Critique Week #5

Currently I have two ongoing projects for the capstone class. First I am designing the Feature #2 for the 3.19 issue of VOX, which is a story about the grocery stores in Columbia. That is not quite done yet so I will be posting that design later this week. Check back to see.

The second project is the design/publishing project that we have been slowly working on all semester. I presented my ideas to the publishing students on Monday along with the other two designers from my group, and while the design from one of the other designers was ultimately chosen as the design we will work from, I am in charge of all the web technical stuff (of which I know some, but not all. I have these grand ideas but I'm not good with the technical side of doing such things). Oh well. Anyways I have posted my designs that I presented on Monday. I had a lot of fun with this. My ideas for the web pages were based off of ESPN.com, because I am a sports junkie and really enjoy the way ESPN.com is set up as a website. Most of the images and boxes on the pages are hyperlinks to pages that have not been created yet, kind of like showing the surface of a very complex machine but not seeing the layers inside. It's really hard to design a web page on a program such as InDesign, because you can't show most of the features that come with a web site such as the one I proposed, such as the use of pop-up thumbnails and flash slideshows. But anyways here are the designs. 

On deck for next week:

1) Attend a T/F film and a session of judging for POYI

2) Work on the Feature #2 on groceries

3) Work on the publishing/design group project

Response to today's class (2/24)

I thought today's class was very useful because I got my design portfolio critiqued by the rest of my capstone class. I've been designing for a while and have a lot of clips, mostly of newspaper design. It's hard to narrow down what I would want to put in a mini-portfolio, something I have to do later on this semester, so it was good that I got some outside opinions on what I should put in the portfolio. I think this was a great opportunity to see what clips I should focus on getting copies of to send out to employers for employment opportunities as graduation is now only about two and a half months away. Job hunting is tough, so any help I can get to make that road easier is greatly appreciated. And today was one of those help sessions I needed. Thanks class.

You can't miss... free tutorials on Flash!

On the blog Visual Editors, Desiree Perry posted information about free tutorials on Flash from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. They can be downloaded onto the computer or even the iPod. She wrote that she considers the exercises, "a good beginner's guide." Click here to go straight to Swinburne's page. This will help those in the class that are designing their websites, want Flash, but do not have a membership on Lynda.com. 

This week on UnBeige... Tropicana!

A great story surfaced on UnBeige today that I also heard on CNN's American Morning this morning: Tropicana, under a frenzied firestorm from consumers over their OJ carton redesign, is returning to their old logo. The redesign by Arnell, on the left, was introduced in late January and did away with the iconic orange and straw. But the original image will be back next month, according to Tropicana. Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America, explained that while the complaints, which came in the form of e-mails, letters and phone calls to the company, only represented a fraction of a percent of their consumers, most of the criticism came from "our most loyal consumers."

Many of the complaining consumers called the new packaging, "ugly," "generic" or a "store brand," which made it "difficult to distinguish from other brands." I just find this fascinating. I mean its orange juice, and I personally felt it was a refreshing, modern redesign. But I guess a large amount of people cherished the orange with the straw sticking out of it. 

CNN's American Morning reported that the redesign campaign cost Tropicana $35 million, and I find that astounding, because in less than one month, the entire plan has been scrapped. Tropicana's move was a smart decision, however, since they listened to consumer complaints and responded quickly. But one thing from the redesign will stay when the old product design hits the shelves again: the bright orange cap. 

I agree with the CNN's American Morning contributor who suggested that the complaints may be due to the current state of the economy, as people lose their grip on more and more things in their daily lives. As people become more paranoid about losing their jobs, they don't want to also lose the things they take for granted every day: orange juice. I know the absurdity of this statement, but think about it. It's the same tasting Tropicana orange juice, regardless of what carton its packaged in. Really how hard is it to find a redesigned carton if you are a consumer that always buys Tropicana. You see the word and you grab a carton. 

I personally liked the new redesign of the old carton: it is hip, new and modern. I just wish people would grow up and embrace the same orange juice in a different carton. The taste has not changed. What do you think of the new redesign and Tropicana's 180 degree move as a result of angry consumers? 

Critique Week #4: Redesigning the cover

At last Thursday's lab, a group of students, including myself, presented possible designs for the February 26 issue of VOX, which will highlight the True/False Film Festival, starting that day and continuing until March 1. The editors and students wanted me to work on the design I made with the black background. They thought that particular cover spoke too much with the Hollywood theme, since I was trying to mimic the Oscars in that design. True/False prides itself in not being in Hollywood or attached to it, so I had to go back to the drawing table. Looking through clip art, I found a movie clapboard, and thought I could incorporate some of VOX's witty voice into the cover using the clapboard. And the word "Hollywood" on the board led to a lot of fun as I crossed it out in red pen, like editing, and replaced it with the words True/False next to it, also in that editing red, which is also one of the colors in the T/F logo. I kept with the the lines on the clapboard and answered them in a fun way. I hope everyone likes it! 

