Response: Judging

Making choices is hard.

I thought the process of selecting the top magazines was fascinating. Having a group of people make decisions based on their individual preferences and then forcing the group to reach a consensus is almost cruel.

I (and probably others, as well) felt like a lot of really great spreads were discarded.

Personally, I feel almost responsible for not properly sticking up for a few of them, and of course not representing one I really love well enough to convince anyone it deserved to stick around. I tried to be super honest, though.

After going through the process of explaining and defending my own designs, I found it extremely difficult to defend someone else's work.

1. Because there were a few things I felt could be changed to make it better and

2. Because there wasn't any way I could know exactly what the designer had intended.

It is nice to have the opportunity to tell one another what our thought process was and what effect we were going for. Readers don't have that luxury. There's no sticky note on the page cluing them in to why we placed that line there or why we chose that typeface.

So, design becomes art. Left up to the interpretation of its audience regardless of its creator's intent. Scary. I think this is making my prototype project even more intimidating.

Critique: Magazine Prototype

Modern Midwest:

Referring to the plans the team had created, I wanted to steer away from the typical set up for covers – essentially, no wreaths or white plates of food. I wanted it to reflect what the magazine was about: cool places to go, things to do or see, etc in the Midwest. And two covers down (here and here), I realized sushi makes for a truly horrible cover.

For my color palette I chose five colors I was pretty excited about. They were bright and a fun combination of colors not typically associated with the midwest. Because while this magazine is about the midwest and for the midwest, it is also about breaking stereotypes of the midwest. (Do you capitalize Midwest?)

I created a cutout version of each cover and played around with the typeface on the cover. I think it could be pushed a little more. Right now, I am really liking the idea of having the words just bleed off the page. I just don't know how much each can be pushed and still remain legible.

(Here's a link to my department, which needs a lot of spicing up, and to my feature, which needs more focus.)

You Can't Miss: Blue Holes and thedesignwork.com

Blue Holes of the Bahamas:

Colourlovers has once again found an interesting way to pick color schemes. Looking at the Blue Holes (areas of water that are different, usually darker, shades of blue than the surrounding water) in the Bahamas, the site posts color combinations of bacteria, cave shrimp, and of course the two blue holes pictured above. I find the inspiration for these palettes to be so beautiful and specifically unique to the natural sea life.

thedesignwork.com:

This website is a really large collection of posts featuring photos, demonstrations and tutorials as well as links to other design blogs. Some really excellent examples include the entries covering typography, 3-D animation in Photoshop, and blog designs.

It is a really fascinating variety of work that is being showcased. Work by design studios offer links to their website as well as visual representation of their site and current projects.

Response: Historical Magazine Designs

Drawing comparisons: For this assignment we were supposed to find covers or spread that had taken inspiration from past designs.

I found this cover design to be similar, but definitely different. The obvious similarity is the use of cut outs. What I think is the main difference is the size each photo is played on the page. Clearly, the historical example of this montage of past covers uses a variety of sizes for the objects in the design. In "Entertainment Weekly's" review cover, there is very little variation in the size of the people.

I think these have different effects due to the basic way that we view pictures, but I also think those effects are intentional. Each issue has itsown purpose and its own desired outcome. The historical cover comes across as more of a personal reflection of stories covered that year while EW's cover is more of a collection of people the magazine has featured in some way or an

other.

I chose this example (also from EW) that highlighted "typographic expressions" with an illustration. They are pretty similar (and yes, the spread about Hunger Games is backwards). Some difference can be seen in type treatment - "Hunger Games" is set apart from the rest of the title in color and bleeds to the edge of the spread. Also, the body text has a more traditional layout on this spreadthan in the historical example. All in all, it is a little less abstract than Herb Lubalin's (the designer for the "Pleasure Painter") and more structured to fit the EW style.

In this last comparison, the way that text is displayed in this historical design is quite interesting. (It actually reminds me of the "Daily Prophet" from Harry Potter. If it was moving...) Like the blocked type that provides structure and segments the spread, this more recent spread from "Good" uses thinner lines along with varied text sizes and fonts to organize the information. Even though all of the text in this spread is horizontal, the contrast between black and white is still very clear.

Critique: First Group (2) Cover Contest

(first) Cover: I really liked the photos for this competition a lot better than I the photos for the pageant story, so I chose to make two covers with photo choices. For the three different covers, I used the three different headline options. For the headline Butts, I had thought of using a photo illustration, but this photo of the girl's hand and her cigarette. I placed the headline near the butt of the cigarette because my original thought was to treat it like a label. This is the cover that was chosen for me to work on.

The other two designs:



To explain the sell line treatment on the cover with the second photo, I was thinking that if I was a "social" smoker (so, someone who didn't really consider themselves a smoker), I wouldn't want my face on the cover of a magazine engaging in a habit that I don't feel like is a huge part of my life.

The third design was based off of a facebook logo that I found online. I created the logo in Illustrator and added the cigarette. For the font, I used futura because it looked the font from the movie social network. (I had also thought about using a font that looked like facebook's.)

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What's next:
My updated cover design is due in lab, so that is my current project. For class we have the logo designs coming up and, of course, the Meredith projects. I will be working on the Modern Midwest design, and I am looking forward to learning more about that publication as it develops.
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You can't miss: Dribbble.com and Seamless

dribbble.com: Dribbble.com is an online gallery for designers to share projects. "Shots" (or small glimpses of designs) are uploaded to share with "spectators" and "players." Players are recruited by current members.

This site has a really interesting variety of

work. I really like the fact that the people

developing these designs can get

feedback on their work and some

publicity at the same time.

colourlover's seamless: Seamless is a program people can use to create patterns.

Users choose from a huge-mongous list of shapes and objects to manipulate the size, placement and color in a design. Users can then share their designs, tweet about them and "love" (similar to facebook's "like" function) or comment on them. Designs even receive ranks based on views and ratings.

The pattern can then be broken down into a list of colors used. (This is like the color trending I referred to earlier. Where the exact color information is listed. So, if one likes a color, one can

pull that information from this program to use in the future.)

Colourlover's blog recently highlighted a lot of

patterns created by users this past December. Many of

them were made using the "color a pattern" feature

where users can manipulate the colors of an existing

pattern. It's cool to see how different the templates

look when different color schemes are plugged in.

Response: Department Design

I designed the BOB section on Sunday. After being walked through the process (which was super helpful), the designing didn't take very long. I really appreciated the organization of everything. There was a learning curve to figure out where exactly everything was and what resources were available, but everyone was very helpful and patient as I worked through the first page.

I would say the redesign took more time than my original design. Because the BOB section recently underwent some small changes, I had to reformat some of the content from the template to keep up with the new style.

Nothing I did for that page was very impressive, but I did get a brief overview on text-wrapping (something I had rarely used in the past). It was a great refresher. I am glad we will be using InDesign so much, so when I graduate, I won't have as much to catch up on. It will all be fresh.