Week 6

This Week

I am designing the department page for the Screen department of VOX. I applied for a 6-month internship with Southern Progress Corporation and should be seeing my design for The Global Journalist within the next 2 weeks. I'm really happy with this clip. It's something that will add to my portfolio because it's a more serious clip, and before doing this, I felt like most of my clips were just fun and playful, which isn't so bad, but I'm glad to have something a little more serious to add. I designed this without the illustration at first, and then the editors decided they wanted an illustration to show where the Eraz Crossing is, because it's an area the story focuses on. So I went back and added the illustration and this is the final product. Now I'm just waiting for the publication to come out so I can see it in print. 

This week and last week in Advanced Design we have been perfecting our portfolios, and so I have been thinking about what my online portfolio will look like, as well as my mini-portfolio. After my meeting with Jan yesterday, I am relieved and feel as though I'm on my way to a career in design, so that's a plus. 

I'm designing covers for the 3/12 issue of VOX, and the cover story is about caffeine. Below are my preliminary designs. The first one is a little whacky, but I thought it would be fun to do something like the "got milk?" ads, and...it ended up being a little scary, but strangely, I like it!

I will be starting my 20/10 logo designs tonight and will post those as they come along within the week and weekend, as well as some website designs that are coming along later this week.

Response

The packet we got today to fill out about our design process is challenging for me. It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult, but I'm having a hard time walking through my design process. I kind of just start thinking a lot about what I want my design to look like and then after I have a concrete concept, I look through magazines and our design books, as well as looking at advertisements and commercials to try and expand on my idea. After that, I just sit down and start designing on my computer, and it usually comes together in a couple of days. I don't start a design and finish it in the same day ever, because I want to have time to think about it while I'm in the process. I think it helps me put a lot more thought into it and helps me weed out any cliches or obvious designing I tend to turn to first. Also, I never sketch my designs before I go to design them in InDesign, but I'm going to for the 20/10 project, just because there are so many different ideas we have to come up with and it will be much easier to have it all in front of me instead of clicking through on the computer. I'm hoping this assignment will help me and give me another process to use when designing.

MagCulture.com

This week MagCulture talks about his interview for BBC Radio 4 and the relaunch of Pop Magazine. He also shows a photo of Swedish magazine Tare Lungt, which means "take it easy", which published its third issue as a tattoo! And guess what... MagCulture is now on Twitter. The last topic this week was the Italian edition of Wired, which Conde Nast just launched. Another topic this week on MagCulture is that New York Times Magazine creative director Janet Froelich left the the paper to oversee Real Simple with Time, Inc.

You Can't Miss

The author of MagCulture, Jeremy Leslie, is also the author of Issues: New Magazine Design. I had trouble finding a description of the book, but it has great reviews, so it might be worth checking out since we will be (as scary as it is to think about, for me anyway) entering the "real world" of design in two short months. I figure it will be a good resource for future design projects, and it's really cheap! It's available on Amazon.