On deck:

Working on designs for the publishing project; ideas for the secondary feature on March 12, which is on "groceries." Check back for more of my designs next week!

Response: my research on Sports Illustrated

I found the historical perspectives assignment to be a lot of fun. I critiqued Sports Illustrated in the 1960s, which the class will hear about next Tuesday, and one of the most interesting things about SI during that time was their innovations in color sports photography. At the start of the 1960s, color sports photography was still an experiment, and mostly everything that ended up in SI at that time was black and white. But by the mid-1960s, however, SI began to look into faster printing processes, and that allowed developments in sports photography, because at the time costs could run upwards of a quarter of a million dollars per page to process a color photo 36 hours or less after it was taken so it could run timely in the magazine! That is a lot of money now, and it was even more then. It's interesting to look back at that because today all a photographer has to do is plug his or her camera into a computer and the images are downloaded instantly. And they were struggling with color photos only about 40 years ago! It's amazing how far sports photography, and photography in general, has come.   

You can't miss... NewsDesigner.com

So one of my friends pointed me to NewsDesigner.com, a blog by Mark Friesen, a news designer at The Oregonian in Portland, Oregon. It's a cool blog, with links down the left side to front pages from various newspapers across the world, including the Hartford Courant, seen above. I really enjoy the Courant's front page designs, including this one, because they have a lot more white space than other newspapers, and their front page is designed differently than others. I think it's just a little breath of fresh air in the newspaper design world. But I would recommend checking out Mark's site. He went to Mizzou in the '80s!

This week on UnBeige... The One Show Contest

A posting on UnBeige caught my eye today, and it was because of this pencil, promoting The One Club for Art and Copy's annual awards show, The One Show. According to The One Club for Art and Copy's Web site, The One Show is, "the premiere international advertising award show" which "sets the industry standard for creative advertising in print, television, radio, outdoor, innovative marketing, integrated branding and branded content."

Designers would be more interested in the One Show Design aspect of it, which according to its Web site, is in its ninth year and "rewards innovation and celebrates excellence in design in advertising, branding, and other forms of visual communication." Anyone can register a design for this contest, and the deadline for completing the online registration form has been extended to February 27, 2009, in case anyone reading this has advertising design they would like to submit. More details are available by clicking here. The awards are the large gold, silver, or bronze pencils given out on May 4, as seen above. Last year's winner was HBO's Voyeur. Click here to see the design and all the winners here.

All of last year's winners were very creative, and it's just interesting to look and see all the different designs people have made for the advertising and branding of products. I would highly recommend to check it out!

You can't miss... Visual Editors!

Some of you may have been introduced to this blog already through other classes, but for those of you who haven't, I would like to introduce you to Visual Editors: "graphics, photo, video and design-skilled journalists who share best practices online and through offline training events like Camp VJ." It has a mix of online, newspaper, and magazine based content, much like UnBeige, (which I am also following) but with a broader look at the design industry within the media. 

One of my favorite bloggers on here is Charles Apple, a free-lance visual journalist and former graphics director of the Virginian Pilot and the Des Moines Register. He posts a lot of news of the industry. One of his recent posts is about a designer, Kelley Shaffer, who is a senior at Ohio University and did two covers of the New York Times Magazine as a class assignment. Click here to read the post on Apple's blog and see her designs, which are eye-catching, inspiring and very conceptual.  

Response to class presentations

After listening to the historical presentations in class, one thing stood out to me that was interesting. By 1955, Esquire had developed four-color printing and it featured more photography in the magazine. Since I am researching Sports Illustrated, I thought it was interesting how, when the first issue came out on August 16, 1954, SI had already used a color photo for its cover, and featured a couple color photographs inside the magazine as well, along with color advertisements. Otherwise, in the editorial content, SI did not do much with color in its design other than the color picture front cover and feature articles with color photographs. SI did not include more color photography inside its magazine until the late 1960s, because color photography at that time took longer to develop than black and white. Therefore, color was only used on feature articles, not news articles, such as the NFL's NFC Championship Game recap, which appeared in the magazine just days after it took place. 

Critique Week #3: Covers in process

In tomorrow's lab I will be one of the designers presenting three cover ideas for the February 26 issue, which is the issue for the True/False Film Festival, which starts the day the issue comes out. These are not completely done yet, and will most likely be tweaked again before tomorrow's deadline. 

Since this is an issue that happens every year, for inspiration I looked back at the past 4 years of VOX's coverage of the True/False Film Festival to see what other designers had done over the past years. All of them featured typography and incorporated the logo somewhere on the cover. From here I will explain why I did what I did for each cover.

