doubt USB-rechargeable book likes will obtain the same status as their class black notebooks, but it seems like I pretty innovative idea.

For those of you who are graduating this year (which most of us are), do yourself a favor and visit Jann Wenner's site. Wenner is the founder of Rolling Stone magazine and still works as the editor and publisher. I'm an avid reader of Rolling Stone, but I didn't know much about Wenner. I feel like he doesn't insert himself into the magazine as much as some editors and publishers. What I found out those was stunning. Turns out, Wenner dropped out of Berkeley and founded Rolling Stone when he was 21 YEARS OLD. That was shocking for me. Considering how successful it is today, I was amazed that it was started by someone so young. Maybe he's the prequel to Mark Zuckerberg. Anyway, Wenner started Rolling Stone by borrowing $7500 from some relatives and his future wife's parents (yikes). While as you'll see in my presentation tomorrow, Rolling Stone wasn't the most glamorous of magazines design-wise at the time, it had a clear vision and purpose. As someone who dreams of starting my own magazine, I found Wenner's story to be incredibly inspiring and a real kick in the pants. When I tell people that I'd really like to start a magazine in the next few years, I get a lot of funny looks. Like, you're only 22, you can't possibly do that. Where will you find the money? I still don't have the answers to many of their doubts, but at least I've found my inspiration.