CRITIQUE: Final Meredith Feature

This is the final draft of my feature story for Modern Midwest about the Top 10 seafood restaurants in the Midwest. It was the only design I changed fairly drastically and felt worthy of posting again. Through the recommendation of the class, I worked with the headline typography a lot and also made my images a lot larger. The headline typography is a play-off of the Chicken of the Sea logo. As I explained to the publishing team I thought that worked well because of the whole Jessica Simpson thing (you're welcome). In contrast to that, the typical Midwesterner would recognize that typography and get the reference. I played around with different words for a while. I tried Chicken of the Great Plains, but the Great Plains don't really cover all of the Midwest by definition. I think that headline would have worked better with the illustration though. Right now, I think it's kind of weird, because I have this headline about fish coming from the Great Lakes, but then I have an illustration of them growing out of the ground on corn stalks. I made the photo a lot larger too because I thought it was very appealing. I have no idea where it was taken, but who wouldn't want to go to a restaurant with a 20 pound lobster on top!? (I mean, unless you're afraid it's going to fall through the roof, in which case I would avoid at all costs.) I shortened up the text on the left page a bit to give the headline and deck some more breathing room. Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. The presentation to the publishing team was pretty painless as well. They asked a lot of great questions. I'm looking forward to working with them as well as the design team as the semester progresses.

RESPONSE: The September Issue

I'll be honest. I've never even glanced at a copy of Vogue. I'd like to think I'm fashionable, but I'm not into fashion. I'd heard of the movie The September Issue, but I didn't know it was about Vogue. I didn't even know who Anna Wintour was. After seeing this movie, I hope I never run into her in a dark alley.

The thing I found most interesting about this movie was the role of the Creative Director. In the entire movie, I never saw her open InDesign on her computer. I thought maybe there just wasn't a lot of page design in Vogue, but rather just the photos. But after seeing the final product, there's a lot of elaborate page design that goes into it. However, Grace Coddington spent most of her time picking out clothes for models and arranging photoshoots. While that was surprising, her impact on the design and feel of the magazine was obvious, as explained by Wintour at the end.

My favorite feature that was shown in the film was the one that included the film crew. I thought that was just an absolutely brilliant idea. Not only that, but Grace came up with the idea under deadline pressure and it worked beautifully. I really like how she fought to not not have the cameraman's stomach touched up. She didn't want him to look like a model, but rather an imperfect human being. The final product (shown at right) was a very fresh, well executed idea.

I also learned a lot about the relationship between the editor and the creative director. Honestly, Wintours was terrifying. She didn't even have to say a word. She could just stare at you. I don't know how you could stand facing her day after day. Grace does a fantastic job of pushing Wintours and fighting for her work though. That's something I feel like I need to do sometimes. I'm too willing to just change whatever someone else thinks is bad, even if I absolutely love it.

YOU CAN'T MISS: The New Yorker's Signature Reimagined and GNOMES!

This week on the Media Bistro Unbeige blog, there's a post about the 12 finalists for the re-imagination of The New Yorker's mascot Eustace Tilley. Apparently they received over 600 entries for the contest. The winner gets their design on a tote bag. Woah. If that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what would. Anyway, I came away relatively unimpressed with some of the designs, but maybe that's because I don't understand the New Yorker demographic. Regardless, here a some of my favorites:

While I have no idea if this looks anywhere close to Manhattan, I thought the idea was brilliant and well executed. I didn't get that it was the mascot at first, but I caught on quickly. I'm assuming their readers are at least 10 times smarter than I am, so I'm judging myself on a curve.

This one reminded me of some kind of Japanese-type art, but I was still pulled to it. Something about the bottom image of the old man looking out his window at the butterfly was just incredibly beautiful.

I really like this one because of the modern appeal to it. However, it also looks like a cross between a street sign and an iPod commercial. It just lacks some originality.You can check the rest of the finalists out here.







Finally, its been a rough week for a lot of us I'm sure with the Meredith presentations and what not. I know I'm ready to sleep for the next 24 hours straight. In light of that I bring you: GNOMES!! First of all, if you haven't seen Gnomeo and Juliet yet, you should. It's pretty great. What's also great is this website they put together for the movie in which you can MAKE YOU OWN GNOME! How flippin' cool is that? Besides that fact, the website design is pretty stellar. I didn't even mind waiting for the pages to load, because there was a progress bar of GNOMES!

