Last week the advance design students competed amongst ourselves for a shot at designing VOX's 30 under 30 feature. The story featured 30 up-and-coming Columbia residents under the age of 30 who are impacting the community in one way or another.
cover
The VOX editors really wanted to emphasize diversity with this story, so I wanted to show it right from the start. I also wanted to use fun, bright colors to emphasize the quirky youthfulness of the story. I wasn't crazy about the solid orange background, but I wasn't able to come up with another idea that I knew I could execute in a professional manner. Also, I grabbed the arrows from our Nosh prototype (two birds, one stone haaa).
opening spread
I wanted to continue presenting the diversity of those featured in the article. I absolutely loved this photo of Phylshawn Johnson. It's really fun and energizing (as are the other lead photos here), which I thought would attract readers.
secondary spread
With the secondary spread I was trying to show how I would work to squeeze 30 vignettes into the 10 pages that were originally slated for the story. Because there was so much text and a photo for each story, I didn't want to use too many "decorative" design elements. We all knew the pages were going to be tight. I chose to use bold drop caps, numbers and pull-quotes to help break up the seas of gray.
In the end, I still feel as though my designs were far too text heavy. I wish I would have found a better solution to help split up the stories more definitively, as did Theresa. She developed a really great broken grid technique that convey the story's VOX-y edginess, which, of course, is why her design was chosen :)
I think you achieved getting across the quirky youthfulness of the story with the colors you chose. I loved the photo of Phylshawn Johnson too, and I think it works great for the lead. Your spreads are well organized and clean. I like your treatment to each name/hed/deck. The drop caps look nice and using pull quotes was a good idea, I didn't even think of that for some reason.
ReplyDeleteI really like the drop caps as well. I think my favorite one is the photo with the text inside. I also had a hard time separating the text into different segments. While I like the photos, I don't believe they lent themselves to this situation because both the cutouts and the very light backgrounds don't offer enough striking contrast with the layout.
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