The week of Randomness

The last week has been a break in the mold of my life's normality. That's not to say it wasn't a good thing... it was actually fairly refreshing. I had to go back home to Grapevine (Texas) this weekend for essentially about 48 hours for my cousin's wedding... random. It started snowing Sunday night and continued all day Monday, and today I sat and ate outside at the tables downtown in the sunshine and nice weather... random. I saw a poster in my apartment complex notifying everyone of a lost kitten, the same lost kitten (coincidentally) that I found meowing at my doorstep last week. Random.

I could go on, but I'll stop there. And go on to...



Critique: 5 Final SJI Logos


Last week, we submitted all 20 of our logos and spread them out for the class to vote on. After everyone voted on their top 3 choices for each person's collection, Erica, Jan and Greg went through and chose the 5 we should work on and gave us advice on what we should change for our finalized works. Greg's biggest concern was that the logos didn't represent the idea of diversity well enough ( as the Sports Journalism Institute strives to bring both women and minorities in to the newsroom). It was really tough to try and portray the idea of diversity in such a small space and with so little elements. These were my revised 5 products -

I wasn't sure how to really tweak my logos, other than adding a little bit of color and trying to make the baseball stitches on the bottom left logo less literal. This Tuesday, however, Jan, Erica and Greg went around yet again and chose their two favorite (or in my case, three) out of our five.

      These are the three final logos I submitted. I added even more color after their comments yesterday, and tweaked the fonts and tracking a bit. I think this assignment was a really good exercise for me in order to get me thinking about design in a different way, the way of logos that is. I really liked getting to see what everyone else came up with while working with such limited material.

Response: Vox Magazine's Travel Issue

The. travel. issue. Well now, what can I say. At the beginning of the semester, when I saw four of our names under the travel feature, I just figured the feature would be long and we would all split it up. However, three other designers and myself quickly learned that this was not just a feature in an issue, but rather a whole special issue. 

So the last couple of weeks have been full of redesigning many of Vox's small design elements to match our theme of travel. We redesigned the byline style, the calendar, film fare, Ask Columbians (Bransonians), the sidebars, the heading at the top of each page, info boxes, chose new font families and color palettes, had two features to design, etc. 

My main focus was the Branson feature. Two of the writers and one of the photographers on Vox's staff traveled to Branson for a weekend and basically journaled their trip in both words and photos. Originally it was only slated to run in one spread, but the editors canceled one feature for print and moved it entirely online, so the Branson feature was allotted another spread. 

I think it was a really useful opportunity to see what goes into designing a whole magazine and recognizing all of the tiny elements you don't think about needing to be designed, especially with our Meredith prototypes in the works. It is a lot of dang work. I really cannot wait for the issue to come out tomorrow so I can see all of our work actually come to life in print! 

I will post photos of the issue, and the Branson feature, next week and critique it. :)

You Can't Miss... This!

The 500 Colored Pencils of Felissimo

      - So there are all types of "insert any word here" of the Month Club, where the club sends out samples of that product to the club members. Here, you can sign up to get sent 25 colored pencils each month for 20 months. They also send you a special case to hold all of the pencils, and each case they send you can link together, so at the end of the 20 months you can have a big display of all your colored pencils together. If you're impatient though, (like I would be) you can order all at once. Check out the different displays that've been made.

Also, check out this video. I thought this was pretty timely because of the iPad conference so recently. There is now a program for the iPad called LetterMPress that acts as an old letterpress, but electronically, so you can make letterpress art from the program. 

Here's the link to the video!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/821242145/lettermpress-a-virtual-letterpress-on-your-ipad

After while Crocodile,

        - Kaylee