You can't miss these magazine covers.

I've always envied how some people can easily choose beautiful color palettes. When I am designing, deciding what colors to use is sometimes the hardest part. For magazine covers, the color can make the difference between someone picking it up off the newsstand or passing it by. ColourLovers.com, a website on color and color palettes, has created an index of magazine cover color choices and trends. A screenshot of their website is to the right. You can see current magazine color choices and click on each magazine to see what their color choices have been in past months. For example GQ has a trend of using black, white, red and bright cyan on its covers.

Over at Publication Design, there is a recent entry on Metropoli covers, a weekly supplement of El Mundo. The art director has posted 50 covers. The gallery of covers has a majority of typography driven covers with diverse treatments and almost all being bright and colorful. I really enjoyed the concept and design of the two below. Take a look at the gallery to see more.

Publication Design has also posted a before and after of the redesign of Dairy Today. The new design definitely has more appeal. The magazine now has a fresh, clean, bold and updated look. Each issue will feature a "portrait" of a cow on the cover. Watch the video to see the difficulties of a photo shoot with a cow for a model.

Response Number 1

Jenn's comment in her blog about our Vox critique getting her brain going is how I feel about the CRMA judging we did yesterday. Listening to others defend their choices brought up a lot of different elements of those designs than I had not thought about when I had looked at them to make my choices. There was such a wide variety of design that it became hard to choose my top picks. From the grittier designs to the bright yellow spread on happiness, the magazines used color, photos, art and layout in different ways. I loved the layout and use of color in the feature spread on spices. My initial favorite though was the one that ended up in first place. The Big Brains spread immediately caught my attention. I was impressed by the consistency of the design on every page, and it was a long feature. Yet, it also didn't become repetitive. The design also broke down the text into smaller, manageable pieces, which made me want to sit down and start reading it even though there were not an abundance of images or photos.

This judging process helped me realize I need to learn how to be more articulate about the reasons why I like or dislike certain designs. It also helped me to realize that I need to think more creatively when approaching assignments.

I was glad that I had already read through half of Graphic Style before the judging process. It is interesting to see the influences of historic eras on current design. One of the spreads seemed to call upon the Victorian era with the type set to fill the page with some words larger than others. I haven't ever taken an art history course, so learning about the different arts movements was new to me, although I knew vaguely about a few, such as Art Deco and Art Nouveau. The quick descriptions in the book were helpful, but I wanted more information on the designers that were mentioned frequently.

Critique Number 1

I am excited to have already accomplished designs in the first week and a half of this semester. The quick jump back into designing was hard at first, but ended with that feeling of accomplishment. Brainstorming was at first frustrating. My initial ideas all related to the mess, frustration and paperwork of becoming or staying a legal. I thought about blurred edges and the fuzziness that might represent the immigrations system as opposed to the focus in Missouri by groups, such as the Centro Latino. I also thought about scrambled words/letters to represent how immigrants must figure out the paperwork for legalization. Until that point, I still wasn’t coming up with any images I could use for the cover. So I started searching for images of immigration online to spark ideas. After I came across the image of the caution sign with the family running and the word “prohibido” on a sign below it, I decided I could come up with something to work with that concept.

I decided to add to the "prohibido" sign in order to show the local aspect of the story, the assistance being provided by places in Missouri. My original cover is below.
For my feature I used the original ideas I had about the fuzziness of the immigration system and the paperwork. I tried to find a fuzzy font for the headline and layered the photos and “paper” of the sidebar to create the image of paperwork.
Becky Bierig's cover and my cover both used the same concept, and were chosen to be merged together for the Jan. 31 cover. We worked off of Becky's layout and added the second sign from my design. We also reduced the size of the signs to allow the black space around the signs to draw the eye in. I think this cleaner design works a lot better than my original design with the more busy road background. For some reason, I felt the need to fill the background with the road image, rather than let it breathe. I also now think that the road didn't add much at all to the concept. The road sign itself did enough. In addition, on my original cover the sell lines did not pop out from the page.

As for my feature I still like my paperwork theme with the sidebar and photos. However, the spreads themselves are a little too simple and bland. I plan to revise the features spreads and make it feel less text heavy.

My upcoming design work will be for the Feb. 7 music department of Vox. Especially because the art for this issue is almost all publicity photos, I am hoping to be able to design the anchor story page to complement the album art of the artist, who is releasing a new CD, and make the page more exciting than just publicity photos. I am also still brainstorming cover ideas for the Feb. 14 Vox cover on the eyesore that is the construction downtown. I will begin working on the shutter graffiti assignment, for which I plan to use the letters of my name. Meanwhile for other classes, I am starting a Flash project and a digital imaging project .