We Don't Get French Benefits?

Short Talk Illustration Critique

The past two weekends I have designed Short Talk. It's been awhile, and coming back at the end of the semester I wanted to really push myself to do things I haven't gotten to do yet. Namely, Illustrations. I have yet to put together a 'clip-arty' page like Eddie's Flying Hot Dog, so I made a point to take the pages that needed illustrations.

The 4.20 issue I was responsible for Tips to Tack and a Side Dish that consisted of recipes.

The T2T page was short, and instead of filling the bottom of the space with another box, I decided to draw dandelions within the sidebar box (the story was about how to take care of these weeds) They kind of spring up from the bottom of the page and break up the text of the box.

Here's the Illustration:


Here's the page:


The Side Dish was a little tricky, because the only text was the recipes. They looked lost when I set them up as simply text, so I decided to place boxes around them, giving them the feel of recipe cards that readers could cut out and use. This makes the page more sevice oriented and anchors the text better. I also created an illustration for the page because there wasn't a lot of text. The theme was 'dinners you can make in one pot' so I took a chicken and fish, two of the featured recipes, and had them sitting inside a pot. The illustration looks VERY clip-arty, but it was my first illustration. I created it by tracing a clip art image, hence the silliness.

After the page was in print, Heather reminded me they had thought up another idea that had each ingredient in circles, and arrows pointing them into the pot. This would have definitely been less clip-arty, but it was too late to change anything. I didn't know about the other idea because I was originally not scheduled to design this issue, and hadn't written down any of the brainstorming ideas. This was a lesson for me to always be aware of what the other ST designers are planning.

here's the illustration:


Here's the page:


4.27.06
For the 4.27.06 issue, I was again responsible for two pages, a Scene and Heard and a How-To.

The scene and heard was simple, I switched around the picture position from where it had run the past few issues just to be a little different.

Here's the spread:
TK--when it's published I'll get the image up.

For the How To, Heather and I wanted to change up our illustration options because we had four pages of Short talk. The idea was to have small icons for each subhead. Originally scheduled for a full page, I designed five icons for each section, which explained how to get out of situations like a bad date, etc. Icons were fun, and I tried to make them NOT look like clip art by simplifying the colors and lines. I needed to keep the images simple, so I took the main theme from each subhead and represented that through the icon. Here's how they turned out:

How to get out of a bad date:


'Child's Play' or How to excuse yourself from the table:


How to get out of work:


How to get out of a long-winded phone call:


How to excuse yourself in Thailand with a 'wai' (I know, very bizarre);


Here's the spread:
TK--when it's published I'll get this up.