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!