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.