RESPONSE: My greatest college accomplishment

 

This week, I ventured to the fourth floor of Ellis Library for the second time in my college career. But this time it was different. I was seeking out the mystical microfilm room I had only read stories about online. Frankly, I was terrified. But I had chosen Rolling Stone for my historical perspectives assignments and the library only offered it on microfilm. Unfortunately, when I got up to the creepy wing with the microfilm, the office that helps people like me who are clueless about the tiny film, was closed. I was on my own. I walked into a room and faced pullout cabinets from the floor to the ceiling. Somehow, locating the first volume of Rolling Stone was the easiest part of my day. 

Then the fun really began. In the room with the microfilm readers, half of them had signs across the screens indicating they no longer worked. You mean no one knows how to fix these ancient machines? Shocking. I selected the machine that was able to convert the microfilm into pdfs that I could save on a flash drive. To use this machine, not only was there a 15+ step hand drawn infographic on the wall, but also a 25+ page manual on how to use this specific machine. Woof. 

Long story short, I spent four hours flipping through slides and converting them, but it was pretty fascinating. I might go back and look and old magazine on microfilm for fun sometime. Plus, at the end of the day I felt unbelievably accomplished for having learned to use microfilm by myself.  

CRITIQUE: Flyer Design!

 

This is a flyer I designed this week for the Newman Volunteer Corps fundraiser for a library project for victims of human trafficking. The Newman Volunteer Corps is a group of students and resident parishioners of the St. Thomas More Newman Center on campus who plan the service, social justice and education events for the parish. I serve as the Technology Director for NVC and since we couldn't find an Advertising Chair, those duties usually fall to me too. So, I've spent most of my week working on the advertising for this fundraiser.  It presented some challenges in that I had to also think of the theme for the event before I could start designing. I started with "Dining for Dollars" (clever, I know), then went to "Dining for Brighter Futures" before coming up with "Light Up the Night," which I really liked because of the symbolism behind it. 

I wanted to hype up the dinner theater aspect of the event with the design. I feel like a lot of people want to support a good cause, but they don't necessarily care what that cause is. Plus, I think this organization is fairly obscure, so making their name and logo huge wasn't going to help bring people in. While the topic is obviously serious, I wanted to make the flyer kind of fun and inviting. We've had some trouble attracting people to our events in the past, so I wanted to reach as many audiences as possible. Let me know what you think. Also, you should come to the event! We have over 8 musical and dance acts lined up and a great dinner. AND it's only $12 for students!       

CRITIQUE: Final Meredith Feature

This is the final draft of my feature story for Modern Midwest about the Top 10 seafood restaurants in the Midwest. It was the only design I changed fairly drastically and felt worthy of posting again. Through the recommendation of the class, I worked with the headline typography a lot and also made my images a lot larger. The headline typography is a play-off of the Chicken of the Sea logo. As I explained to the publishing team I thought that worked well because of the whole Jessica Simpson thing (you're welcome). In contrast to that, the typical Midwesterner would recognize that typography and get the reference. I played around with different words for a while. I tried Chicken of the Great Plains, but the Great Plains don't really cover all of the Midwest by definition. I think that headline would have worked better with the illustration though. Right now, I think it's kind of weird, because I have this headline about fish coming from the Great Lakes, but then I have an illustration of them growing out of the ground on corn stalks. I made the photo a lot larger too because I thought it was very appealing. I have no idea where it was taken, but who wouldn't want to go to a restaurant with a 20 pound lobster on top!? (I mean, unless you're afraid it's going to fall through the roof, in which case I would avoid at all costs.) I shortened up the text on the left page a bit to give the headline and deck some more breathing room. Overall, I was pleased with how it turned out. The presentation to the publishing team was pretty painless as well. They asked a lot of great questions. I'm looking forward to working with them as well as the design team as the semester progresses.

RESPONSE: The September Issue

I'll be honest. I've never even glanced at a copy of Vogue. I'd like to think I'm fashionable, but I'm not into fashion. I'd heard of the movie The September Issue, but I didn't know it was about Vogue. I didn't even know who Anna Wintour was. After seeing this movie, I hope I never run into her in a dark alley.

The thing I found most interesting about this movie was the role of the Creative Director. In the entire movie, I never saw her open InDesign on her computer. I thought maybe there just wasn't a lot of page design in Vogue, but rather just the photos. But after seeing the final product, there's a lot of elaborate page design that goes into it. However, Grace Coddington spent most of her time picking out clothes for models and arranging photoshoots. While that was surprising, her impact on the design and feel of the magazine was obvious, as explained by Wintour at the end.

My favorite feature that was shown in the film was the one that included the film crew. I thought that was just an absolutely brilliant idea. Not only that, but Grace came up with the idea under deadline pressure and it worked beautifully. I really like how she fought to not not have the cameraman's stomach touched up. She didn't want him to look like a model, but rather an imperfect human being. The final product (shown at right) was a very fresh, well executed idea.

I also learned a lot about the relationship between the editor and the creative director. Honestly, Wintours was terrifying. She didn't even have to say a word. She could just stare at you. I don't know how you could stand facing her day after day. Grace does a fantastic job of pushing Wintours and fighting for her work though. That's something I feel like I need to do sometimes. I'm too willing to just change whatever someone else thinks is bad, even if I absolutely love it.

YOU CAN'T MISS: The New Yorker's Signature Reimagined and GNOMES!

This week on the Media Bistro Unbeige blog, there's a post about the 12 finalists for the re-imagination of The New Yorker's mascot Eustace Tilley. Apparently they received over 600 entries for the contest. The winner gets their design on a tote bag. Woah. If that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what would. Anyway, I came away relatively unimpressed with some of the designs, but maybe that's because I don't understand the New Yorker demographic. Regardless, here a some of my favorites:

While I have no idea if this looks anywhere close to Manhattan, I thought the idea was brilliant and well executed. I didn't get that it was the mascot at first, but I caught on quickly. I'm assuming their readers are at least 10 times smarter than I am, so I'm judging myself on a curve.

This one reminded me of some kind of Japanese-type art, but I was still pulled to it. Something about the bottom image of the old man looking out his window at the butterfly was just incredibly beautiful.

I really like this one because of the modern appeal to it. However, it also looks like a cross between a street sign and an iPod commercial. It just lacks some originality.You can check the rest of the finalists out here.







Finally, its been a rough week for a lot of us I'm sure with the Meredith presentations and what not. I know I'm ready to sleep for the next 24 hours straight. In light of that I bring you: GNOMES!! First of all, if you haven't seen Gnomeo and Juliet yet, you should. It's pretty great. What's also great is this website they put together for the movie in which you can MAKE YOU OWN GNOME! How flippin' cool is that? Besides that fact, the website design is pretty stellar. I didn't even mind waiting for the pages to load, because there was a progress bar of GNOMES!

One of the first cover designs I ever did for MOVE Magazine, way back in freshman year, was for the Mischievous Gnome Collective. I have no idea if it had anything to do with gnomes or not, but my heart was already set on creating a gnome cover. My photoshop skills were pretty horrible at the time and I had never used illustrator. So I proceeded to draw over a photo of a gnome I took, in Photoshop, filling in each area with different colors. It took for-ev-er.

 MOVE Magazine was also really into gnomes (which I had no objections to) so the guitar gnome made a reappearance a year later on the Kanye cover above(if you can spot him). 

Finally, here's the gnome I made special for all of you... If you have an idea for his name, let me know.

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!

RESPONSE: Mag+

Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

During the VOX Staff meeting on Monday, we had a Skype session with a developer/designer from Mag+, a program designed to create iPad application for magazines, directly from InDesign files. Going into the presentation, I thought the program seemed too good to be true. Really? A program that will create iPad pages from InDesign pages? I was skeptical.

After watching the presentation, I came away impressed with the program, but I don't think it's as simple as it sounds. One aspect I was really impressed with is the way it's able to convert all the images in an InDesign file to be formatted for the web. That was pretty cool. Also, I liked how you don't have to design two different documents to account for both the horizontal and vertical display on an iPad. However, the "pinning" solution to that problem seemed way more complicated than the presenter seemed to make it.

Overall though, I think this is a program we can make work at VOX. I was shocked when the presenter said Popular Science launched their iPad app the day the iPad went on sale. Now that's forward thinking. I hope we get the chance to work with the software this semester. As Jan said, magazines will hire you in a second if you know how to work with iPad design.