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.