critique wk 6 - MEREDITH CRITIQUE

This week I worked mostly on my designs for Fusion. I was really pleased with the typeface I chose for the logo of the second cover and I think I'm going to stick with it for my official logo. Although I really liked my concepts for the different pieces, I ended up not satisfied with the execution of them. So I'm changing the pictures and the color palette to make it a little less "retro" which was not the style I was going for, and a little more sophisticated. Here are a few samples from my collection. Let me know if you have any other comments for me.

MEREDITH

Features - I wanted the features to be simple, with vibrant colors. I wanted the colors, not the layout to draw readers into the spread. The colored boxes around the "Get" in Get Organized, mimick the colors and style of the shelves on the opposite page and were a way to add interest to an otherwise predictable spread. Budget Bracketing was supposed to show products in different price ranges and while the pictures are interesting, I think the spread ends up looking more like a department and a feature.

Covers- The covers turned out to be only as good as the photos I found. It was a little difficult to find photographs that looked good, related to one of the features in that issue, and would work well with the concept of the magazine. The two covers below are for features in the magazine. The first is a story about the nice homes and the other is about nice appliances. Finding the right colors for the sell lines on the cover also proved difficult because of the photos' color schemes.

Departments- My idea for the departmens involved lots of white space and short, quipy pull-outs so they'd be easier to read at a glance.


FEATURES



























COVERS







































DEPARTMENTS








































TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Designing the prototype was great and hard at the same time. I liked the freedom of thinking up designs that were totally my own. No one else had a say in what they could look like but I also found it hard to be original while doing that. My designs didn't turn out as polished as I would have liked. I'll be revising most of the designs and I'm hoping to end up with something great for my portfolio.

Since we're learning flash, I'd like to recommend to recommend a few books on the program,courtesy of Electronic Photo Journalism.

1. Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages by Mindy McAdams
2. Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 8 in 24 Hours

you can't miss

The blog I'm following continues to disappoint and I am, as I've been doing for the past few weeks, following other blogs for design inspiration and news. Something I found that will interest all designers, through the unbeige blog, I found the results for the Design Awards 2007. There were categories from editorial design to furniture design to stationery. For a full list of winners, check out http://www.designweekawards.co.uk/Results.aspx. Incidentally, Apple won for best consumer design for the iPod shuffle.

Also, I found out that Getty Images may be buying the company that owns Wire Images and Jupitermedia Corp(which owns STEP magazine and graphics.com). The sale would give the stock-photo company "almost half of the US market for still photos."

Heads up on a potentially funny movie. According to unbeige, there's a new movie called Idiocracy that makes fun of corporate branding and logos. It's all about design. In light of our logo assignment, I thought it'd be helpful. Enjoy!

The picture is from the movie, a play on the "Fuddruckers" logo.

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The digital portfolio book has been an interesting read. It's always interesting to learn what the experts think you should do to better promote yourself. I didn't quite follow the directions in the book that closely but as I begin to redesign my website, I think I'll be paying attention to some of the tips that Cynthia Baron gives designers in chapter 10. Since I'm striving for uniformity in my website pages, I like what Baron says about color palettes (limit it), limitting page sizes so visitors don't have to scroll and placing elements like captions, thumbnails at the same place on every page.

I thought the portfolio class today was great because when you get 9 or more people saying they like a certain piece, it's pretty obvious that it's a pretty good portfolio contender. What is is even more interesting to me are the pieces that were popular. I think I'm a pretty fair judge of my work and I felt validated that some of the pieces I thought were my strongest were also the ones that were consistently in the top three. But there were a few surprises that I'll be looking into further.
Thank you for your comments.

you can't miss

Once again, the blog I follow didn't have any recent posts so I went looking for other design related things to talk about.
I've always been interested in logos and making and creating them. In my search for logo information, I came across this website that's basically a logo generator. The site helps you create logos from words you type in. You have options to choose from for what you want your logo to look like. You can also choose the type you want to use. It's a little cheesy as it's stuff you could probably put together in Photoshop yourself, but I thought it was fun and very easy to use. Below are a few of the logos of my name I created.
For more more information, check out http://cooltext.com/Render_Graphic?RenderID=45705919

critique- wk. 5

This week, I only had one page for the "books" department and the art on it was a book jacket. It was relatively simple to design. The only problem I had was with the length of the story (too short) so I made the columns a little shorter so there'd be some white space on the bottom. I currently don't have a copy of the page but once I do, I'll post it.

I wrote last week about looking at art directors' websites for inspiration for my own, well this week I finished my website, at least the first of many. My inspiration was Nancy Karamarkos website. I really liked how simple mine looks, even though now I worry that it might be too simple. I'm also having to fight my urge to put in every clip of mine I think is good. I know there's no fast rule about how many clips is too many but I think I'd rather err on the side of having too many, at least that way potential employers can see my range, than too little. Any thoughts about that? I also have to think about what kinds of clips I want to play up and what kinds I want to just leave out. I have newspaper clips I could use, but I don't want a newspaper job but I do want people to know I can design both newspapers and magazines, so do I include my newspaper clips in my portfolio??