One of the first cover designs I ever did for MOVE Magazine, way back in freshman year, was for the Mischievous Gnome Collective. I have no idea if it had anything to do with gnomes or not, but my heart was already set on creating a gnome cover. My photoshop skills were pretty horrible at the time and I had never used illustrator. So I proceeded to draw over a photo of a gnome I took, in Photoshop, filling in each area with different colors. It took for-ev-er.

 MOVE Magazine was also really into gnomes (which I had no objections to) so the guitar gnome made a reappearance a year later on the Kanye cover above(if you can spot him). 

Finally, here's the gnome I made special for all of you... If you have an idea for his name, let me know.

CRITIQUE: Midwives Feature and Prototype

Above is the opening page of the spread i designed for the Midwives Feature, set to run this week. There were several challenges facing me when I started this design. First of all, photos came in pretty late, so my first draft was awful, awful, awful. However, the photos turned out really well I thought. The photographer did a great job and gave me a lot to work with. My original idea was to focus on this whole idea of birthing options and where a natural birth is better than a more modern birth with epidurals and such. That kind of weighed down the design though. Erica wanted to see more baby-like themes in the design, so I went to work on that. I started with pink and blue letters, but I really didn't want to play up the baby aspect that much. I was really pleased with the green and blue color scheme I ended up using. I'll post the final pdf of the 4-page feature that comes out this week on my blog next week.

Now for my prototype for Modern Midwest, I decided to change up the cover story suggested by the publishing team (about seafood restaurants) to one about emerging music scenes. While we met with the publishing team and talked about the target market and ideas for the magazine, I immediately thought of my hometown, Omaha. The city has a fantastic new arts district and has become a hub of the indie music world. The Slowdown (pictured on the cover) opened just a few years ago and I thought it really captured the idea of Modern Midwest. It's a really cool place that I thought worked well for a cover story.

Now to be honest, I really liked the brackets around the nameplate, but no one else seemed to like  them. I wanted to reflect the Slowdown neon sign and thought the brackets represented vibrations or sound waves. I'm not sure whether I'm just going to get rid of them completely or play around with some other similar design elements. Thoughts? The colors I chose for my color pallet are very modern and trendy I felt. They're not bright or eye-popping, but more laid back and inviting. I think they relfect the tone of the magazine well.

For the feature spread, I went with the story about Top 10 seafood restaurants in the Midwest, breaking  some of the myths that there aren't any good ones in the Midwest. I like the idea behind the illustration I made, but I'm going to work with it a lot to execute it better. Also the headline needs a whole lot of work. Jan also suggested using more white space.

Finally, for the department page I wanted to keep a very clean and simple look while utilizing some elements from the nameplate. I'm not sure what I'll do with the department head if I get rid of the brackets. I'm going to make it a lot smaller for sure though. Right now it kind of competes with the headline. Something else I might do is to create a colored tab for the department. After reading Esquire for Magazine Editing this week, I really like the colored tabs. They are very helpful to the reader who flips through the magazine quickly. Also, I'm going to work with more white space and I think I should add a secondary color. Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions in class today!

RESPONSE: Mag+

Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

During the VOX Staff meeting on Monday, we had a Skype session with a developer/designer from Mag+, a program designed to create iPad application for magazines, directly from InDesign files. Going into the presentation, I thought the program seemed too good to be true. Really? A program that will create iPad pages from InDesign pages? I was skeptical.

After watching the presentation, I came away impressed with the program, but I don't think it's as simple as it sounds. One aspect I was really impressed with is the way it's able to convert all the images in an InDesign file to be formatted for the web. That was pretty cool. Also, I liked how you don't have to design two different documents to account for both the horizontal and vertical display on an iPad. However, the "pinning" solution to that problem seemed way more complicated than the presenter seemed to make it.

Overall though, I think this is a program we can make work at VOX. I was shocked when the presenter said Popular Science launched their iPad app the day the iPad went on sale. Now that's forward thinking. I hope we get the chance to work with the software this semester. As Jan said, magazines will hire you in a second if you know how to work with iPad design.

YOU CAN'T MISS: Album Design and Inspiredology

This week on the Media Bistro Unbeige blog, there's a post about Michael Carney winning the Grammy for best packaging design for The Black Keys 'Brothers' (show on the right). First of all, I had no idea that was a category, but that's awesome. While I think the album cover is fairly funny, I wasn't entirely impressed with it. That is until I read that the actual CD has heat-sensitive ink that changes colors. Now that's pretty cool.