Cover, at top: That cover was inspired by a feature design I saw in Garden & Gun Magazine. I wanted to make it fun to read and look at, while also not making it look too over the top. The dotted lines represent the sides of film strips, with the words being on the "film." I didn't want to draw the lines between images in the film because I felt that those would just complicate the design and it would be too much. I left the cover white because I felt color would distract from the design. Since the T/F logo is red and white, I decided to add some red in there to add as accents to the type.

Cover, at middle: I wanted to go with an Academy Awards feel, since this is a pretty major independent film festival, and I listed every film that is being shown over the span of the four-day festival on the sides of the page. The red and white colors of the festival are shown to separate the films. Of the three covers, this one is my favorite.

Cover, at bottom: My concept for this particular cover was to make it as simple as possible, since I am all about simplicity and typography. Again the colors of the festival are seen on the page to tell the reader that when they pick up the issue, they will find out about that festival.

Each of these will be tweaked later tonight before they are shown in lab tomorrow. I will post the revised covers after they have been seen in lab. 

On deck for next week:

-Revise the covers I just showed. 

-Design the Short Talk section of VOX for the 2.19 issue.

-Work on the historical perspectives assignment about Sports Illustrated in the 1960s.

This week on UnBeige... fallout over Esquire's Obama cover

Well, not surprisingly, Esquire is getting some negative reactions to their Obama cover, left, which featured a flip-open ad in the center of Shepard Fairey's now iconic image. The ad for Discovery Channel was featured on the left, while editorial content appeared on the right, or the cover side. Esquire Editor David Granger will address the controversy in an upcoming American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) Members' Lunch on February 24, but Granger has already responded to the controversy in a Q&A format on the ASME Web site, which UnBeige found and posted a news blurb on Feb. 9, linking themselves to the conversation via www.foliomag.com

Anyways, the fuss about the cover started shortly after it appeared on newsstands, when ASME questioned if the cover violated the Guidelines for Editors and Publishers. While the ASME Board of Directors concluded that the cover did not violate these guidelines, some of its members are worried that this may be the beginning of a trend to satisfy advertisers by doing quirky things like this. In the interview on ASME's Web site, Granger says the advertiser did not have an influence on what Esquire did with the cover.

"They did not have any," says Granger. "They didn't see the cover until it was shipped. Their only responsibility was to come up with the unique creative to make use of the inside of the five-inch-by-five-inch window. And the agency for Discovery did a great job of making it work."

Granger discloses that he asked his staff three years ago to find unconventional ways of making a magazine. Those months of experimentation led in part to this cover. Asked why he would do this, Granger replied:

"...I got sick of reading about the demise of print, which is the best, most rewarding medium ever, and I got sick of all forms of print being labeled "old media." Yeah print has been around for a long time, but that's because it works really well. Both aesthetically and as a business - which is more than one can say for most forms of "new media." So we've been trying to find ways to get people to reassess the print medium."

I thought that quote was interesting because he goes on to say from there that he doesn't believe that the Obama cover violated the so-called "sanctity" of the cover. In fact, he doesn't think its any more intrusive than the gatefolds magazines sometimes have on their covers.

So I think this was definitely his way of getting people to reassess the print medium. Is it effective? Yes. Does it violate the sanctity of the cover? Actually, I don't think so. I got this issue of Esquire because my Magazine Editing class talked about it. Had my professor not told our class that there was an ad on the cover under that flap, I don't think I would have noticed. And if you wanted to save it for keepsakes, like I'm doing, you could just fold the ad back onto the cover and it would look the same as if the ad were never there. Does anyone have a different opinion on this? 

Response to the movie Helvetica

Yesterday, during class, we watched most of the movie Helvetica. According to IMDb.com, it's a documentary film about typography, graphic design, and visual objects in general. What was interesting to me was the range of responses to the birth of Helvetica. It seems like every business seemed to use it when it first arrived to give them a "fresh" look, and I believe they still continue to do so today. But one thing that stood out at me was the woman, I forget her name, who associated Helvetica with starting the Iraq war. I think she was joking, but it still seems odd that someone would make a joke like that. 

As a fan of typography myself, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I had never seen it before. During the movie, it struck me how many different places use Helvetica or some other san-sarif font today in logos, menus, papers, movie posters, etc., among other things. It leads me to wonder if there will come a time where serif fonts will become obsolete? What do you think about that? I believe that because of its clean look (Helvetica, et. al.), it appeals to the eye, and I think that's why Helvetica and fonts like it have become so popular nowadays. 