Here are a few shots of my website. Like I said before, it is very simple. I'm still working on my logo and working on improving the overall look of the site so it looks a little more sophisticated. I'm working on making each page of the website feel like part of a unit. Right now, the color choices are a little scatterbrained so I'm working on a color palette that I can use for the entire site. Other than that, I think it looks great. My favorite thing is the rollover over each thumbnail. So awesome!
Check it out at missouri.edu/~eeoq44 and tell me what you think.

you can't miss

The blog I'm following didn't have anything new this week so I decided to go out and find other exciting things to write about. Since I've been thinking a lot about website design this week, I've been looking at other websites' designs and have found websites advising people on mistakes to avoid. Jacob Nielsen's "Top ten mistakes in web design" was interesting and helpful. Not all the points applied to designers but here's a summary of the few that I think actually do.

1) Don't use PDF files on your website. Convert your clips into web-friendly files.
2) Make sure visited link colors change so people know where they've been.

In my search, I also found websites for art directors. Nothing like being inspired by a great site. My opening page is something that I worry about because I know it's the most important page of my website. If it's cluttered and hard to navigate, no one will come back to it. I found opening pages by a few art directors to inspire me. The websites are clean and easy to navigate.

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I'm really excited about the "graffiti" assignment which is coming up. In looking for inspiration, I went online to find signs around Columbia. Granted these are just pictures I found online, I am looking forward to creating graffiti out of words that are available to us.

























Since I was looking into graffiti, I decided to find out more about the history of graffiti. I've always thought of graffiti as an art form for rebels. People who were trying to make a statement and didn't care about breaking the law (it is illegal is some or even most cities as far as I know).

On http://www.ccd.rpi.edu/Eglash/csdt/subcult/grafitti/culture/Birth_and_Evolution.htm, I found information about the history of graffiti.
Apparently, "urban" graffiti", the kind we are most used to seeing, started in New York in the 1960's with spraycans on subway trains by someone called Taki 183. He used markers to write his name at subway stations and inside/outside subway cars. Others started emulating him and the movement was borne. Go to the website if you want to learn more.

Here are a few samples of Taki 183's work.

critiques- wk 4

This week I've been working on my website and have also made a few business cards that I would greatly appreciate comments on. I think my cards are really simple and maybe a bit too simple. I feel there should be some other graphic elements on it other than lines but I'm having trouble coming up graphics that add to the piece and are not just busy. I'm gradually realizing that my name, while cool (at least I think so), doesn't work very well in logos that I like. It doesn't look very good lowercase which I really like.

Below are three examples of business cards I've made. Like I said, pretty simple and maybe too plain. Thoughts, comments are most welcome.

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This week on the rogerblack.com, there is industry commentary on the current state of screen fonts, fonts designed to be seen on a computer. Black writes about the history of screen fonts, which also happens to be the history of design and publishing on computers. Personal computers began with the bitmaps (aliased screen fonts). In the mid-90s, Adobe produced anti-aliased type that is now widely used in operating systems.

Below are examples of the different screen fonts.



































































Check out http://rogerblack.com/blog/screen_fonts_history for more on the story.

Also, the society of publication designers is holding a design contest for students with lovely prizes that judging from what I can make out from last year's entries, should be relatively easy to do well in. Go to http://www.spd.org/pdf/SPD_Studentposterforweb.pdf for more information. I believe the deadline is sometime in March.

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The historical assignment this week was a good way for me to learn more about the evolution of design. I decided to study Ebony magazine mainly because it was the only magazine left, other than Reader's Digest, that fit the criteria for the assignment. The magazine has a great history, complete with editorial coverage and photographs of civil unrest in the country and abroad. After hearing about Life magazine in class today and seeing some of the covers, it struck me again just how much Ebony patterned itself after that magazine, especially on the cover. Both feature their logos on a red background with white typefaces. Though they are both photo-driven magazines, Ebony covered the lives of successful African Americans.

Below is an Ebony cover from 1963.




















Compare that to Life magazine's cover from 1963





















Though Ebony covers initially had very minimal sell lines when it was first launched, today's covers follow the current trend of lots of sell lines.

Below is a more recent cover, January 2007

critique- third week

This week, I finished up my "books and postscripts" design for the February 8 issue of VOX along with my ballerina feature. Doing departments and a feature for the same week was a little difficult and I don't recommend it. The ballerina feature went through a few more revisions. I was having difficulty finding a font I liked for the headline and I ended up downloading a font called "loki cola" from acidfonts.com. (Thank you Kristin!). I think it's the "Coca Cola" font. Anyway, I used loki cola for the first letters of the headline and used a serif font for the remainder of the letters. The number of pictures also changed from six to five. This opened up the design and I think it looks better. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with design that did the pictures justice, but I think I was able to showcase the wonderful pictures within a design that I actually like. I stuck with purple for the color, I just made it a little darker. It's a luxurious color that I thought complemented the look of the spread.




























Above is the design with the font that I used (Monoca Cursive) before Loki Cola. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the design with six pictures using this placement.






























Above is the final design as it will appear in VOX on Thursday.



















For the "Books" department page, I decided to go livetrace the images I found on the web in Illustrator and change their colors so there would be different looks for each subhead. Even though I'm pleased with the final look of the page, I'm wondering if there's more I could have done to differentiate the sections.



















For "postscript" I decided to use an illustration for the art because I wanted to practice my skills, plus I thought it was the best way to show readers what the story was about. I sketched out my original idea and scanned it in to trace in Illustrator. Once I had traced out what I needed, I used brushes for the outlines of the shapes and figures. While it may not win an award, i like the way it turned out and my use of illustrations continue! Here's the final illustration after some cleanup.


Let me know your thoughts!!