The site I would like to feature this week is Inspiredology. I came across the site while looking for some other great album cover designs. They offer a lot of innovative designs, tutorials and videos. They also have some great articles and information about web design, which should come in handy as I start working on my portfolio site this semester. But sticking with the theme of album covers, they have a listing of the top 99 album covers. I have a lot of interest in music-related design, especially band posters. There's such a unique art form to it. It's nice to know you can win a Grammy for it though. Below are my favorites.

Kanye West - Graduation: I'm a fan of just about everything Kanye does, but I really do love this album cover. This album was the third of his great trilogy (College Dropout, Late Registration and Graduation), all of which featured the "Kanye bear." I just love how it goes outside the conventions of most rap artists. I mean, what other rapper would dare to put a stuffed animal bear on their album cover?

Jack's Mannequin - Everything in Transit: I really just love the illustration on this cover. I love anything non-conventional. It's so easy to just throw a profile shot of the artist on the album cover and call it a day, but I appreciate artists willing to take the time to make their album cover a work of art. It's also easy to go over the top with the covers. I think this one is a great middle ground. It's a very subtle illustration that gets the point across.

Bright Eyes - The People's Key: My parents pre-ordered the Bright Eyes album for me for Valentine's Day. You could say they're pretty great... Anyway, Bright Eyes/Conor Oberst usually does a lot of creative things with the packaging of the CD. This one had a tri-fold flap and then a separate envelope that contained the actual CD. Neither the album art or CD art contain the band name. I'm assuming the flames come from the track "Firewall" but who knows. I think it looks pretty cool though.

CRITIQUE: Foreclosure Cover

Foreclosures Draft 2

Foreclosures Draft 3 

After the critique of my first foreclosures covers, the consensus was to work on the one with the giant FORECLOSED stamp across a photo of a home. Erica showed me a magazine to draw some inspiration from, showing several small thumbnails of families on a cover. With the help of Mary Delaware, I was able to obtain 12 photos of foreclosed homes in Columbia, which I used for the cover. I think the improvement from by 2nd draft to my 3rd was tremendous. I agreed with the criticism that it was too busy with all the foreclosed signs and the red lines and red headline font. It was suggested that I make the houses all smaller too. While I think the smaller houses definitely look better on the cover, that unfortunately meant I had to repeat them. Then after two of them were deleted, I had a lot of repetition which I'd rather not have, especially since the story was about the large number of foreclosures. But, that's what I had to go with. 

On Monday night, I worked on the headline typography with the help of Erica and Aaron. Aaron had a good idea to make it look like the Social Network Poster. I went with that and headed home for the night. Well, this morning, Kelsey Whipple informs me that with the letters aligned on the left, if you read from top to bottom it spelled out WANG. Not good. So, just something to keep in mind. Like Jen Rowe has said in our Editing class, sometimes you have to have a dirty mind in this industry in order to catch things that readers could find inappropriate (even if they are just a little funny).

RESPONSE: Plagiarism

In Monday's VOX staff meeting, Professor Jen Rowe gave an in-depth talk on plagiarism. I was glad that she included a lot of design-related plagiarism examples. I think a lot of times people look over intellectual property plagiarism and things like stealing images. With the availability of so many photos and illustrations with the click of a mouse and 0.32 seconds of wait time for results, it's incredibly easy to take the short route by using images from online. It was also a good idea to include a good chunk of the VOX style guide about what images we could use.

While working on past publications (which shall remain nameless), it was common practice to just google image search for clip art, import that image into Illustrator, Livetrace it to change the colors and then print it in the publication. I always felt really shady about that and advocated for changing that practice. VOX has access to several online photo archives and clip art databases, which I think when used appropriately can be very beneficial. It's always important to cite where the clip art comes from as well.

I ran into a problem just yesterday while working on my VOX foreclosures cover. I used several thumbnails of houses that had been foreclosed in Columbia. After the staff meetings I found out that two of the homes were no longer foreclosed and that we weren't sure if we even had permission to use the photos. YIKES. So after a discussion with some VOX editors, we got rid of the two houses. We also received permission later from the realtor to use the photos. Crisis avoided. But I think the talk on plagiarism really opened some eyes in the room as to what is acceptable as far as photos and illustrations go.

Above is the design I chose as a representation of a historical style. The reason I chose it was to go along with the section of the reading on photo sequences. This style is very influenced by Dada as well as by the invention of the first hand held camera in 1923. These new cameras allowed photographers to reposition faster and also had faster shutter speeds in order to take sequence shots. This style has become a prototype of magazine photojournalism. This spread is a good example of photo sequencing, especially with the zoomed-in third frame. The design of it makes it look more like a film strip and gives it action and movement.

YOU CAN'T MISS: Tiny people and Brusheezy

 

This week on the Media Bistro Unbeige Blog, there was a posting about those little people you always see in architectural renderings. They are always fairly vague, non-descriptive and represent different population groups. Rob Walker wrote a column about these for The New York Times Magazine. He says the figures are used mainly to provide a sense of scale next to buildings, monuments, etc. The point is to sell the design to the client, making it seem more realistic. I think that goes along with the "human element" we've been talking about a lot in critiques. Clients want to see how the building would look like with people around it. For VOX covers, it's easier to draw a reader in if they see someone they can connect with. In case you really want some, you can buy a set of 120 people for $70.

 

I know a lot of us have been using sites like fontspace and dafont to download free fonts to use for our designs, but one of my favorite sites is Brusheezy. It's even fun to say. They offer thousands off free fonts you can download to do amazing things with in Photoshop. Often times I see designs and think "How on earth did they illustrate something like that?" Especially illustrated nature scenes. Then I came across Brusheezy and those types of illustrations seemed a lot easier. They even have this cool download for iPod and iPad brushes!

 

RESPONSE: First VOX department pages

This weekend I had my first experience designing VOX department pages. I went in Saturday afternoon expecting to spend several hours getting to know the reins and format of the department pages. However, with the help of Aaron, it was a lot easier than I expected. I was in and out of there in just over an hour. He warned me that it wouldn't always be like that though.

I'm excited to design further pages for Front of Book / Insight. I like the format of the of the VOX department pages. They are structured and easy to design, but still allow for some creativity. As someone who has mostly designed newspaper pages, the structure of magazines is a lot more fun to work with. Another thing that helped was having the design checklist. It might seem annoying, but there were a lot of miniscule things on there that I would usually forget about. I think it's important to take that seriously and not just glance it over.

CRITIQUE: Spring Preview and Foreclosures Covers

 

Pictured above are all my designs since the last time I blogged (minus my Spring Preview cover which I forgot to PDF onto my flash drive and won't open with the CS4 on my computer). The cover was an illustration of a old movie theater marquee. I originally started with an idea about baseball, but I thought it wasn't really appropriate since the issue was coming out in February (and there's 18" of snow on the ground). I decided to go with a movie theme since I had this voice stuck in my head from movie previews like "Coming this spring...". So the marquee sign said "Coming this Spring" and above it said "Sneak Preview." Then I went with a collection of movie posters for the splash page. I ran into some difficulty with the order of the posters. I was trying to use two of each category, but there weren't very many events listed in May. 

For the spread, I was initially intimidated by the number of events, plus the Black History Month sidebar, but after learning we only had to use some of them it made things a lot easier. I used matching colors and themes from the splash page, but I wish I would have added some simple elements to carry the movie theme over to the spread. Also, I didn't leave a whole lot of room for photos, and the ones I did use were so small I might as well have left them off. 

As for the foreclosures covers, I liked the idea of the housing bubbles but I understand the criticism that the bubble has already burst so it's a little confusing. I think it would be a little strange (and difficult) to show a burst bubble too. For my final cover, I'm going to go with the idea of the foreclosed sign across the houses. I think it speaks pretty loudly. However, I'm going to use several photos and create more of a collage of foreclosed homes. I'd like to tie in the human element to it though, which I'm going to try to do with some clever headline and dek writing. 

Finally, I'm also starting to work on my first feature for VOX about Midwives.  It's been fairly difficult so far considering I don't have any photos to work with yet. However, I'm trying to thing of some typographic or illustrated elements I could include on the opening spread. I'd like to emphasize the theme in the story about how a woman should have the choice of how she wants her child to be born. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to do that though.                          

YOU CAN'T MISS: Google's Art Project and Six Revisions

This week on the UnBeige blog, there's an awesome video about the behind the scenes work on Google's new "Art Project," a collection of art available online from seventeen museums around the world. Users can feel like they are in the museum with 360 views and the ability to zoom.  This video just further shows how ridiculously amazing Google is. Plus, I absolutely love time lapse videos and this one takes me to places I've never seen before. It's only about two minutes, you should definitely check it out.

Another site you can't miss it http://sixrevisions.com/ . This is one of my favorite sites for Photoshop tutorials, which I use A LOT. I don't claim to be any sort of expert whatsoever in Photoshop, but I think I'm pretty good at following directions, especially when they are clear, like the ones on this site. I found this site when I was looking for Photoshop help a few years ago and came across the Top 50 Photoshop Tutorials of 2009. They're pretty great. Especially the one on how to mold paint splatter to a face. Woah.