Critique: Vox 5 cover

After a long time without having to think about iPad applications at all, it was finally my turn to do a Vox 5 cover. I was pretty nervous going into it. Everyone has made some pretty sick covers and I was worried I wouldn't live up to the standards. In reality, I am obsessed with the cover I produced. Throughout the duration of this class, I didn't push myself to do enough work with photoshop and super crazy typography. I made up for it by making this cover:

I used The Polyphonic Spree as my cover inspiration. While I am not totally familiar with the band, I did my background research and found all their cover art. They use crazy 3D letters and crazy background art. Therefore, I wanted to go all out and make a Vox 5 cover that I could picture as theirs. I am very happy with the final product, although I know that some of the smaller white text is a bit tough to read. It's a small price to pay for this end result I suppose.

Critique: David Lile Cover

Tomorrow in class I will be presenting a second draft of my David Lile radio host cover. Here's how it looks now:

I went with the image that showed his hands with the soundboard. While I know we tend to run photos of people when we have essays about them as the feature, but I wanted to mix it up. This still shows him and his profession without showing his face. I want the audience to be enticed to go inside to see who he really is after seeing the cover. I'm still not 100% sure about the typography. I tried to do an homage to Saturday Night Live but use a bit of a different font. I thought that would be something that the audience could relate to. However, the typography might change before I present in class tomorrow, although I still have Bookstore covers to do for tomorrow and some more touch-up work for my book cover. I also have an exam in another class tomorrow, eek! But hopefully it all comes together. I definitely like the Lile photo choice, so I'm really hoping everyone else does too.

Critique: Spring Preview Cover redone and Tiger Hotel feature

Hey all! I have some exciting news. I have a job interview on Monday! I'm really stoked, and I also am freaking out trying to perfect the portfolio I am going to bring. In order to do so, I redid my Spring Preview cover. Incase you don't remember, there was a teaser to the (then) upcoming Eli Young Band concert. So I took a media photo from their website, as suggested by Jan and Theresa during my portfolio review before break, to create a new cover. Here's how it looks:

I'm pretty satisfied with it, although I would like to play with the typography a bit more. If you have any suggestions feel free to let me know!
I also have a second draft of my Tiger Hotel feature for tomorrow. Last time they suggest adding more photos, especially of the inside of rooms. They also gave me another page to work with which is greatly needed and appreciated. I am still loving my huge photo spread to open the feature, although I know it was a concern last time since it took up so much space for other potential photos. I'm hoping that with the amount of photos I added and the addition of the extra page I will be able to keep this spread intact. Let me know what you think!

Critique: Simplicity Cover for print

This past week I won my first cover design competition! My Simplicity (Now "Keeping it real simple") cover will be published for the 3/29 issue. I'm so excited for my first cover!
Here's what the new version looks like. Unfortunately I only have the .indd document on my computer, so the font for the story title and blurb is changed. When I get on a Vox computer next I'll fix this...

I definitely like the color scheme more now than on the version I showed on the blog last week. I also like the fading of the handwritten text. I didn't want to fade it too much or the last few words become completely lost, but I thought this was enough to give it a nice feel. What do you guys think? (minus the font problem os course).

Critique: Simplicity cover

Tomorrow in class I will be presenting my final Simplicity cover. I'm finishing it up in the morning (I need a break just to work on some other things) but I'm happy with how it is going. All that's left is figuring out how to fit the title onto the page.
I took my original idea of using the handwritten piece from the woman on the cover and pairing it with her image. For this draft, however, I cut out the woman and placed the text beside her. This really gave me a chance to play with cutouts and photos a bit more. It also took me a while to literally trace every single letter with the pen tool to extract the text and be able to manipulate it. I think had to place everything word by word to make it fit onto the page. It was a tedious process, but I'm happy with the results so far. Now I just need to figure out the title placement and font. Wish me luck! Can't wait for you to see it tomorrow.

Critique: Softball Covers

This week I worked on potential covers for the softball issue of Vox. I presented three covers, each using a different one of our photo choices. Here were the three options I gave:



This week I started showing my work with cut outs. I did a cutout of the girls arm and leg on two of the covers so that I could put her over the text. The leg cutout turned out successful, but I had some difficulty with the arm. Since she was pitching at the time the image was taken her arm and the ball were extremely blurry. If I choose to put these covers in my portfolio I definitely need to clean up the cut outs. That's what happens when you try to do a cutout with little to no time... They don't look up to your personal standards.
I hope to do more work with cutouts in the future, however, and then come back to deal with the more difficult, blurry image.

Response: History presentations

This week we each did a short presentation on a magazine before the '70s. I ended up with Vogue from 1910-1919.
This project was very interesting for me. I had never looked at such an old magazine, in fact I had no clue Vogue had been around for so long. The biggest thing I found was how they used illustration covers and hired different artists to do different covers. This is very similar to how a magazine would hire a photographer to do a specific cover shoot for them. It was also interesting to see how they did not have a "branded" logo yet. On many covers, the title of the magazine was drawn differently. In current times, magazines would never do that. They have a specific typeface that they use on each cover so that they have a recognizable identity. This was not the case for Vogue at the time, and it was not the case for many other magazines that my fellow designers studied. It goes to show that a magazine can be successful even if they do not want to keep one typeface for their name. As long as the title is legible, a reader will know what they are buying and still want to read the magazine. In fact, I would probably be more drawn to a cover with a clever, integrated title that showed a lot of thought went into how to write the title. But that could just be because I love typography and am a designer.
Anyways, here are some covers for you to check out: