See this! Beer

My "See This" for the week is dedicated to beer, because frankly, I need one.

I found some cool vintage beer posters that reminded me a lot of the old Vogue covers, and then some fun extras to entertain you.

So go ahead and sit back, relax and take a sip!

Wilbur Pierce

Jean D' Ylen

Alphonse Mucha

Artist unknown

Wilbur Pierce

& this great graphic found on

Maga Design Blog

COOL.

Critique: True/False app

Last week's Oscar cover for Vox 5 was cake compared to the beast that is True/False.   I was assigned the feature portion of the app so right away I begged Jordin for some tips and sat through our Friday meeting exuding confidence (maybe?), but feeling dumfounded.

Last night I got started and it really wasn't as bad as I'd thought.  The work is time consuming, but it isn't difficult.   Thanks to Krista and Kelsey for coming up with the concept designs in the print issue, the app should turn out alright.

The longest part is resizing all the text, fitting it into columns and finding out what to do with sidebars.  Everything on the iPad needs to be bigger because it's harder to read on a small tablet, so what looks like a wee bit of text in the print edition turns out to be monstrous on the iPad.

Other issues I had so far in the process was getting my images formatted for web rather than print.  Timmy lends his genius to the photos and makes it so I can use them.  Problem is, there's so much to be done for True/False that the photos aren't ready yet.  I went ahead and designed the portrait and landscape versions of what I think will work for the iPad, and then tomorrow morning I will go in and replace all the images with the correct versions, link everything in the app and wait for text revisions.

It's a process but I'm excited to have worked on True/False.  I love the festival and try to go to as many movies as I can.  This is an exciting weekend for Columbia, and I'm ready to go out, enjoy it and pick up my copy of Vox to marvel at my fellow designers' talents.

Here's a cell phone photo of the splash page, adapted for the iPad.

& for all those lucky enough to have an iPad, be sure to check out the full issue, out this Thursday.

Response: Vogue 1930's

Alright everybody,

I've had one of those weeks.  The kind where you stay up too late every night through your weekend doing homework, and then the week hits and there's even more for you to do.   However, I'm in the final stretch with the True/False app and things are looking up!

I didn't present my History of Vogue powerpoint today because I hadn't yet finished it before class.
You'll all get to see it next week, but here's a few of my favorite covers from the 1930's.

November 1932

February 1935

June 1939

November 1939

I love the illustrative covers, especially from the art deco period.   The geometry and the uniqueness of each one is something I wish still existed in magazines.   With a title as popular as Vogue, I don't think there could be any mistaking it on the newsstand.  REVOLUTION?

What's really cool about my period is the transition from illustrations to photography and seeing the mix of the two play out.  The "Vogue" is still different on each cover, not yet having come up with the current Bodoni-font brand.

While a lot of people touched on the differences of magazines then and now, I think Vogue was able to transform over the years, but without ever losing it's elegance and sophistication.  

I really enjoyed working on this assignment and seeing the complete transformation of magazines such as Life and Vogue throughout the decades.  

After seeing some of the Vogue collections, I also think I've added a few coffee table books to next year's Christmas list as well.

See this: Paris vs. New York

I love coffee table books and creative illustrations AND PARIS.  Muratyanf cleverly compares the two iconic cities in a variety of ways using fun graphics.  I have put a few up here, but you should definitely check out the link after the images if you found these as much fun as I did!

So if you didn't get me a birthday gift....

Paris vs. New York by Vahram Muratyanf

Super fun, oui?

See more here!

Critique: VOX 5

I DESIGNED AN iPAD APP COVER!!!!  How awesome is that?

I was really excited to work on the Vox 5 app cover last weekend.  My cover needed to focus on the Oscars, so I brainstormed a bit and came up with a marquee theme.  I know it's common, but the Oscars are a tradition and I didn't think a red curtain and beautifully executed marquee would have caused such chaos!  I handmade everything but the curtain, which I found on Stock xchng.  After getting some good feedback on my first design, I came home to an email saying I needed to redo the entire cover.  Illustrations aren't common for our app and they wanted something different.  So, Monday evening I came back and worked with Rachel to come up with a better, more creative design.

Here's a phone shot of my first design, in rough detail:

And here's the final design:

Vertical orientation &

Horizontal (closeup, with the dek missing)

I made a press account on the Oscars website and was able to obtain a high resolution stock photo of the "Oscar."  Afterwards, I outlined it in pen tool and made a white fill layer over it, then created a clipping mask and placed it into InDesign.  I messed around with the transparency on the image and then repeated it over and over until I made an entire page of miniature Oscars.  The idea behind this was to mimic the normal "5" theme normally placed into the cover backgrounds for the special issue.  Afterwards, I cut out the honorable host of the event, Billy Crystal,

When Harry Met Sally anyone???

and placed him on the document.  Then I played around with the colors of the VOX text and also made the "5" look like an award by using gradients and shadows in Photoshop.  

