We Don't Get French Benefits?

So, I've had a chance to slow down over the weekend, and decided to spend my new-found free time commenting on clothing design.
Miss Universe
First, without any critique, I would like to present for your pleasure the 2006 Miss Universe National Costumes: Hey, don't laugh--it's their heritage.


MISS USA


MISS ALBANIA


MISS LATVIA


MISS JAPAN

and my personal favorite...

MISS GERMANY

Project Runway

As most of my friends know, I love Project Runway. I have a huge respect for people who can not only come up with interesting designs, but then take that idea and transform it into a 3-D, wearable product people can use.

A new season has just started up, and I've already picked my two favorites.
Michael. had the most beautiful dress made entirely out of coffee filters! Alas, I can't find a picture on the web. It was white, short, and the filters were frilly shells moving as the model walked, it was FABULOUS.

My other favorite is Katheryn. She really hasn't done anything yet, but I do love her attitude. We'll see if her designs can live up to her adorable look.

Someone I really dispize is Vincent. Here's his first dress, it looks like a kindergardener's art project, from the horrible hat, to the bizzaire pockets that DONT go with the outfit. I hated the cut of the dress, and just him in general, I have a feeling he's on drugs or something. After two episodes, I've decided he's just one of those 'artists' that is so completely wrapped up in his craft, he doesn't even realize what he's creating is horrible crap.

Here was his first creation, completely with hideous hat:


HERE's what he did for the second challenge, which was a beauty pagent gown. I HATE the way this looks, it doesn't fit the model right, it looks like a dumb little prom dress you'd find at Macy's and the sleeves are just hideous.


I realize I'm being mean here, but I have been searching blogs all afternoon for these photos, and their cattiness is rubbing off on me. Tune in each week, I'll try to critique designs on the show to mix up my design posts.

Second Front: 7.21



I liked using the In the Moment, it gave the page more white space than usual. The art head isn't very good, but works with the space. The copyeditor liked that headline, and it was the best I could come up with.


1A page: 7.22


This page was lambasted (not really, but I like that word) by my professor. I am not using two line headline, mostly because I just don't think about it, and in this case, it definitely deserved one. Other than no second line on that MesaAir headline, I still like this page.

1A page: 6.29


Here is another example of not using a two line headline. I love my art head, but there is no lead story on this page. Looking at it now, it is obvious. While the MesaAir lead at least has space around it, this one just looks cramped and not important.

1A page: 7.13


Horray a good 1A page again! I like this page, it seems very nice. I love the square photo on the page, I don't think we use enough square photos. Ahh...cropping.

So I've switched out my Second Front shifts and started doing both the Wire and feature pages. Wire is fun because I get to pick the news and feel smart, but the pages aren't really pushing me design-wise. It'll help just to tell people I've worked with the wire. Yet another resume filler.

My feature pages, however, are neat. Usually we get one page, sometimes a jump, and they are created whichever way we want to create them that week (granted, we have to stay in boring News-style, but I don't mind it) Here are my first three feature pages:

Faith: 7.2


Faith: 7.16


Muse: 7.23

Here are my last few features/covers for vox:





The family bluegrass band-photo essay! How do you make a boring Christan family exciting? green background.





The Disaster issue! These boxes gave me the hardest time...especially when their placements needed to move on Monday night! overall, the spread turned out very well. Each story has its own icon. I'll post my icons later to show you how cool they are.



The rodeo cover. After this, I don't want to put a photo on the cover EVER again. It's completly the WRONG photo for vox, but what can you do?



My Bollywood cover! Considering my art was all pub stills, I decided to embrase the tackiness head-on. I think this cover is a mix between MTV movie awards and a Bollywood sign, hence the name.

Here's my feature this week for Vox:




There was a lot of text to work with, so I kept the design simple. I did have to trace the Playbill to get my headline. It just goes to show, you can put in hours of work on something most people will assume you got off the internet.

I like the red, and the borders around each section. I was proud of the copy fitting in such perfect boxes.

Tuesday's Second Front:


Here I was working with a LONG story. Long copy. Long graphic plus a photo. The photo isn't that interesting, but if I played it smaller, the graphic would compete for dominance, and It wasn't interesting enough to have that dominance. It was an alright page.


Wednesday's 1A:


For the first time, I was not happy with the page. The centerpiece headline isn't large enough, and isn't really a feature. The bottom photo screwed up my grid and it's hard to tell what story it belongs too. I'd rather just throw this page away.


Thursday's Second Front:


This was much better. First time I had two photos on the second front. I liked playing garden at the top, and the centerpiece on the old lady wasn't really exciting, but did get the dominance I wanted.

Lesson of the day: You can move life stories to the JUMP page! (making it someone else's problem) Seriously, on Thursdays we have issues...the combination of Andrene (the 1A designer), the ACE and myself always leads to at least three obits coming in AFTER budget, screwing up my page. Today, I just pushed them over to jump, oh the joy.

Here is the Second Front from Wednesday:



Joy told us in class to try and think outside the typical '4.5 column centerpiece' package. This spread really helped me do that, mainly because the lead photo was vertical. Partly because of space issues, and partly because I was thinking 'outside the box' I decided to play both photos on top of each other. It divides the page, looks different, but I think that's good. Variety is important. Also, the life stories block at the bottom of the page helps make the vertical top not seem as extreme as it could.

Lesson of the day: Just because you have no obits at budget, doesn't mean it won't fill up your page by 7 p.m.


Here is the Front page from Thursday:



This was my first time working with a graphic/photo package. I got a lot of positive feedback on the page, my class liked how the photo worked well with the story.

lesson of the day: graphics is your friend...and when a graphic is too long, talking nicely to Bob might get you a little space trimmed at the bottom of your page (hooray!)

Here is the second front page from Friday:



Today I had another fun centerpiece, and decided to try another art head. I love how it came out, the lowercase p not only resembles the popsicles, but also creates a nice box for the t deck to fit underneath.

Lesson of the day: never joke about people dying to give you more space on the page, because when it happens (like tonight) -- a little part of you probably goes to hell.

Here is this week's feature:





It's about a guy who just discovered he has the perfect countertenor voice. I knew I would be playing with the musical notes, and really liked how the large clef note off-balances the text. It's high, like the text is wide, and I think music is so much about balance between elements. The H as a note I think is both subtle, and connects the headline to the large clef note, creating a scale of words.

Looking at the page, the photo of him might be a little too large. I think in Vox we try to play up a large dominate image, but when the image isn't detailed, there really is no reason to play it this big.

Carrying over the notes to the second page, the pull quote again off-balances the clef note.

Here is this week's cover:


It was a photo essay on a boxing club in town with really powerful black and white images. I liked this photo for the cover because it's ambiguous. It tells the reader the subject, but none of the players are in the forefront, creating an incentive to read the feature inside.

Because the photo was black and white, I wanted to play that up, and did so by lessening my colors around it. The gold lettering gives some muted colors, I liked the metallic look of the gold on the page. The white outline of vox represents the ropes in a boxing ring.

Some critique of the cover, a black and white photo, no matter how interesting, still doesn't really sell Vox as a cover. Part of it was that the black and white only prints on one plate. Possibly printing it as a four-color grayscale would have made it pop more, but honestly I think it just can't be done on our presses.

Illustrations
Also in the past few weeks I've taken on some illustrating responsibilities, here are two gems. The first is a fun little ice cream cone, the second is much more disturbing. It was originally going to be a cover, filled with masks of different artists, but fortunately boxing was deemed 'cover worthy' It still gives me the creeps looking at it, I had to stop designing after these two because it was creeping me out.

Wed. Second front:


My first use of a two-photo centerpiece. There was a space issue with the centerpiece-- I did not know there were two photos, and a tagline previewing the hickman graduation the next day never made it on the page. Although it was just talked about as a possibility, its missing presence on the page the next day led to questions from Liz and Joy.

The infobox in the centerpiece was long, and its placement means both photos are on the same side. I could have switched their positions, creating a diagonal for the photos, and moving the infobox headline away from the t-deck...there is just too much type up there in that corner. I like the headline above the photo.

Lesson of the day: don't volunteer to add things until you know the space available

Thursday 1A:


This was my first use of an art head. It was once again a stand-alone photo with a copy block attached. The photo at the top corner gives the sky in the photo a place to expand, and the art head really goes well with the boy in the photograph.

The online story at the bottom needs a website address added to it. This was a tricky situation, the story was once on the jump page, but was bumped off for a different story and all that was left was a 1A teaser to go online. I changed the display to 'online' as well as rewrote the last line to say 'see online.' I assumed the copy editors would add what needed to be added, but apparently they suck. (That was harsh, but that day specifically I had real issues with the copy desk, I won't go into making fun of the spelling bee kid in his headline)

Another lesson Joy told me was to treat pages as blocks. Try to get one space filled first, then have everything else fit into the rest. The vertical space is an example of this-- I knew where the photo and graphic stories would go, and by keeping those in the same block, it left a vertical column to fill with an AP story.

The graphic was really tall, and I had trouble trying to keep the standalone photo dominate with such a large graphic to deal with. It guaranteed the photo would be at the top, and also moved my mugshot of the spelling bee kid to the outside. I like my vertical column, it helped set up the page really well.

Lesson of the day: Don't be flustered by the newsroom's frantic nature.

Friday Second Front:



This second front had a lot of infobox material to fit in a few stories. The 'How To Volunteer' in the lead story worked well lined up next to the story. The 'Get Involved' also matched well with the infographic in the Dig story. This was another two-photo centerpiece, but this one was def more newsy than my others.

I'm getting better at distinguishing between headline sizes, and that top headline was 60 pt-- SUCCESS! The photos were boring, but I wasn't going to argue with the photo department this early in the semester.

The lead story was the last one to come in, and at the time the centerpiece story was longer and taking up more space vertically. My first reaction was to cut the lead story, because that was what was not fitting, but the centerpiece was already so long, it had to most space to cut from, and also prol needed the cutting.

Lesson of the week: In lieu of an inch long feature, find something else on the page to cut.

My first week as a news designer was....interesting. I am trying to learn the style as quickly as possible, and each night I learned something new. Hopefully by next week I'll have the style down enough to be able to play more with my pages.

Here's my 1A from Thursday:



I actually had a few people tell me they liked the spread, including Rick Shaw, the photo editor, which is always good. I liked playing the photo large, but it threw off all my column sizes on the page. I still like it, but technically it's not kosher 'news design' wise. But they way I see it, I'm a mag designer....I'm suppose to push buttons.

Here's my second front from Wednesday: (my first night)



For my first night out, I was pleased. The spacing is off, because you can't expect me to get everything right the first time out. The 'what's up with that' display type was created by yours truly. It's a little cluttered there at the bottom, but I guess that's news design for you: stressful hours and accepting mediocrity if it's deadline.

Friday's Second Front



I originally had a blub above the headline of the swim feature, but it had to be taken out for space...so sad. I am a goddess at getting things to fit...see the left side of the page? It's called skillz.

Here's my first feature post-class. The story was about a German lady who grew up under the Third Riceh(sic) and eventually came to America and married a GI. Interested memoir, I tried to play up the old photographs she gave me to get a photo-album feel. I wanted to repeat the old border in the spread, and settled with the Illustrator template, it works pretty well, but possibly is a little more treasure map than old photo. The color looks light because our press runs everything darker. It comes out tomorrow:

Here's the spread: