Critique 5

This week has been spent on a couple different design projects. Anne and I worked on making a few more changes to the True/False spread for this Thursday’s issue of Vox. I’m excited to see how it turns out in print.
I also designed a poster for the Missouri Association of Publications Summit. Having seen even more of my classmates’ work, I think they might be overwhelmed by all of our posters and having to choose one. This is the one I submitted.
I’ve also been working more on my portfolio website. I can see the end in sight pretty soon. I’m working on putting my portfolio pieces on there, but hope to edit the selection after feedback from our class’s portfolio reviews. Hopefully I will be able to add some more exciting components to my website as I learn more in my Flash class.

Response 5

I was pretty nervous about portfolio reviews in class, but it ended up being really insightful. I was impressed by all the work our class has done. We really have a range of talent and styles in our class. It’s amazing how much everyone has done just within their college years. It was, however, hard to critique and choose the top three portfolio pieces in each round. I found it hard to limit to just three, especially for the people who had such diverse pieces. This is one thing I think I need to have in my portfolio, a bit more of a diversity of work. I’m actually kind of excited to get back the critiques and see if what everyone thinks of my work. And I can’t wait to see the rest of the class’s portfolios.

You can't miss this hodge-podge of cool design!

Publication Design had another good post last week that I didn’t mention. These posters are really cool and conceptual. If only I could speak Greek! However, I did find some of these designer quotes on other websites. Here are a couple examples below. The first is by Nikos Koutsmanis and is the Paul Rand quote, “Everything is design. Everything!” The second is by Dimitris Arvanitis and is the Massimo Vignelli quote, “A designer should only use these 5 typefaces: Bodoni, Helvetica, Times Roman, Century, Futura.”
I also found this great website with Saul Bass’s illustration work on the opening credits for movies. You can see a sequence of Anatomy of A Murder (1959), which is in Graphic Style, as well as the many other films he worked on. Some of the illustrations from the opening credits of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) reminded me of some of the illustrations from Good Housekeeping in the 1960s. Here's one image from it. Enjoy!

Response 4

The history presentations in class Tuesday were fascinating. It’s amazing how much magazines have changed, but also how much they have stayed the same. I thought Kirby’s presentation on Ladies Home Journal during WWII was particularly interesting. I love history and was interested by the impact of the magazine on that time period, such as with the mother/daughter cover illustrations, which were picked up by the government for propaganda. As for the design and the magazine content structure from her presentation, Ladies Home Journal seemed similar to Good Housekeeping in the 1960s, which I looked at. The nameplate and cover design changed often and inconsistently. The serial fiction stories were definitely illustrated in a similar, romance novel style. Also, each issue had front of book regular content and then the feature well, which would have one introduction page or spread to a story. The rest of the book was nothing but text-filled pages of the continued stories. Was this to save space? I wonder how many women read past the first spread of a story. Also, as you’ll see in my presentation, I was impressed by the range of feature design, especially in the early 1960s. It wasn’t what I was expecting from a traditional women’s magazine. I took way too many photos, so here are a few that didn’t fit in my presentation.

Critique 4

Most of my design work this week has been on the True/False feature package. These are my completed first drafts. I wanted to keep the pages uncluttered, but still use elements, such as arrows, that related back to the old film/countdown leader concept.Anne and I have now merged our ideas and completed our second draft. The feature is now seven pages, so we moved our countdown leader to the splash page and extended the first feature story to two pages. I think this works really well. The splash page plus our border gives the whole feature a packaged feeling. Images of our splash page options and the rest of the feature spreads are below.This week I’ve also been working on getting art for the March 6th Vox music department and I’ve also been working on my website. Here’s an example of how I want it to look.

You can't miss this blog

This week Publication Design had a post with a link to another design blog, Grain Edit, which posts mostly about design from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. From photos of the works of Dick Bruna (yes, I do own a Miffy key chain and I love it, Dick Bruna covers are above and Miffy is the first image below) to the influenced contemporary work of Mr. Mannun, this site has a variety of posts that can provide inspiration. I love the Mr. Mannun card they chose to post on their blog, see below. He’s also designed posters for bands, such as My Morning Jacket and Boy Least Likely To.



I must have hit the jackpot this week in finding Grain Edit. The blog also had a link to David Airey’s website, which has a list of what he considers to be the top 50 graphic design blogs. The ones we are covering for class are included, but there are several new ones to check out as well. Happy reading/viewing!

Critique 3

This week has been pretty busy from our trip to Meredith to starting my first feature for Vox this semester. I'm currently working with Anne on the True/False feature, which will take up all 6 pages of the feature well. We think we've come up with a pretty good concept. We wanted to do something different from past years' coverage of True/False. Check out this link for a bit of our inspiration. Hopefully when we get the text it will all fit in smoothly with our concept. Here's a rough (very rough, not done) draft of the first spread. I'll be working on that more tonight, as soon as I am done posting here.I'm also close to completing a couple digital imaging projects this week. This is a photo I took at the skate park in Cosmo Park and altered in Photoshop. I can't say I'm terribly proud of it, but I think it has been good practice in learning how to use the pen tool better.
I finished my first flash animation this past week, as well. Later in the semester I will post the link to my flash assignments, once I've had a chance to fix up my website. And just for fun, I bought a clear travel coffee mug that you can decorate yourself. I decided it would be fun to make it my own and designed this for the cup.It didn't end up looking quite as planned once I got it cut out and in the cup. Next time, I'll make sure to not use straight lines on a curved cup!

