Critique: The word of the week is redesign
This week was a week of reflection on old designs and how to improve them. On Sunday I finally finished my resume. I had seen a design on Pinterest a few weeks back that was just what I wanted: easy to follow, pops of color and lots of white space. I emulated the concept with different colors, fonts and obviously my own information. Personally, I think it looks much cleaner and easier to read than my previous resume.
On Monday we presented our final drafts of our design prototypes to the publishing class. After a few revisions, a new feature and new department page, I was confident in my design and what it offered to the editorial team. I limited my fonts and left white space to add a different feel for a tween/teen magazine than is currently on the market. My goal was to limit the amount of “junk” on the page and try to focus on the pops of color throughout the departments and the positive images that would be throughout the magazine. One of my favorite things to do is play around with typography. For the opening spread of a feature on Jennifer Lawrence, I took a quote from the actress and played around with the type, hoping to create more visual interest to draw a reader into the story and not just look at the image. This was my favorite spread of my concept and I thought it tied back to the cover nicely.
Although my concept was not chosen for the direction of the final project, I know that the aesthetic of my designs and the other design are very similar and I am curious to see how we will combine ideas for our final presentation. The feedback I received from the editorial team was that the script font I used felt too youthful for the publication, which is something I had not thought of. My thinking was that, with such a broad age range to appeal to (14-20) keep the lines clean but still adding something that was visually different (a script font) would break up the images. Plus, it, again, is something different than is typically seen in magazines that are currently out there for that age group. I will serve as the Assistant Creative Director for the remainder of the project.
Tuesday’s class continued with the theme of redesign as we were presented with the challenge of creating books cover options for classic novels. I was given Pinocchio and have been staring at the guy the past couple days to figure out just how to make 10 different covers to present next week. We will then talk as a group about the covers and narrow our options to five; this will be challenging because, while coming up with 10 separate ideas for a cover is already difficult, I think once I have 10, I won’t want to cut half of them. I have started some sketches and may have to steal some of my roommates colored pencils to keep drawing....This will be the first book cover I have designed and am looking forward to doing something different than a magazine cover and feature.
Today, because I had some spare time and am actually planning on applying for some jobs this weekend, I decided to redesign my online portfolio since the capabilities of Wordpress don’t really offer a lot of room to showcase my designs. I created a Wix site and have been working to bring a cohesive aesthetic look between that site and my blog and to make it visually appealing, which is what it was originally lacking. I have a feeling this is going to be an ongoing endeavor over the next few days but am anxious to get it done.