I love the final design and am really happy I came back in to change it from my first.  Anyone who wants to download the VOX 5 app can see my design on the cover this Thursday!

Available on iTunes.  

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AWESOME!!!!

Response: Meredith

Nick summed it up well when he said the whole presentation process was very anticlimactic.  I knew going into the meeting that the publishers probably wouldn't choose me for Art Director, but I was happy to show them my ideas.  What I got from the little information we had was that the magazine needed to be modern yet quirky, and still look like something Meredith would like.  I chose to disregard the last criterion.  

At the beginning of the capstone course we were encouraged to be creative and to push boundaries.  I may have pushed too much but I took inspiration from McSweeney's Lucky Peach and Bon Appetit.       I am not a huge fan of food magazines, but decided to have some fun with it.  I'd liked to have had more time to perfect them, but I'm happy with my ideas overall.

Here are the revisions.  Keep in mind that they are still ROUGH mockups. =]

COVER

A criticism was that the "Eat Now" was too declarative and looked menacing.  I understand that completely but still wanted it to look sleek and professional.  Had the title been different, I think my font would have worked better for the magazine.  Maybe not, but I still went with the all-caps.

Feature story example

I found the flag and mojito on Stock xchng and fused them together for an 

American feel, reminiscent of all those war movies or speeches to the nation.

Department page

I spent the least amount of time on my department page.  I wanted it to be simple,

 but it definitely is too simple. 

FONTS & Color palette

The whole experience was really fun and I couldn't be happier with my design team.  Every one did a great job and there were a lot of great ideas we can incorporate into our magazine.  I think we're really going to impress Meredith.  

Also,

  

Congratulations Nick on getting to boss me around for the rest of the semester!   

See this: Valentine's Day Infographics

We love and hate the holiday.   

Here's my take on Valentine's day:

If you're single.  Stay inside.

If you're in a relationship but not able to be with your lover, stay inside and
wait for the postman.

    He doesn't come?  

    ---> Cry  

    ---> Put on your sweats over that lace and go buy yourself some wine and chocolates.
          |
          |        
          ------> Intoxication

You're in a relationship and your boyfriend didn't get you anything.

        Bitch.

You're in a relationship and got dinner and chocolates?

        Cliche

You're in a relationship and got a homemade card?

         Grow a pair.  && Where's the chocolate?

Clothing and or magazines and a massage?

         KEEPER!

The cool thing about Valentine's day is whether you were lonely or lucky, there are always a lot of cool infographics to look at.  Almost every publication does something, so I've compiled some of my favorites for you.   

CAUTION:  They're not all warm and fuzzy.

But first, a cute one:

Infographic proposal from the associate editor of All Things Digital.

http://allthingsd.com/

One isn't the loneliest number:

Couponcabin.com

This one cracks me up, from a food and safety website: 

keepingitkleen.com

To all the lovers and the haters,  Happy February 15th!

Response: Meredith mockups

It's that time!  We're finally getting into our Meredith projects and I have to say that I'm really excited after looking at the magazines the class produced last spring.

I'm lucky to have my roommate in charge the publication of my magazine.  She's been able to give me some extra insight into what she's looking for and what kind of vibe she wants from the magazine.   We're still in the initial stages of our project, and I'm not quite sure we all know what we want to put out, but it feels good to get going.

With the lack of clarity over the magazine as a whole, it was hard to design mockups.  I went to HyVee this weekend and picked up a couple of food magazines that I thought were good examples of what we wanted.

I know most food magazines are simple, but I wanted to stray away from being boring with my design.  I don't think a good food magazine needs to necessarily just have a plate of food on the cover to sell.  I went with a fashion-magazine vibe for my cover and came up with this:

I added a gradient and changed some text, but there is still a lot I want to play with here.  Some comments were that the title font looked too commanding, so I may try to find a better logo that's not so harsh.  The title our publishing capstone came up with is a command, so it will be a challenge to design around that to keep the magazine inviting. Also, I think I may take off the gradient again.  There were some designs I was exploring that had a more playful logo paired with a grilled plate of food, so I may add that to the mockup as well.  

The second design I did was a mock-up feature story on summer cocktails:

I love this design.  I think it's perfect.  The distressed texture of the flag, which I found on stock.xchng, is so interesting and beautiful when paired with the mojito.  As Nick pointed out, a mojito isn't really an American drink, but I think once we know more about the feature story I can find a more appropriate cocktail.

I KNOW!  The last design is very bare.  I wanted to keep the whole magazine very clean, but I think elements can be added without cluttering the page.