You can't miss these illustrators

Andrea’s recent post about the survival of illustration in a photography-heavy world got me thinking this week. Maybe illustrations are making a comeback, or did they even ever start to die? It seems a lot of commercial products have been using illustrations lately. For example, both Nike and Apple have had ad campaigns with illustration as a main component of the design. The Nike ad below is from a few years ago and the one below it is from an Apple iPod tv ad of recent years.
Meanwhile Publication Design featured an accomplished illustrator, Nick Dewar. Check out his portfolio to see some of his amazing work. Also interesting is the But How section of his website in which he describes his creative process. A sample of his illustrations is below.
Here’s the website of another amazing illustrator/designer. Her cutout collage pieces are detailed, beautiful and unique. Two examples of her work are below.

Response 3

I enjoyed taking another look at Metropoli and its art director Rodrigo Sanchez at underconsideration.com after writing about the cover gallery on here before. The author, Armin Vit (also one of the participants in Layer Tennis) addressed an interesting point about the design of the magazine. He wrote, “The logos — or mastheads — of a magazine are sacred. They are the bastion of recognizability on which publishers rest the majority of their hopes that the passersby will choose to grab that magazine in the newsstand…” While Sanchez adapts the Metropoli logo to fit each cover design, for some reason I think the covers are still recognizable. On the other hand, this could be because I am looking at them all together in the gallery. Interestingly, Sanchez calls this integrating the masthead fully with the cover design and says that the change didn’t seem to bother readers. Readers liked it. For more pondering, I also found another quote from Sanchez on newsdesigner.com: “We must cause the reader to dedicate more than 4 seconds of contemplation of the cover. If it is necessary we give him 4 minutes. And, if it is possible, we give him a lifetime to think about it and try to find out what it is we tried to tell him. ... By the way, the covers are thrown away the next day or wrap fish. The ideas remain beaten in the walls.” The photo above is Rodrigo Sanchez, from the blog VisualMente.

You can't miss these designers and an update on the Publication Design blog

While the layer tennis website is in and of itself cool, it also lead me to looking at these participating designers’ websites. Bran Dougherty-Johnson’s Grow Design Works site shows his animations, print design, font design and logos. I loved this animation he created for Yo Gabba Gabba and Nick Jr, as well as the more typographical animation Change. A still frame from this film is below.
After watching most of the movie Helvetica in class yesterday, this post on Publication Design caught my attention. If Helvetica is a neutral font, what do the typographic choices of presidential campaign paraphernalia mean? Do sans-serif typefaces look more modern and serifs appear more traditional? And if change is the buzzword for this election how come most of the design isn’t fresh?

Response 2

I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s blogs. They are all now links to instant inspiration. Everyone had really interesting posts, but I was most captivated by Kirby’s link to “Layer Tennis.” I ended up spending a little too long on that website looking at the matches. I was impressed that these designers create these volleys in 15 minutes. It would take me longer than that to come up with ideas, let alone execute it. Brainstorming and not stopping after just a few ideas is something I would like to work on. As I said in my critique this week, I need to push myself to push the envelope and go beyond my safe comfort zone. My favorite match on the layer tennis website is the December 7th match between Jason Koxvold and Bran Dougherty-Johnson. The volleys were clever, and how can you not like the happy tennis ball?
I also found this was a great way to see different designers’ styles. The designers range from graphic and bold to bright and cartoony, and everything in between. Here are a couple examples below.
If you didn’t check out Kirby’s link before, you should now. Or wait till you have enough time because you’ll definitely want to look around.

Critique Number 2

This past weekend was my first music department design for Vox this semester. For art, I had all publicity stills, so I had hoped to do something more exciting with the design. However, as we talked about in class, I didn’t push the envelope. I didn’t realize that we could use album art however we want either. I love how Meredith added the album art as part of the design of the page. It added extra energy to a page that was otherwise boring. For the next music department I design, I hope to plan more interesting art ahead of time, and of course push the envelope.
Before:
After (in other words, better):

I also worked on a design for the cover of the Feb. 14 Vox, which included photos. The cover story is about the city development in Columbia and the ugly construction downtown. I decided to focus on the construction aspect and brainstormed ways of visually representing it. Blueprints and sketches were the first things I thought about. I ended up using scaffolding to illustrate the downtown construction. From the photos, I chose to use the one of the steel construction on top of Quinton’s because of how unattractive the stalled project is. I incorporated the photo into the design by making it a 3-D block and setting it on the scaffolding. Other than the illustration of the scaffolding, I tried to keep the cover clean. I thought the colors I chose popped out from the page more than the last cover I designed. I also added a crane hook onto the O of Vox, which I thought was a fun addition.
Outside of Vox, this week I looked at Columbia in a new way. Picking letters from various signs around town for a project called Shutter Graffiti made me look more closely at the places I’ve been over and over again but never noticed. There seemed to be an abundance of red letters or red backgrounds on signs and a lot of sans-serif signs, but there were also a variety of typefaces and colors. I chose a somewhat eclectic mix of letters to spell my name. I think it gives it a fun, bright crazy feel. See the end result below.
Here’s where all the letters came from:

• L- cooL stuff
• i- domInos
• n- flyiNg cow
• d- nooDles and company
• s- Sake
• e- Envy
• y- sparkY’s

If I were to do this project again, which I would like to do (my digital camera
unfortunately died during this project, I guess it had a decent almost 5-year life), I would take more time to go all over Columbia looking for the perfect letters to make a more consistent collage of letters. One idea, which would be very simple, would be to find all white letters on different color backgrounds.
Coming up, I will be working on the Feb. 28 feature for Vox, which is on the True/False Festival. I plan to revise my cover and the feature design from Jan. 31. I soon (hopefully tonight!) will be working on revising my website and adding portfolio pieces. I will also be deciding which time period and magazine I want to study and present in class.