Critique: Modern Midwest Prototype

I agonized over the designs for my prototype. I was so frustrated by the fact that we basically had nothing to go off of (in terms of copy and photos), and that frustration caused the project to take more time than necessary. I have to admit that I felt completely lost. How do you design a magazine from scratch? Where's the handbook on that? I wanted to try and make an energetic personality for the prototype because I thought that would make it stand out amongst the many other lifestyle magazines that exist. I stay far, far away from that style of publication because they bore me, or so I thought.

After starting this project, I have begun to look at lifestyle and food magazines in a whole new way. There's something to say about finding elegant photos of food that haven't been done before. The people that work for publications like these have to put an endless amount of time and consideration into choosing the design and style of the publication because I feel that they have a difficult task to stand out. With other commercial magazines, sex, fashion, and impending celebrity doom sells. I think those topics are more likely to get plucked off a newsstand before a lifestyle magazine. So, my goal was to try and make the design as visually pleasing as possible so that I could grab the attention of a younger demographic. So, here's my prototype.

Now that I know how to access the creative library, I'm going to utilize that resource for way better photos to use in the presentations for next week. I think one of my biggest hurdles is finding appropriate fonts. Fonts plague me. Some times I have an eye for them, and other times I feel completely lost. I wanted to go with a sans serif for the fonts because it seems more modern and chic, to me. The one thing I plan on spending more time with before our presentations next week is my logo treatment. It needs help! Hopefully that will give me some practice for the upcoming 20/10 assignment too. Good luck to everyone presenting prototypes next week!

You Can't Miss: Soviet Architecture

I found this post on EyeBlog this week. Photographer Phil Sayer had his images of Soviet architecture displayed at a gallery in London recently. His photos appeared in a breathtaking photo essay, which appeared in a magazine called "Domus" in 2001. Here is my favorite spread from the feature package:

I know it's kind of small, but the picture on the left is one of the best naturally framed images I have ever seen. The photographer has an amazing skill for capturing a certain desolation that is evident from the environment, while also playing up the extraordinary architecture he is featuring. This makes shooting buildings look so eloquent.

Review: History of Design and Judging

I didn't quite realize their was going to be such a serious judging process involved in Tuesday's lecture until I got there. After being all thrown off by the snow days, I've been a little slow getting re-prioritized again, but what's new. I ended up choosing the swanky marijuana design done by Philadelphia Magazine. The color palette impressed me most with their feature design. I never thought of weed colors being so calming and vibrant, which I thought was a very interesting reaction. It was surprising and innovative. Being that it was such a potentially contentious story topic, the design did a great job of supporting the text while not being vulgar or intrusive.

After reading the History of Magazine Design, we were asked to come up with contemporary examples of some of the old-fashioned techniques we read about. It seemed to me like there were many, many similarities, as far as basics, staples and foundation design tactics, that continue to be used today. It's crazy to think how difficult it must have been for people in the early 1900s to work with page design and layout. My respects to them all. Here are my examples:

This example is from Nylon, one of my absolute favorites. This loud photo montage creates a visually pleasing department page that mimics the technique used in the following "Fetish" example from 1980. 

The designs are definitely not identical, but I thought they were very similar in the sense that both used photos and distorted the size of the figures and characters to create a focused illustration. The idea of using giant pictures to grab your reader is definitely still in use!

This example is also from "Nylon." The following is from a 1916 McClure's, and is my comparison to the above layout.

The columns and structure of the text and photos are very rectangular in both designs. "Nylon" even uses that geometrical design in the corner that stimulates the shape concept it's going for. The reading said that this McClure's example is reflective of the trend towards "logo type" for magazines. Each of these examples uses a boldly different type for their headlines, and a smaller version for their deck. Although it's not clear in the McClure's design, Owens also talked about the trend towards placing text on top of photos, or running them in some correspondence. Some of the earlier examples Owens features were so outrageously designed - text seemed to come from nowhere and images had no flow and were jarring, rather than informative. Using a structured grid like the examples above helps create a peaceful coexistence between text and photo, like Nylon achieves.

Although the above example is a studio shot, I thought it closely mirrored the following example done by Leslie's Weekly in 1903.

As discussed in the reading, this is one of the first examples of design in which a single shot was stretched across an entire page, notably the cover, then text was placed over it. Often, a photo can say a lot about the story you want to tell, and these two photos are the perfect simple shots that are clear and provoking. 

Critique: Trying to keep up

Next week is not looking pretty for me. I have a 8-page feature spread rough draft due next Tuesday and the capstone project prototypes are also due next week. I have an extremely busy weekend ahead of me, but this week was, of course, really slow.

