These are at least a bit more successful than my last round.

I still feel like my brain is really having a hard time wrapping around this type of project. The whole anchorage/relay thing is hard!

But that’s what I’m here for, though. To learn how to think.

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I’m overall pretty happy with the progress on this one. It’s going well.

But I’m having issues with color yet again. That yellowish color does not want to print consistently. It looks fine on my infographics, but it’s greenish on my small text, even though there’s no cyan in there at all. Bah! Maybe getting rid of the little bit of black in that color will fix it…

And my rag is all weird and stuff. That’ll get fixed soon.

There’s a bunch of other tiny issues that will be resolved soon. (Image color & cropping, author name placement, page number placement, etc.)

But yeah, overall, it’s going well. I haven’t had to stress out too much over this. Which is nice, because I’ve got enough stress in my other classes to make up for it. Har har har.

…Oh, and I’m getting rid of all that Univers in my infographics. I don’t use it anywhere in my article. So now the typeface count is down to two. Chaparral for body text and VAG Rounded for headers, infographics titles, and all the other display-ish stuff. No more, no less.

Boo-yah.

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One movie campaign that I immediately thought of was Food, Inc.

The use of visual pun (the barcode standing in as the cow’s spots) is both eye-catching and relevant to the message that food has been reduced to a product with utter (udder!! ha!) disregard to the integrity of the food itself in its natural state.

The saturated color in the image hits the viewer in the face while alluding to today’s food being hyper-saturated with artificial colors and preservatives. This DVD cover combines natural and artificial elements to create an uncomfortable feeling of being over-processed while not having a crowded composition.

I’ll be keeping these things in mind throughout this project.

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As far as aesthetics go, I like the top one. Although, it looks a little bit like an album cover from the ’90s. Conceptually, I like the top and bottom ones. The middle one is just using the floppy disk icon as a stand-in for the real thing. And that’s not very exciting, is it?

This whole anchorage & relay thing is still really hard for me to fully grasp. But I think I’m starting to get it. There’s a glimmer of hope for me after all.

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Throughout this semester, I’ve been learning how to come up with concepts and use imagery to illustrate those concepts. I know it seems like a silly thing to be excited about, but I’d been having a lot of trouble with it before. I feel like I’m finally starting to get it. (Yay!!)

This process started out with a bunch of sketches. One of my mentors once referred to sketching as “getting the crappy ideas out to make room for the good ones.” But I never really appreciated sketching until the last couple of projects I did. It really does help get the crap out of my head and refine the better ideas I have.

Creating images from concepts will probably be a struggle of mine for a long time. But at least I’m starting to get better at it.

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It occurred to me that I need to give credit to the author of my article. Duh. I should put his name in my opening spread.

In case you were wondering, I got the bulk of the info from here: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hacker.htm but my opening paragraph is from here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is

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The opening spreads were pretty fun to do. So I made a bunch. I ended up using the last one (with some modifications, of course) for my article.

My article spreads:

That last page has a disproportionate amount of whitespace. Maybe it needs more text. Maybe the whole document needs more whitespace… I’ll move things around to make it all happy.

And I think I need to use either more or less photography in my layout. Right now, the opener feels so disconnected from the rest of the article. Adding more photos throughout (or taking the opening photo out and replacing it with some of my vector stuff) would unify the spreads (and possibly help with the whitespace issue).

I’m trying to stick to certain rules about my design. I’m a bit looser with my magazine rules than I was with the rules for building my icons, but there are rules there. For example, I can’t put any text in the lower row of modular space (AH! There’s a pullquote down there! Gotta fix that!) because that’s where my ethernet cable is. And there must be at least one pullquote for each spread. I’m still playing around with the pullquote color, though. Right now, the rule for pullquote color is that it must be the opposite color of whatever colored thing it’s closest to. (Kind of a sloppy rule, perhaps… but I’m working on it.)

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Peer2Peer

• focuses on how data transfer revolutionized how the world sees community and public property

Hacks to Riches

• hackers who became famous & successful (like Steve Jobs, Woz, etc.)

Less is More

• evolution of computer hardware; devices are getting smaller, but more powerful over time

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Needless to say, I came a long way in this project. I’m surprised at how quickly my ideas evolved. It’s only been a couple of weeks!

Here are my first round of sketches:

First digital idea:

Second digital idea, playing with formal similarities:

Refinement of that idea:

further refinement:

iPad screenshots:

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So, even though this is technically the last version with an all-class critique, I’m still going to have to make some changes/improvements before carrying it over to my Typography project.

For example, my ethernet cable is losing its meaning now. It used to be an anchor for the dates on the timeline, but then my timeline felt heavy. Now it’s just kind of floating at the top without any connection to the timeline at all. That’s gonna change. I’ll continue playing with the placement of that ethernet cord in relation to my dates, and find a solution to that problem.

Also, I’m  continuing my battle with color. The whole thing feels a bit too light. So I need to figure out a way to make it darker/heavier. That will help things stand out from the page a bit more. Honestly, I was worried about these infographics being adjacent to blocks of black text because the black text will be too heavy in comparison. If I can beef up my infographics, I can avoid that problem before it starts.

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