You Can't Miss: Parlez Vous Design?

This week on Print Magazine's Imprint blog, I found a great book the site recommended on speaking the language of design. Being able to articulate your design choices is always necessary, so I think even taking time to read over some of the basic principles of design would definitely help you do so. I'm thinking this would make for a great summer read! Learn more about it here.

Advanced Design capstone comes to a close

It's hard to even fathom the amount of new portfolio pieces and published design work that has come out of just the past semester alone while in the advanced design capstone. Placing all of those pieces in addition to past work into my mini portfolio has been such a rewarding experience. This capstone is one unlike any other. Who else gets the opportunity to design for a city magazine, judge a design contest, conceptualize and design a magazine for a commission for a huge publishing corporation, learn to design for the iPad, learn to conceptualize and produce studio shoots, critique other students' work and receive feedback on a regular basis from 20 other expert designers all in one semester? Pretty great, huh? And that's not even half of it, I'm sure I've missed some things. I know for most of us the amount of designing and published work just seems like standard procedure at this point, but to outsiders, that amount of work and amount of professional experience done in just one course is quite impressive.

Danielle is absolutely right, separation anxiety is absolutely inevitable. Never again will we have the opportunity to work alongside each other in the design lab, critiquing and helping each other as we go, or be able to follow 18 other designers' and their work over the span of a semester.

To my fellow capstone designers, you all have done some pretty incredible things this semester – be proud of what you've done – I can't wait to sift through everyone's finished mini portfolios and websites next week and look back at a semester's worth of designing! Good luck to everyone in the upcoming months getting out there in the real world – and please keep blogging!  

Critique: Shindig goes digital

Critique: Shindig Magazine's website wireframe design



The past few weeks I have been tackling some rather unfamiliar design territory – web design – for our magazine prototype Shindig. Although the purpose of creating the wireframe design was not to then make it a live website, but to show not only a representation of the magazine's digital content, but also how its design philosophy and personality is transferred to this platform – easier said than done for those of us who have spent so long studying and working in print design. After a few revisions to the design, which involved lots of scaling and adjusting space and the hierarchy of the various elements on the website pages – I constantly found myself going back to many of my print design habits – the home page and party planning page of Shindig's website were complete.

I do think that overall the finished product is able to not only able to capture the Shindig personality and design style, but displays the magazine's in a clear and cohesive way. Rachael Ray's new website was an influence of the homepage's rotating feature section, where the "Baking with Booze" story sits. I'm also quite happy with the way the "Party Mixer" app on the website has turned out as well. I think the way it's treated on the homepage – with its own teaser – is a great way to promote and preview the Party Mixer app.