Response, week 8

You'll have to move swiftly to get your hands on a design job

Finding a design job feels sort of like the world's largest game of Whack-a-Mole; the jobs pop up when you're least expecting it, and they're only around for a very short time. That's how it feels, anyway.

That said, I am in the process of putting together my portfolio book to ship off to prospective employers, so this past week's group portfolio review has been helpful (and will be even more helpful when I can get my hands on those written critiques). The entire process has me outrageously stressed, but finally sitting down and picking out which pieces make the cut has alleviated a small portion of that stress. I am finally moving forward with all the preparations for applying to jobs and internships (the March 21 National Geographic deadline is also pretty good motivation).

Critique - week 8

Here is my revised final logo. That is to say, it's revise, and it's the final selection of the original 20/5. That is not to say it's done. Were I to improve upon it, I would have to fix the sports figures and give them a clear, unifying style. They're cleaner than the original figures, but there are still issues that I'd like to resolve before handing it over to SJI if they choose it.

When Greg assessed our revised logos, he first asked how we incorporated the idea of diversity in our logos. As I said I would do last week, I looked at logos for diversity-oriented organizations, and I was unable to find one that I felt was done tastefully. By and large, they incorporated the "Hands Around the World" theme or several faces of different skin tone overlapping. Wanting desperately to avoid falling into these tempting traps, I mostly avoided the idea of diversity and instead focused on the college, sports and written journalism themes of the organization. The logo pictured above, however, can be read as addressing diversity through use of color. The colors are representative of the main color in each sport's ball (brown footballs, orange basketballs, red baseball stitching), but they are also all warm colors, which are reminiscent of people and skin tones without being overt and tactless.

Critique - week 7

As promised, this week's critique is devoted to my rough drafts for the Sports Journalism Institute logo commission. SJI is a program committed to bringing greater gender and ethnic diversity to sports desks across the U.S., and they need a logo. In creating the logos, I tried to address the iconography of sports journalism. SJI as it was explained to me is focused on magazine/newspaper/online sports journalism rather than broadcast, which unfortunately eliminated much of what we visually associate with sports journalism. (The sideline reporter looking skyward with the logo-clad microphone as he or she interviews a 7'4" center, for example)

Here are the five finalists that I picked along with the help of all the designers and our liaison with SJI, Columbia Missourian Sports Editor Greg Bowers.

Obviously, they all require a lot of improvement. These are just rough drafts to better visualize the ideas I was playing with. I like the first and fourth the most (the first is based on the St. Louis Cardinals logo with birds perched on a baseball bat), and the fourth calls upon the podium where athletes and coaches address the media after a game or during a press conference. The last one looks pretty atrocious right now, but I like the idea. It is intended to show a scorecard from a sporting event (specifically baseball, although there are probably ways to incorporate other sports' scorecards), which is a method used to record data about a sporting event. At its most basic level, this is what sports reporting is, even though it can and frequently does reach much greater heights.

Moving forward, I have to find a way to make the fifth one look less cheap and simplify logos one, two and four. The third one is pretty boring, but it does address the idea that this is a program for college students as it is similar to many college logos. I will have to make it more apparent that it's a logo for the Sports Journalism Institute rather than anything that could be SJI (San Jose Institute, perhaps). I don't know that it's necessarily obvious that I should add color, but I certainly will. After all, these logos are not just for letterhead.

When he critiqued all the logos, Greg mentioned that he was disappointed that very few directly addressed the organization's main purpose, which is to diversify sports departments. This is certainly something I thought about, but it's extremely difficult to express this idea as an icon or with color and have it not be offensive. In my revisions, I will make a point to look at organizations devoted to promoting diversity to see how they address such a delicate subject.

Response - week 7

On Monday, we had the iPad conference on how to make magazines for the iPad in the RJI. Although it was certainly enlightening as to how the magazine industry is adapting and how much the people in charge of major consumer magazines know and don't know about the iPad, my takeaway from the conference was (mostly) unrelated. During his presentation for Mag+ and Popular Science, Mike Haney explained that presenting yourself to a potential employer is not necessarily about the many skills you possess. Instead, employers want us to be able to solve their problems. So even though I am not an expert with every pertinent software, I do feel wholly capable of coming up with solutions to a variety of problems and then implementing that solution. I also feel capable of learning the necessary software as each new program rolls out of the factory. My intangible and (I hope) more valuable skills lie in my storytelling ability and journalism judgment.

