Critique: Spring Preview Competition

My Cover

For my cover, I was trying to make it fun and entertaining. That being said, I'm awful at drawing, which is apparent if you saw my sketches. I am really trying to get better at typography designs, so I thought, "well, I suck at drawing- just make it a type-cover." That's what I did. I like how it turned out, except it looks kind of cluttered and way too busy. I think it was a good idea, but I possibly just needed a better editing eye before saying it was completed. 

Feature

I continued with the theme of the title for the first spread. I chose to do February, mainly because it had the most events to work with, but I think that definitely made it interesting and helped give me one great headache. Kristina had a mix of typography this past design competition on the feature "Heartbreak to Hope" and I really liked how it looked, so, I tried it out. The headline at the top of the page, looks pleasing, but I'm not sure if it's big and grand enough for the splash page, which is what I would change about the feature. Something that I had fun doing and I think is a different way of color coding, was the dots corresponding with the correlating headline color. It was something fun and something new that I wanted to try out. My only regret about the spread is how crowded it looks, that I think would be my only complaint- no white space.

Vox work

While I don't have the links for my designs in Vox Magazine and the iPad app, those print and go online on Thursday. It was really interesting and fun, plus really beneficial to get my first department page done. My piece of advice when you are going in to do your department page, if the ad size on the board and the space they blocked for you doesn't match- ASK SOMEBODY! I finished designing and then went to get my layout checklist on and had to redesign, it was totally awesome (yes, I said totally awesome) working with the editors there and Andrea. I was originally really scared to ask any questions or to do anything because I didn't want to screw up. In the words of Will, "If you get crazy, I'll pull you back in." That is going to stick with me from now on because it really takes to much time worrying about doing something wrong than doing something crazy and toning it down. Thanks Will. 

-AMA