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).
First off, congratulations on having your cover design chosen. I think the final product is interesting, as I don't think it's a type of design that is usually expected from VOX. While it's nice design, it seems out of character for VOX. I think it's interesting that the editors had you tone it down so much. I would have liked to see a version where you removed the individual "forecloses" from the little houses on your revised draft but kept the "Where have all the neighbors gone?" text in the red. I think it would have been punchier. Good job coming up with and then executing a concept for a cover without having intriguing art at your disposal.
ReplyDeleteGreat job on your cover design. It is kind of unfortunate that you were forced to repeat the houses on the cover, but overall the smaller houses look a lot cleaner. I think it turned out really well. I also agree that the first cover with all the foreclosed signs was too busy, but you managed to have the same effect without needing them. I'm curios to see what the headline would have looked like in red like Danielle suggested. It might have made a bigger impact.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Christina that it was unfortunate that the houses were repeated on the cover. I really like the final product though. I believe the font was changed a bit to make a bigger distinction between the headline and the sell lines which was a good idea. I also love that you included the information about the alignment affecting how readers would view the headline. That is something I would not have noticed while designing.
ReplyDeleteIt turned out really well and printed nicely. Because it is so different from a lot of Vox covers, I think it showed a nice change in pace. Congrats!
First off, what a catch! Thank goodness we didn't print WANG on the cover of Vox. It really makes you think more about the potentially wacky things type styling can do.
ReplyDeleteOn to your design: I really liked the finished product. I think you improved on the design so much from draft to draft. The finished product looks cool, topical and confident. It'll make a really nice addition to your portfolio!
Oh my gosh. I NEVER would have noticed the "wang" element unless an editor had pointed it out! Good thing we have them helping us with our designs with all that pesky English and grammatical stuff... By the way, good luck on the editing test this week!
ReplyDeleteI think your final cover turned out great and it was so much of an improvement compared to the draft we saw in class. There's not many times you can get away with using a question mark in a cover headline (or any headline for that matter), so I'm glad you got to use this opportunity to pull it off. All the small photos of homes makes the story hit so much closer to home because we have those real life examples to associate with this terrible, sad story. Great job, Joe.