Can't miss this, vol. 7

I'm not an anglophile by any means. I felt The King's Speech was dramatically overrated. That said, Eye's post this week about the many artistic renditions of the Queen of England is particularly fascinating. It's interesting because her image is so omnipresent in the country and, to a lesser extent, the world, that she becomes the subject of many forms of visual art. She has been immortalized on stamps that feature a portrait of her in the most standard, least challenging (to understand, not create) style of art. She has also been photographed and painted by dozens others, all in varying styles. I find this intriguing not because I care about the Queen but because she is a figure that apparently spans every element of culture in her country. In the U.S., I cannot think of such a figure whose image could be made into every form of art from the lowest brow to the highest.

Onto a subject I am much more passionate about. A few months ago, one of my friends shared these posters with me, and they impressed me at the time and continue to wow me. Here are a couple of my favorites:

These posters all take a fascinating way to transform the iconic visual elements of a film into a poster that captures the essence the entire film. Each article of clothing (possibly with the exception of The Usual Suspects) is completely recognizable to anyone who has seen the movie, and they aim for the jugular (so to speak). I enjoy these because they're a roundabout way of telling the story visually, which is something we frequently have to do as designers when the obvious visual isn't there or is so overdone that we need to be fresh, new and exciting.

Critique - Week 6

I haven't designed anything new or of note in the past week (at least that I have in digital form — logos to come next week). So I've decided to critique my vidcast on VoxMagazine.com, Talking Pictures.

This is supposed to be a design blog. This is cheating, I know.

I have no training for broadcast. I only know to design, edit and write for magazines (or newspapers — I won't play favorites). As such, when I send in my weekly script to be edited by my producer, Amber, and Vox's online editor, Ileana, I frequently get back edits that my topic is difficult to find b-roll for. This gets back to my lack of broadcast training. As a designer, most of what I do is think visually. As a writer and editor, it's about half of what I do. That said, when I'm writing or editing, I'm concerned that the story is visually compelling, not with the pacing of the visuals within the text. As I write more for video, I have become more and more aware that it is imperative that I constantly consider what the B-roll will be and how long it can last. I might discuss half a dozen or more movies (as I did with my vidcast on romantic comedies), but if the writing does not allow for pacing, the content feels uneven.

In general, I feel my understanding of how to best match moving words to moving images has improved. I won't make the same mistake I made when I decided to complain about Redbox for the duration of the vidcast (we had to use a series of Redbox commercials for the B-roll). That said, I still don't think about the visuals before I decide what my topic of discussion will be (a common problem for beginning department editors), which results in lackluster visuals because the additional cues for video are frequently added in superfluously. In other words, it's not content-driven design. But I'm trying.

Can't miss this, vol. 6

Eye hasn't been hitting as many homers as it was those first few weeks, so let me apologize in advance for being less insightful than usual (unless you think I'm never insightful, in which case I will live up to my pre-established standard). In a blog post this week, Eye's writer talks about a new men's magazine called Port (or is it PORT?). It looks very expensive and classy but gets by on the cheap because the founders have a lot of talented friends. Think of it as a not-necessarily-Mizzou Mafia of the journalism world. It reminds me a lot of Eros, which Michelle discussed in our study of magazine design history. Both are somewhat foolhardy labors of love that are run by small staffs. As Eye points out, it will likely be financially unsuccessful for a variety of reasons (the economy, the death of print, etc., etc., etc.), but the creators are making a good product that they enjoy making.

One day, it will be nice to have such freedom to luxuriate in my journalistic success. Until then, the job hunt continues. Also the yob-hunt (I'm not opposed to working in Sweden)

And now, an opportunity! I work for Mizzou Media, which is the University supplier of course packets and its custom publishing division. Among my many important duties as designer is to oversee the University Classics Series of books that we print on the Espresso Book Machine. (My duties are not, however, to design promotional material, so don't blame me for the bad letter spacing in 2011.)

This year, we're holding our second (un)cover cover contest for the books. We at Mizzou Media are calling on the considerable talents of Columbia to present us with options to use for book covers (because Creative Commons art is pretty uninteresting). You can find details here, but submissions are due March 9, and you can submit one cover per book.

I think it's a great opportunity, and I'd enter five covers if I were eligible to do so. If your cover(s) get chosen, that's one more notch on your belt. If they don't, you still have a reason to generate more diverse items for your portfolio, which is always welcomed.

After all, you should always judge a book by its cover. If you didn't, why else would books have covers at all?