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...

 

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?