We present our mockups to the publishing capstone on Monday to find out who will take on the role as art director, and who will just be designers.  I'll be happy either way!  

Do work!

Redo: Roll On

I wanted to redesign my spreads on the story "Roll On" and get rid of all the text on the splash page.

Here is the more readable and less cluttered version:

I also pulled the red bar from the splash page and repeated it throughout the rest of the feature to make the entire design more uniform.  

Better? I think so.

Critique: 3/8 Covers

Each time I begin a design, the brainstorming process goes a little like this:

I read the story three times, highlight words that capture themes and moods throughout, then sit down with my sketchbook and draw.

As you can see, they're SUPER ROUGH SKETCHES.

This helps me a lot because I'm a very visual person, but the process of designing on the computer takes so long to execute that when I start in a blank InDesign document I get lost.  This allows me to just think and not get caught up in:  

Why is my photo so pixelated?  &

Where is the clipping mask I just made with pen tool?  

Ctr-Z Ctr-Z Ctr-Z Ctr-Z Ctr-Z  OOPS! Shift-Ctr-Z 

For my cover presentation on "Simplicity," which is not really simple at all, I drew inspiration from some of my favorite minimalist magazines, particularly the feature and department pages of Interview and some photographs from www.designobserver.com that I posted yesterday.

Here are the results:

Too legal.

Nice photo. 

I like my other illustrations better BUT, 

it was a photo story, so I had to do one cover with her on it.

Ahhh.  I think this one, too.  So clean and...simple.

Simple

SIMPLE

SIMPLE!!!

It's black and white, which Theresa says is her jam, but I'm also going to say is mine too.  Either I'm all about color or I'm all about black and gray (You should see my closet).  It's such a shame that our paper isn't white, but I had to go for it anyways.  The mission for the next couple weeks is to try to figure out a way to incorporate the balance idea into the last cover and then play around with the colors to find something that works as well as black and white.

I know, never going to happen.

Suggestions?

  

See this: i-D

i-D magazine is one I read often during my study abroad semester in London.  It's another fashion and culture magazine, and I was always struck by their beautiful portraits.  Also, after going to the Tate Modern every month to make sure I saw the lastest issues, I started noticing that each month there were multiple covers.

How curious.
There were four covers for one of the months I bought.   NOT FAIR, I thought.  How could they do that to me?  They know I'm going to want each one of those covers, and there's no way I'm about to spend £50 to get them all.  

Inni, minni, miney, mo.

...and I settled on one with nudity.

Anyways, although I dare not dish out all the money to pay for an international magazine subscription at the moment, I still frequent them online.   To my surprise, the number of covers this February.... NINE.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

So much for simplicity.  Less is not always more, people!   

Ahh, 

one last thing.

Since we're discussing logos for our Meredith project.   Look at the i-D logo.   

Closer 

CLOSER

Do you see it?   It's a winking emoticon, and don't think they did that by accident.  Awesome!

i-D

Critique: Simplicity issue

This week I'm designing my three cover mock-ups for the 2/23 issue.  The theme is simplicity, which didn't get me very excited in the beginning.

But then it clicked.

While I was looking for inspiration the last couple days I realized how all my favorite magazines are  extremely modern and, well, SIMPLE.

So although I can't make the issues look like high fashion magazines, and the VOX paper isn't white, I still had a lot of fun thinking about bringing that idea of simplicity into my designs.  (I'll post these tomorrow after feedback)

Here are some minimalist photographs I found inspiration in this week:

All the images are taken by Jane and Francois Robert in a collection of their search for "white."  John Foster compiled the images and put them up on 

designobserver.com ,

the blog I have been reading and until now, haven't posted on.  The images are great.   I especially love the juxtaposition of the red frosting on the black and white street.  Don't you?

Response: Departments

This week was my first time designing for the department pages.  I read VOX before I took this class all the time, but for some reason I was under the impression we were going to be more creative with our individual departments.  Turns out everything is in a template and you just have to push things around and make it all fit and look beautiful, VOX style.  In a way it was a nice break from trying to be really creative all the time.

I will say that I underestimated the time limit on it all.  Hours seem to go by like minutes.  There were some revisions and I had to come in Monday, but it all went rather smoothly compared to last week's cover.

I'm really excited about this semester.  The first few weeks were a lot to take in, and even after our discussion Tuesday about the VOX 5 Ap covers, weekly VOX Ap designs and the Meredith Project, I am finding that I really enjoy coming up with creative concepts and forcing myself to think around the limits of the VOX style and my own skill level.  I've already learned so much and this class is definitely giving me the excuse I need to go buy myself an iPad ASAP.

Final Spring Preview Cover

Ta-da!

And if I had my choice: