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.