Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Critique: Week 7

Is it really week 7?

It's been a fun design week. Although, I can't show you much.

Last week I started working on the design for Epic Magazine, the literary magazine I'm art directing. It's difficult to compete with last years, but I've got some ideas that will hopefully make things different. I spent Friday evening with a couple of the Epic editors going over photo submissions. There were a ton to look through, and we finally narrowed it to 16 + a cover photo. It was interesting to talk through each of the submissions. Everyone has different tastes, so it can be difficult to agree. However, we decided on an loose, underlying theme, which made decisions easier. Also, looking at the technicalities of the photography and putting that above general "prettiness" helped us a lot. I've also been working on cover concepts for the magazine. I have a few that are coming together. I wish I could show you, but they involve our pick for cover photo--and that's a surprise! Just wait until the release party, then you can all have copies.

I also spent some time redesigning the FATE brochure I worked on last week. It needed some content tweaking, and now I think it will be much more useful. Oh, and good news: We submitted our grant proposal, so we should be hearing back soon. I'm glad that part is over, but it has been a fantastic learning experience.

The design team for Renovate Style has been working on the art side of the magazine. This week I put together the page dummies and went to our first photo shoot. Talbot is writing a story on an early 20th Century Columbia home that has been renovated into a bed and breakfast. Friday afternoon was spent with our photography, Mary, looking for the best places to shoot. We have some great images, and I'm excited for Abbey to start laying out the feature. It's exciting to be able to be a part of every creative aspect of the magazine--photography, image selection, design and production. I can't wait to get the rest of the copy, so everyone can start putting together a much-needed magazine redesign.

On Tuesday, I presented my logo prototypes for the Eat for Life program at the university. I thought I'd include a few favorites and some scans of my sketchbook:

I love the logo design process. The research is a lot of fun. Flipping through dictionaries and looking at the thesaurus and finding out more about the program is a lot like journalism. And then, the visual research--looking at photography, scanning magazines and perusing blogs--is really inspiring. I like to start out in a sketchbook, but sometimes certain ideas only come when I'm working in Illustrator and can see how certain shapes fit together. There are times when there is more freedom to just sketch things out, and then there are other moments when the ease of the pen tool and apple+z is just so handy.

In the next week, I will be working on cover submissions for Vox, and getting very little sleep in order to get Epic squared away nice and early.

3 comments:

Aimee said...

I just want to say that I was really impressed by the way you set out to "take an idea that was really cliche and make it work". It was my favorite eat for life logo.

Annie Harp said...

I very much enjoyed your logo ideas. It was fun to see your ideas in class on Tuesday. I feel like I have a lot of learning to do where logos are concerned so it was great to see some of your ideas since you've had experience with them before. Good job.

Jena Lene´ said...

I really like the spoon/plant logo. It's fun & definitely usable. I think thats what you did VERY well with this assignment-take the cliche a step further and make a logo that can make all involved parties happy. it certainly has an element of design sophistication but is simple enough to work. i also like how you payed attention to the words eat for life.. i totally ignored the text in my logo and focused solely on the image--something i will fix in the editing process!