Magazine Design Blog #1!

1. Critique

a. The design work that I have completed this week was primarily for the "Booby Prize" profile of Heather Carver, detailing her battle with cancer and using comedy as therapy. My overall thought process was to convey the fun and playful nature of the piece, yet relaying the serious tone of the subject matter and conforming to the overall style of VOX. I decided to use black and the red/orange color of Carver's clown nose to form a cohesive color scheme that would highlight the "clown role" and coordinate with the photographs. From this point, I used Carver's clown nose as inspiration. A clown nose is easy to recognize and carries an overall playful and funny notion about letting loose and being humorous, or perhaps crazy. So I took this recognizable feature and played it up throughout both of the spreads and used small rows of dots as borders to keep the circle/ball theme. I now wish I would have spent more time developing this idea and used circles in a much greater way to give more of an impression and impact on the design. Although I think the circles do enhance the overall idea, I think that their mere existence and somewhat small impact did not quite create the tone I had hoped.

For the cover of "Booby Prize" I wanted to show the many facets of Heather Carver as described in the profile. I wanted to show how many roles she has, and I thought a way to portray this was through a play on words of "walking in someone else's shoes." I used the title, "Hard Shoes to Fill" and large, exaggerated clown shoes with a list of "checked-off" items listing all of her roles as described in the piece to show how she is more than a cancer survivor and a clown, but also that she has managed to do all of these other things besides being a cancer survivor and a clown-which I think is the main point to the story.

b. I plan on revising both spreads and the cover for "Booby Prize" in hopes of relaying my ideas in a more visually exciting and interesting manner.

c. some designs!!!