Critique- Roll On, Columbia photo story

This week I worked on my first assignment for my capstone. This assignment was a cover and 5 page photo essay from a story about a shop in Columbia where people can come to roll their own smokes.
I was a bit nervous to start this project seeing as I was not familiar with VOX formatting and most of my design experience comes from a class where I did not publish my work. I started by choosing a photo edit that I thought best fit the story. I also chose my cover image.

I chose my cover image because I found it to be intriguing, it informed the audience that the story had to do with smoking, and it worked nicely with the size of the cover and where the VOX logo goes on the cover page.

Then I worked on my story edit. I knew that I wanted to make the first spread of my story a large photo with limited text. I made this decision based on the fact that this was a photo story and the focus did not necessarily need to be the text. Therefore, I only used the title and dek on the opening spread. I used the image of the smokes to emphasize that the story was about a smoke shop.



My second spread began the story. I used the dominant image of the shop owner smoking so that I could introduce him into the story. I also used the image of the shop so that people could see what the store looked like. The third image on this spread was a difficult decision. I love the photo, but it worried me to show a child inside of a smoke shop. In the end, I decided that since the child was just standing by a counter and not buying, rolling or smoking any smokes it was alright to use. I had space that would have been great to use a vertical image, but unfortunately we were only given horizontal images. Therefore, I used a pull quote that I thought represented the story.



On my final page I wanted to show both what the shop sells and a look at the smokes being created. That is how I chose the final two images. The dominate image had a lot of detail in the glass counter and showed what was sold in the shop, therefore I chose it to be the dominant image on the page.


Overall I think I did a good job on my first project. I wish I had been a little more creative and played with my typography more. In this next project, our Spring Preview issue competition, I hope to come up with a more creative concept.