Shutter graffiti Photo #2

A letter in the "University of Missouri" sign at the end of the driveway off Elm St. 

Shutter graffiti Photo #1

Part of a stop sign in Copper Beech Townhomes.

Photographic Field Notes Photo #2

The iconic columns on the MU campus.

Photographic Field Notes Photo #1

It's interesting that the USPS, something we take for granted each and every day, might be forced to cut their delivery to only five days a week. "Snail mail" will take on a whole new meaning. Meanwhile, I took a picture of their logo on my mailbox for my apartment building because it's very simplistic, and often overlooked.

Response to today's class (1/27)

Members of the Advanced Magazine Design class were preliminary round judges for the City and Regional Magazine Association's (CMRA) annual contest on Tuesday, Jan. 27. We were handed three issues of various city and regional magazines from across the country, and told to vote for the top three magazines in the category of General Excellence. 

It was mentioned before we began judging that the process would be very quick. No kidding. It's similar to judging by other organizations such as SSND and POYI, but I don't understand why it has to be so quick. It's very difficult for a judge to get a sense of a magazine by looking at it for only a couple minutes, let alone decide whether it's better or not than the ones sitting next to it from a different publication. Why does it have to be under a strict time constraint? I don't think the excuse that the judges aren't getting paid for their work should suffice. It's an award, and I feel it's unfortunate that the designers on the non-winning publications are out of luck just because a judge looks at a magazine for less than a minute and decides its fate. Awards help attract talent to magazines, and I believe a slower process should be in place to decide these kinds of things.

How much slower? Frankly I don't know. It seems like the judges could take home the magazines for a night to read them, and then decide the next day. But even if each judge had one issue from each magazine with him or her, the judge would not be able to see continuity of design between issues. So, as much as I am an advocate of changing the existing system of judging, it doesn't seem like there is a feasible solution to fixing the current situation that would allow for more thorough and complete judging while allowing the judges to see more than one example per magazine. But it was fun to be a part of this year's CRMA judging, nonetheless. It was a real eye opener for me and it also gave me some ideas for future designs. 

Critique of my work (1/20-1/28)

Above is the feature and cover I designed over the weekend for VOX as part of our Beginning Assignment in Advanced Magazine Design.

Last week the Advanced Magazine Design class was given the first assignment of the semester, a contest to create a design for cover and a four page feature article for the following week's issue of VOX. All designs were turned into the VOX office on Monday, Jan. 26 where they would be examined by the team of editors and where, ultimately, one cover and one feature design would be chosen. 

Since it was my first design for VOX, let alone my first editorial design work at a magazine, I was pretty nervous. The deadline extension from Thursday to Monday morning didn't help either, as my academic obligations for the rest of my class schedule began to increase and I waited to do the assignment on the weekend. 

By the deadline on Monday, I was not pleased with my design, but I had to turn in what I had.  I wasn't disappointed with the news that mine wasn't chosen for publication, and considered the whole thing a learning experience. I took the regular Magazine Design class one year ago, so I'm a little rusty with the style of magazine design, especially because I worked as a newspaper designer last semester at the Columbia Missourian. But I know I will get better soon. 

I felt that my designs were very much like newspaper features. They felt very rigid, very formatted. There was also a lot of text for that feature story, so I felt that also constrained my design. Originally I had an illustration on the left page of the opening spread, but went with the current photo instead. It was a last minute decision to change that. But like I suggested today in lecture about a redesign for the feature, it could be a symbol of how the economy is hurting a family, and I could add it into my re-design due next week. So I will take this next week to look over my current design for both the feature story and the cover and also try to incorporate ideas I saw today during the CRMA judging session. 

On a side note, I tried using royalty free art from stock.xchng for this beginning assignment. I already had a free account, but I can't seem to be able to download royalty free images off there. Does anyone know why I am not able to do that?

On deck for next week:

1) Continue taking pictures for the Shutter graffiti/photographic field notes assignment. 

2) Revise the Beginning Assignment, which was the feature and cover I just mentioned above. 

3) Figure out what is being pitched for the Feb. 19 Short Talk section of VOX so I can begin brainstorming and gathering art for it.

 

 

You can't miss... more doom and gloom for the magazine industry, but wait there's a color palette at the end of this entry!

Since the design and publishing  classes are taking a trip to Iowa on Friday I thought I would begin my first blog entry with something interesting I found on the blog http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige. UnBeige, according to its authors, was created to entertain and inform design professionals on a daily basis about the world of design. This is done though short articles about various topics that the blog's editors find interesting. For those of you like me that are into political science, it's like Matt Drudge's Drudge Report but for the world of design.

Anyways, in anticipation of our exciting trip, I thought I would share this small piece of news that I found on UnBeige, published last Friday, Jan. 23. Click here to read the article on UnBeige. UnBeige was providing their own commentary on an article that appeared on WashingtonPost.com titled "Design Magazines Find No Shelter From the Slump." It talks about the shelter magazine industry which, not surprisingly, is facing tougher times during this economic crisis. It's a subject, I believe, this industry knows all too well. But what was fascinating about this article, at least for me, was found on the second page.

The writer says that home design blogs are becoming a popular way for people to instantly get compliments on their home decor. Who knew! I had never considered this as an option to the struggling shelter magazine. But it seems like a reasonable alternative, given the nature of the existing industry and the rise of the Internet. Maybe the groups that are pitching ideas for the online publications at Meredith Corp. on Friday could think about the possibility of adding blogs to those respective web sites? I mean, for example, it seems everyone is blogging nowadays in the newspaper industry, from the Columbia Tribune to the Washington Post, to name a few. VOX could even think about incorporating blogging into our own coverage of local events, i.e. the True/False Film Festival. The possibilities for blogging in the magazine industry are endless, and the way the industry is currently heading, it might just be a good alternative to look into. 

Okay, enough with the doom and gloom. I would like to take this moment to share a web site I think is very useful for designers. I would first like to thank Joy Mayer, the design editor at the Columbia Missourian, for introducing me to this awesome web site, called Kuler. Click here. (F.Y.I. this web site may not work on your computer if you do not have Adobe Flash or another program like it). It's a site, created by Adobe, to allow people to create 5- color palettes centered around a certain color. You can also browse other individuals color palettes as well. What is really neat about Kuler is that each color in the five color palette comes with not only the RGB and CMYK values, but also the 6 character hexadecimal code for that particular color. That code can be entered into the Swatches palette in any Adobe program (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.) and it will give you the exact color that Kuler creates. You can create any combination of colors, from complementary colors to shades of color. It's great for situations where you have a color that you want to use for a design, but you don't know what other colors to choose that would make the design jump off the page with your original color. Kuler will help you with that. And with that, I give you a custom color palette creation from Kuler. Click here.