Critique: My first attempt

Before I can work out the specifics of Advanced Design or understand the schedule at Vox Magazine, my professors are five steps ahead of me and scheduling the due date of my first design assignment. I arrived in the Vox office and tentatively crossed the imaginary line that divides the place I have always stood in front of Kim Townlain's desk and the rest of the room.

My design competition assignment included a cover, two feature spreads, and one additional feature page. The story was about a NASCAR racing father who had devoted much of his time to turning his 2-year-old into a pageant queen. Like TLC's "Toddlers in Tiaras," but without making you want to punch the parent. I made text boxes, I pulled art from Illustrator, I played with fonts, I chose photos... All the while frantically trying to imitate the "Vox Style." This was different from my designs last semester because I was working under a different context. This design represented my skills and provided a placement test. That's a lot of pressure for a first attempt. So - here are the results.

Looking back, I put too much pressure on myself to abide by the standards and style of Vox, and it compromised my final design. I designed my pages in an attempt to fit in, not stand out. This is not something I was conscious of while I was doing it, but now I know I spent way too much time trying to mimic what had already been done and not coming up with my own ideas. I wasn't completely embarrassed of the end product, but I knew it wasn't my best work because it lacked creativity.

I chose to print out my final pages in the morning, when the J-Library opened at 8 a.m. Everything was going according to plan, until I pulled up my pages on the J-Library's computers and realized that they didn't have any of the same fonts as the Vox computers. Now it all made sense why people were bringing their jump drives to class and uploading from the server... Hmm. No fonts means my design is basically nothing like I wanted. The pictures in this blog DO have the correct fonts, but the boards I turned in looked nothing like those. I had ruined my whole first project because all the typography was different from the designs I spent hours on. Between my haphazard gluing and cutting, incorrect matting, and the absence of all the Vox fonts, I'm sure my project was immediately overlooked.

Jan mentioned in class on Tuesday that designs that were submitted that had clearly not followed mounting and gluing directions were thrown out. If I hadn't been immediately disqualified for my hideous cutting tactics, I definitely was for not having any of the template fonts ANYWHERE to be found on ANY of the pages. Oops.

Okay, so assignment one didn't go so well, but making all the biggest mistakes now means I definitely won't make them again next time. I just realized how much I have yet to learn, but I can't do that just by copying the hard work of others. From now on, I will make all my own mistakes. At least that way I can defend myself because those designs will be all my own.