To keep myself busy, I caught up on some design work I am doing for my internship at Hot Box Cookies (and yes, I get free cookies). They are now serving Tiger Stripe Ice Cream to adorn their delicious ice-cream cookie sandwiches. By the way, did you know that ice-cream is hyphenated when used as an adjective? Crazy. Thank you magazine editing. So, here's the semi-finalized ad I designed for Hot Box:

I was pleased with the ad concept and design I had come up with so far, but I think there may be a few elements that could be perfected. The one thing that really sticks out to me is the separation that seems to arise between the contact information elements and the big ad with the tiger. I liked having the little symbols to correspond with the contact info, but I want to find a way to make them more cohesive with the larger ad. Then again, maybe ads aren't supposed to be like that? I haven't done much ad designing, but I kind of like it. It was fun and playful. Especially for Hot Box, it's easy to be creative when working on their designs because their business style is relaxed and more playful. Any ideas, let me know!

You Can't Miss... the Snow!

I finally ventured out into society today. My roommate and I ran our errands on foot, stopping by the J-school and the columns because I just can't stay away! Here's my roommate standing in the entry way between Neff and Walter Williams.... It's such a pretty scene.

(Don't you just love the fabulous shadows...)

I spent the last few days bundled in several blankets, firmly glued to the couch, catching up on homework and surfing the web. I can't help but to continue returning to this fabulous artist's site because her prints just amaze me. Natasha Westcoat is a Michigan native with a vivid style that I'm helplessly drawn to. I love her swirly trees and simple prints. I recently discovered her line of horoscope paintings and am very intrigued with the dimension she creates through the positioning of the characters and the color palette she uses. I think "Virgo" is one of my favorites...

Response

While I was snowed in this week, I plowed through the massive reading Jan assigned to us for the week. It was kind of nice to have a few extra days to mull it over because it was so interesting. I love seeing how magazines have changed over time. I really loved this 1957 Vogue feature:

The red of her lips and fingernails really pop and make a statement for themselves. For a spread about eye makeup, I thought the photo concept was genius. By photographing her peeking through her fingers, the designer also got to incorporate a stand out red as well as multiple beauty elements, lips, nails, eyes. The eyes on the right side are so strange! They stand out in a very 3D, graphic way. Usually, designers don't pull the eyeball off the model, so I thought this was an interesting idea. 

As the article stated, Europeans were less likely to play up white space in their designs because of their circumstances. As nations tried to recuperate after WWII, magazine designs were valued according to their functionality and ability to put as much on a page without cluttering it. There wasn't as much money to print excess pages, so the designs were less likely to incorporate white space. How interesting. Who knew? Here's a great example of the American obsession with white space from a 1957 Playboy cover:

One of the stories that caught my eye in my blog this week was the "stroboscopic titles" of Gaspar Noe's new film. (I have no idea who Gaspar Noe is, but he's obviously immersed in the European techno world. Here is Noe's typographical work for his own name:

Ahh, it kind of gives me a headache if I look at it for too long. Using the O as his center allows this design to work, but I don't think I could be so techno-hip. Not my favorite, but I can definitely say that it grabs my attention! 

Spring Preview Critique

I had such an exciting week with design! I was thrilled to have my cover concept be chosen for the Spring Preview issue. I spent many hours in the computer lab the night before it was due trying to perfect my typography. It was a nice evening, actually because I got to know some of my fellow designers a little better. Just when we were all about to crash, Kaylee had the brilliant idea to fire up Pandora and turn on the Justin Beiber station. Haha, what great inspiration. Anyway, here's what I finished before last Friday and presented to the editors:

As you can tell, I was no where near finished with my feature spread because I had spent a majority of my time working with the cover and the splash page. Pictured above is the splash page and feature spread. The one thing I failed at with this project was time management! I was really disappointed that I didn't get to do exactly what I wanted with my feature spread, but I think it was obvious I had put a lot of time and effort into the cover/splash page. I didn't want to do a trite spring theme, so I tried to incorporate the bugs as a way to pull out something kind of gross and different. I ended up winning the competition for my cover design, so here's a before and after of my cover:

(Sorry about the original photo, I had taken a picture of it, but didn't end up saving the original!) Erica Mendez had the fabulous idea of incorporating the dirt, so I borrowed the idea from her. Instead of using the flower and leaf, I went with the bug theme and substituted a ladybug and a butterfly. It really glued the concept together better. Legibility was an issue, so I tried to make the shapes easier to work with. Because "performing arts" is so long, the earthworm was an excellent help! By making the bugs a solid color, the type stood out more and it also tied into the splash page and feature spread concepts. I really loved playing with this design. I'm still pretty slow at Illustrator, which ended up being the reason why I didn't have much time left over for the spread. My goal is to really familiarize myself with some of the Adobe programs that I haven't spent much time with. Just knowing some basics would really improve my design capabilities. 

I had a great time working with Aaron and Haleigh over the weekend! It was stressful at times, but everyone finished right on schedule and it looked amazing. Best of all, the issue comes out on my birthday, so that's a nice reward to end with.