WEEK 10ish

I'm not sure what week we are in.....all I know is that after this one we have 3 more and then finals week! I think this week has actually been my busiest one yet (I say this as I am sitting in the library with 2 tumblers full of coffee to my left). The end is in sight however, so I suppose that is why everything is piling up! P.S. This is the exact shirt that I am wearing right now: isn't it awesome? and oh so true. CRITIQUE:
Last Thursday in lab I presented a redesign for my school safety cover. I decided that it would be fun and different to try and draw the cover using only ink. It was difficult to find a balance between keeping the tone serious, but also playing into the fact that it dealt with schools. This is what I came up with, and as you look at it I want you to reminisce about all of those times when you were in school and a teacher came in and yelled, "Hey! What's going on in here!" (I am not implying that this happened frequently, but it does on TV shows at least). I absolutely loved making this cover - I was able to have fun with the VOX logo and the dek. I just felt as though it would be a unique look that VOX hasn't seen yet. Although this will not get published, I still love it for my portfolio.
















In other design news.....I am designing a 10 page feature along with Abbey and Jena that is titled, "The Justice League of Columbia." Basically, the feature profiles three people in the field of criminal justice. One is a police officer, another is the chief of forensics, and the third is who we call, "the bug guy." I've been told that his job is a mix of forensics and determining evidence based on the bugs present on the scene. We had a photo shoot with all 3 of them on Tuesday, which Jena and I got to direct a bit. I have not seen any of the photos yet but I am confident that we have some good ones! Here was my initial design for a splash page (with a filler photo):






















We got our inspiration originally from Shepard Fairey, whose work can be seen at www.obeygiant.com. Fairey's is also the genius behind the new look of Saks Fifth Avenue:



Lastly, I have been working on getting my pages designed for Storage.com! We have a site that is clickable and it is very exciting to see the progress!

RESPONSE:
This week in lab we continued to have presentations for our Trends assignment. We again had some very hopeful people out there who have us great advice, and others who more or less said, "Hey, good luck kids." Maybe since this week has been so hectic, I will do a "reflection" moreso than a response on a particular subject. I got to reflect back on my childhood a bit this week because of a few things my mom sent to Columbia. It is tradition in my sorority for our parents to write us a letter when we are seniors and then this letter is read to us during one of our chapter meetings. Some parents send in old pictures, write funny stories, etc, etc, etc....MY parents sent these two posters that I had made (one from grade school and one from high school). It is pretty entertaining to read some of the things that I thought were really important, or that I thought I would be doing by the time I am nearing 23 years old (yikes...23....don't want to talk about it). Anyway, here is the "life poster" I made when I was in grade school:
And, let's zoom in on a few pieces of this poster......



What a perfect day..... In high school I had to make my "life timeline," which was to continue all the day until death. I remember hating doing this because I didn't want to write down my death...I think I said, "dies peacefully at age 100," or something like that. Anyway, here is my life timeline:
And again...a closer look at some important dates.



Man, I sure can not WAIT to make my first million and then hit up Florida all in the same year. My mom also pulled something I had written on my blog from when I lived in London last summer. To make a long story short, I had traveled to Wales to jump off of some cliffs for this excursion. Getting there was an awful experience....and then once we got there we were so late that we missed the train back to London and therefore had to spend the night in a lodge in the middle of nowhere where this "excursion" place was. The woman who ran the lodge gave us vague directions on how to get to the "beach" to see the sunset. It took a good hour or wading through thick mud to find it, but when we did it was beautiful. There was also a man dressed in a full chicken suit by the beach in Wales...it was so weird. But anyway, she had this made for me with a picture that I had taken in Wales as well:
I had no idea I was so inspirational.

YOU CAN'T MISS! BLOG.EYEMAGAZINE.COM
It's Type Week at eye magazine!
The magazine featured custom type this week with hand-drawn letters. Ryan Hughes takes a look at some creative type-artists. He says that back in the "pre-digital dark ages" custom type was the norm. Can you imagine?? That would take so many additional hours of work to complete. In order to create expressive layouts, hand-drawn types were used and especially common for headlines and advertisements. Here is the direct link to the story: http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=188 It is a short story, but here are some of the images:


END QUOTE:
maybe I should put this on my walls until graduation?
Have a great day!
~Christy