It's interesting to relate this trend to the use of typographic design today, especially with things such as Wordle, where a lot of the word bubbles are created in san-serif fonts. Furthermore, unless the type is already a part of a masthead in newspapers or magazines, it seems the trend for headlines and sell lines seems to be gravitating towards san-sarif fonts, or serif fonts that look very similar to san-serif fonts. I think that is the case because it's clean look is easily readable from far away, even when in a smaller size. Newseum's Today's Front Pages gallery helps show this trend in the newspaper industry. Many of the main headlines from the over 700 front pages on this site are san-serif fonts. Do you think that trend will continue?

You can't miss... Wordle!

Continuing on the theme of typography from our lecture today, I would like to introduce everyone to a Web site I love for creating typography designs. It's called Wordle. Above, I created "Border War" in anticipation of Monday's men's basketball game between Missouri and Kansas. It's really simple to create. In only a couple minutes you can design and save your own creation in PDF form. However, I just like to have this program inspire my work, not do it for me. I would rather be in creative control of the designs I make, and not let an Internet program come up with a random design for me. I'm interested, though, in how others feel about this. I mean would InDesign or Illustrator fall under this category? Or am I thinking too much into this?

This week on UnBeige... Philippe Starck and more!

There were a couple of interesting news articles on UnBeige this week. 

First, UnBeige comments on a video interview from Fast Company magazine featuring the famous French designer Philippe Stark, who has been recently in the news for his upcoming reality TV show, titled, "Philippe Stark's School of Design" which is slated to air on BBC later this year. The show will run in six one-hour episodes, and starts with 25 designers who will compete for 10 spots in a design course in Paris over the length of the show. At least one of those 10 finalists will earn a six-month "placement" at Stark's design agency in Paris, according to www.brandrepublic.com. The story, which UnBeige reported on before this latest entry, (Jan. 18 & Jan 26) takes a humorous twist in its third installment, as UnBeige finds a video produced by Fast Company magazine. In the video Stark is being interviewed about his latest project, a set of stereo speakers designed for a French wireless technology company called Parrot. This video was just fun to watch. Click here to see it on UnBeige. 

Second, on a sadder note, while most of us were in Iowa on Friday, it was reported on UnBeige that Fabien Baron and Karl Temple are leaving Interview magazine. UnBeige reported on the news from WWDMedia, who initially confirmed the departures with the magazine's publisher, Brant Publications, Inc. The magazine was founded by Andy Warhol in 1969. 

Critique Week #2: Design Revision

Over this past weekend I redesigned the cover and feature article which was assigned as the first assignment for this class. 

Part of my problem with my original design for the cover is that I was too generic, so I worked on making my design more specific to the story, adding the i-Pod, movie ticket and "As Heard on TV" sticker. The movie ticket would work for the part of the story where the local bands contact with movie producers to have their audio used as part of the movie. I played off the "As Seen on TV" idea for making the sticker. The iPod connects both the TV and movie aspects of the story, since TV shows and movies can been shown on iPods nowadays, and the soundtracks of TV shows and movies can be added to a iTunes playlist.  

With the feature article, I went back to my original idea I scrapped at the last minute before turning it in the first time. I am a fan of simple designs, so I just wanted to show that this was an economic story with probably the most well-known symbol of the economy in the United States: the dollar sign. I moved the sidebar to the last page on the bottom because I wanted to make the story flow and not have one page mostly filled with text and nothing else. I did not want to make the pictures different sizes because this story is about these two men's experiences, and I feel that by making one picture bigger than the other the article looks like its favoring one person over the other. 

For next week:

1. Work on gathering art for the Short Talk section of the 2.19 issue of VOX.

2. Sketch thumbnails and create a design for the 2.26 cover due next week in lab.

3. Research and critique Sports Illustrated from the 1960s for the Historical perspectives assignment.

Photographic Field Notes

Photographic Field Notes Photo #7

Shutter graffiti

Shutter graffiti Photo #3

Photographic Field Notes Photo #6

I've seen this car in the woods by my apartment but I've never taken the chance to walk over and look at it. This would be a car restorer's dream, to get an automobile like this because it's not in bad shape. If it wasn't so rusted I would love to take the end of it and put it up in my garage wherever I end up after college. I love cars, especially vintage ones, so it's a bittersweet moment for me, seeing this type of car like this. 

Photographic Field Notes Photo #5

Grindstone Nature Area, off Old Hwy. 63 S, where I like to take a walk and enjoy nature. Some of my best ideas for designs come when I'm walking through this area because I'm inspired by all the natural beauty around me.

Photographic Field Notes Photo #4

Stephen's Lake Park, off E. Broadway, where I like to go to relax and enjoy nature (even if it's only for a few minutes). 

Photographic Field Notes Photo #3

The iconic golden arches of McDonald's, a symbol of America around that exists around the world. (From the restaurant on Nifong).