Critique: Booby Prize

I found this first assignment both fun and challenging. Time was definitely a factor for me...I was out of town most of the weekend, so Sunday was more or less my only time to really sit down and design. I had enough time and didn't necessarily feel rushed to execute my ideas, but at the same time I wish I would have done a better job of brainstorming and coming up with thumbnails before I sat down to design.

I think doing some additional brainstorming could have helped with my cover especially. What I found most challenging about this assignment was coming up with a strong concept for the cover. I had the idea of a clown face with a pink ribbon on the nose and kind of got locked into that idea, and I don't think it was necessarily the strongest visual concept. Another problem I had with the cover was execution. I am far from proficient at Illustrator (something I hope to really learn more this semester), so I feel like my design ended up looking quite elementary. I also think I over did it on the pink. I think it ended up looking a little bit forced and cliché.

While I wasn't thrilled with the way my cover turned out, I was pretty pleased with my feature design. I wanted the page to look light-hearted visually to convey the nature of the story, so I used playful typography and the "HA" box element in both spreads to show that. I used pulled quotes to pull readers into the story and varied the size of the images to provide variety. I definitely found it challenging to fit all the text because the story was so long. I think my second spread gets a little bit text heavy, but like I said, I tried to use some pulled quotes to break up the big grey text boxes. If I could have done it over again, I might have tried to add more text to the opening spread, but at the same time, I like that the opening spread has some white space, which I think helps draw the reader in. I also might have tried to do something more conceptually and try a few "off the wall" ideas. My current design might be a little bit too orderly for the VOX style.