Response: Portfolio Critiques and the Final 5 Logos

This week, we have devoted a lot of time to critiquing our peers' portfolios during our class time. I think it has been a really beneficial opportunity to see the talent of others as well as to get us motivated to start actively preparing for our futures. I haven't presented my designs yet, but I was surprised to find out just how many examples I actually had. I know I haven't had all the experiences some of the other people in class have, but I don't think I'm going to have a problem filling a portfolio for potential employers and job interviews. It's kind of exciting to see the culmination of everyone's hard work! It's a little scary to hear others' criticism, but in the end, it will only improve our chances for success.

While awaiting my chance to present my portfolio designs, I had also been altering my final five Sports Journalism Institute logos, which ended up getting cut down to three. I really have no idea what the outcome of the judging will be for this project. Everyone had such great logo concepts and I think most of us were in unfamiliar territory here. Logos may be one of the most painstaking design tasks so far. You have to say so much with so little, and the design ends up making even more of an impact than the words themselves, so the design construct becomes even more tedious. After some slow-moving revisions, here are the final three I ended up submitting:

I felt that color was the best tool to reflect diversity for these logos, so I tried to choose strong colors that didn't distract, but grabbed the viewer's attention. I think I like the bottom one best. Erica and Jan suggested I fill in the circle outline I was using previously, which ended up being a great idea that I was kicking myself I hadn't thought of before! The circle has no identifying marks, so I thought it could symbolize many sports by just supplying the "ball" image. To incorporate diversity, I used spot color for "Journalism," and I also made that word a bit larger than the other two. The Institute's tagline is that they help women and minorities into newsrooms, so I thought this sandwiching of words could represent their efforts to interpolate minority journalists into sports journalism. I thought the orange circle helped provide that retro look Greg Bowers had mentioned to us from the start. I'm very interested to see what the outcome will be and which logo ends up being used for the foundation's branding.