Critique: The Fairytale of Spring Preview
This past week we worked on the Spring Preview issue of Vox and my design was chosen for publication. My inspiration was the idea of looking forward to something and what you use to look into the future. With a crystal ball out of the question for my personal aesthetic, I settled on an antique looking mirror that I drew and added flower embellishments to. I thought the fairytale idea of “Mirror, Mirror on the wall…” would be a different concept from watering cans and flowers that were sure to decorate the minds of the rest of the designers. Honestly, I was really proud of my cover and the concept. I continued the idea on the inside pages by adding splashes of color with a brush tool and a handheld mirror to house the highlighted events that were to be pulled out. While I wasn’t as proud of the inside pages, I did think I carried the theme through and kept the copy organized which was key with the abundance of text. The concept and stylization of it was very different from typical Vox issues which I assumed would work against me. Wrong.
I spent the majority of the next four days in the office tweaking little details. I now hate my handwriting and am not particularly fond of how the heading looks because of that reason. I think its because I stared at it for so long. For the theme being about spring, everything just looked so white to me. I added dashes of color throughout with the brushes and am overall happy about how it turned out. If I could go back and do something different with the splash page I think I would. It, along with the flowers in some places, seem a little childish and less whimsical, as I was going for. I was, thankfully, able to avoid the rainbow of colors that I was afraid would explode from my concept and I think that the white gave it a lot of balance in that area.
Coming up, I am working on several things for assignments and (re) building my portfolio. The True/False film festival is an annual event that takes over the town of Columbia and we have been saddled with designing the many elements that appear in Vox for this issue. With a brain fried from working on my spring preview, I set to thinking about concepts revolving around growth and time, the themes set by Vox and True/False respectively. For some reason I am drawn to the idea of Alice in Wonderland because it has strong elements of both however I am stuck at the visual representations. We will just have to see how this one plays out.
I am also working on redesigning my resume. My resume has been in InDesign since my senior year of high school, ever changing, evolving and growing bigger. With the potential job hunt looming I think it is time for a fresh look and maybe a little cleaner slate. I am going to take down the amount of color (don’t worry, it is all one color but the whole resume is one color) and rearrange a little bit. It was brought to my attention that while color adds to the appeal of the resume, employers do like to print it out which would eat a lot of ink. No need to give a strike against myself before they even meet me for eating up their toner. I know how that goes; a publication can never have enough toner.