A Soaring Pirouette

Today, I made a collage to visually illustrate an inspirational horoscope I read in the City Paper a few weeks ago. Originally I was going to design it with the words as well but thought it communicated what I wanted on its own. In hindsight, I should have done it all just in Photoshop but I used InDesign to lay it all out and Photoshop to manipulate the images.

Virgo: A plain old ordinary leap of faith might not be ambitious enough for you in the coming months. I suspect your potential is more robust that that, more primed for audacity. How would you feel about attempting a quantum leap of faith? Here's what I mean by that: a soaring pirouette that sends you flying over the nagging obstacle and up onto higher ground, where the views are breathtakingly vast instead of gruntingly half-vast.

 The mountain/seascape is a picture I took when I went to San Francisco a few years back, and the Baltimore city skyline in the background is the view from Waverly captured with my iphone camera. The pirouetting ballerina was found here.

A New Chapter (i.e. steppin' it up)

As you all can probably tell, I've been away from this blog for quite a while. A lot have changes have happened--I'm no longer a student, but not quite a professional. I guess at this moment I would be classified as a 'fresh graduate'.

At this point in time, I'm currently job searching and trying to grow into a more prolific and professional designer (i.e. I'm steppin' it up). I'm not quite fully employed (part-time server), so I have a bit of time on my hands to refine (or I guess still discover) my style. In order to do this I need motivation to create and a vehicle to receive feedback. Hello, blog!

As the summer moves on, I'll be figuring out various ways to keep myself busy designing and posting the fruits of my labor here. Please, please, please feel free to give me feedback in the comments or e-mail me if you want. Now that I'm not in school I don't have professors and classes full of other designers to critique. If you're a designer, let me know and I'll return the favor for sure!

~B

Cover Crazy!

This week I'm trying to knock out all the magazine cover revisions I have to do for my portfolio. Finally got Chomp magazine sorted out; more to come!

Beat Magazine (the final incarnation)

After many hours of hard work (and many, many hours of procrastination) I think I've finally got this thing down. I even made ads so that mounted in my portfolio, it will look like a super fancy real magazine! Check it:

Front Cover

Ad/Alternate Cover

Table of Contents

Ad/Department

Feature Spread

Feature Spread 2

Department

Back Cover (Ad)

Personally, I couldn't be happier with how this has turned out.  Let's hope my professor agrees! To see how far this piece has come, check out its original incarnation here.

Ugh!!! (or Finally!!!)

I love magazines, I really do.  Reading them, thinking about them, touching them, designing them, writing for them, I love it all.  But the one part of a magazine that kills me every time is designing the cover.  I've just spent the last two months in turmoil trying to fine tune this cover I created last Spring:

If you all remember, this was a re-design of Rolling Stone Magazine for my magazine design class.  Thinking this was my most promising project, I decided to tackle it first in revising things for my portfolio.  Little did I know that months later, I'd still be working on it.  Still.  I have a habit of posting things up here prematurely but if this isn't at least close to being complete, I can't honestly say what I might do.

The masthead changed quite a bit and I also added a headline since the whole even-numbered headline thing was bothering me.  The headlines themselves shrank a bit and I'm still not sure if I still want to shrink the Howard Stern headline a bit or not.  We will see...

 

Art is _____________.

I admit, it has been a while since I've posted any of my work.  To be honest, I've been in a little bit of a rut these past few weeks.  Looks like it's over now--I just started working on what I think might be one of my favorite pieces so far.  It's for my seminar project, a non-profit called artists in motion.  The premise of this non-profit is that we have a mobile art studio (think a converted bus like a bookmobile) that travels around to inner city middle schools and gives kids in underfunded schools the opportunity to have an adequate education in the arts.  At the end of each session, we have a gallery event and fundraiser to showcase the students work.  The first one is designed around the concept of the definition of art, "Art is _____".  This is one of the posters advertising the show:

Definitely needs some work but so far I'm quite happy with it!

Infographic of the Day

One of the many reasons that Fast Company is my new favorite magazine is a little thing I discovered on their website last night called the "Infographic of the Day". Being a designer, and loving infographics, I was pretty stoked.

This infographic in particular, designed by Colin Pinegar, stood out to me. It's a 3-D infographic displaying the designer's relationships to his facebook friends.

He represented each of his "friends" with a model of his bust, changing the color of the bust to represent how close the friendship is in real life.  Purple represents his closest friends, tinting to pink the farther the connection is. Seeing hundreds of facebook friends displayed like this really makes you realize who your true friends are. 

Superbowl Infographic!

Here's an awesome infographic displaying how much renewable energy was used for the Superbowl last night.  Very clean and well done by greenmountain.com:

Computer Arts Magazine

I've officially fallen in love... with Computer Arts magazine.

I noticed this gem of a publication a few months ago at the Barnes & Noble in Ellicott City (who I must say, has the best newsstand out of all the B&N's in and surrounding Baltimore). It's a UK publication that not only gives designers inspiration and business advice, but also has excellent how-to articles for various design programs and projects.  The other day I learned how to make an ipad app for a magazine! Now I just need the necessary programs to create it...

To all my fellow designers, I highly suggest checking out this publication.  The Brits really do it up right here.

We've come so far...

Last Thursday marked the first day of my last semester in the UB Pub. Design program.  In a way, I felt like it was the first day of the rest of my life as I'm about to receive an important degree, and make a lot of important and life-changing decisions in the coming months.  Anyone who knows me well knows that I get incredibly excited about states of transition so of course, I couldn't be happier right now! We'll see what happens. 

As for right now, I just started working on assembling my final portfolio to be presented at the end of the semester.  The way the process works is you weed out all the work that you've done that can't be used in a professional portfolio (i.e. obvious student work such as typographic exercises, design boards, stuff that's just bad etc.), take what is now your best work or not-so-great work, and re-do/refine it as necessary.  Basically for most assignments, you take away all the qualifications of the assignment and make it look as professional and "good" as possible. 


In a nutshell: you all are going to get to see a lot of before and afters! Starting now!

This is a freelance project I worked on during my very first semester.  It was a brand identity for a local framing shop named "Mat About You Framing and Gallery".  This is the final version of what I came up with for the client:

With a little editing and finessing, this is what I came up with today for use in my portfolio (pending critique):

Personally, I think it's way more clean and concise and grabs attention better.  What do you all think?

The War on Women Infographic

I found this incredibly powerful info-graphic today via Planned Parenthood's facebook feed.  With two wars being fought overseas in 2011 and a sinking economy, one would think that trying to make it really, really hard for women to get abortions wouldn't be such a high priority.  This graphic makes it very clear where Congress' priorities are: