OK. Mostly the Tennessee basketball team (I am still recovering from out bball loss to Ole Miss last. OLE MISS, of all teams. If this means nothing to you now, it will one MU starts in the SEC.), but this week I was in my own little competition for designing the cover competition and just couldn't grab that title of cover designer.
Oh, well. I was pretty pleased with the covers I presented, but I will let you be the judge.
The cover was not for a feature story per se. It was for a series of 7 vignettes. They were originally supposed to discuss subcultures in Columbia, however, they turned out more as 7 stories about hobbies, such as knitting, owning chickens, wrestling/cage fighting and the like. Nothing too out of the ordinary.
However, the stories didn't really fit together except under the idea of "hobbies," and since we weren't given a title, I decided to run with that idea and call the series, "What's your hobby?" I realize that isn't the most creative title, but we weren't given much to go on and some of my teammates didn't even get the text, so they were really flying blind.
When I initially approached the covers, I decided to do one that highlighted one particular group of hobbyist with an image (a little robot), one that used only typography because I felt like that could get the idea of all the stories across without putting an emphasis on one and then doing kind of a college (not in that high school year book way) with people and detail shots from the stories.
So, here they are:
My favorite was the typography one, despite my constant fear of using it. That was the one that the editors also liked the best, so I wanted to keep playing with that one. Some of the changes I wanted to make were to make it look less muddy and brighten it up by changing the colors. I also wanted to change the fonts to make them more uniform. The biggest challenge and where I think I didn't quite get to where I wanted to was to incorporate more of the feel of the story. Although, the background words on the page were lifted straight from the story, I don't think it really told readers what they were going to get when they looked inside. From that point of view, I don't think the cover below worked.
However, it should be noted when our group started making revisions to each of our designs, we still didn't have a title. That's how well these stories didn't fit together. During a brainstorming session, the words/phrases that we came up with included: past times, community-created, social circles, finding your niche, shared interests, creating your own family, interest groups, family portraits, building, crafting, collecting, gathering, supporting, sharing, coming together, pack, fitting in, sharing interest, common place community, clicking together, common threads, something for everyone, ties that bind, camaraderie, unit, team, where everybody knows your name, pieces of a portrait and on the side. As you can see, there were a lot of ideas. A
s of right now, less than a week before print, there has been no decision on the title at least that I know of.
Here is one of the final two I revised:
I also decided to throw in one extra idea because why not? I had thought of it while working on the first revision. The title came to me in a dream: The Story of Us. I liked it because it made the cover feel inclusive because almost everyone has some kind of hobby that they enjoy and, in reality, could be featured in a story like this one. We all do activities that bring us closer to other people and that get our minds and our hands working and help create one community of doers.
So, I decided to play with the typography on this one as well, and create the "U" in "Us" out of the words and activities from the story. I really liked how this turned out because it is something different for me and my style of designing. Since I didn't present this one the first time, I would love to know what anyone thinks. Does it work or not? I would like to make some changes to this one for my portfolio and would love if you see that something is missing or maybe it just doesn't work at all.
Here it is:
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