Project 8 - Do-Over

After the beating the original submission took, I decided to redevelop the 4-page newsletter. The main critique was that the newsletter itself, images and text layout, was extremely predictable. In defense of my previous design, I felt the original text lent itself to a standard, predictable design. This time around, with the knowledge that this newsletter was aimed at creative’s, I grabbed my pen and went to work editing the heck out of the original copy. I kept the important points intact while improving flow and getting rid of any redundancies or unneeded text. Any time I am reading a paper that is, in my opinion, dry I end up making mental wise-cracks to keep myself entertained. This is the birth place for my theme. The copy hints at trapping online audiences once they come to your website. The thought of having convicts running around text and hiding in holes happened first, evolved into hand-cuffs and other forms of restraint (this was rejected for gutter-minded folks like myself), and eventually mutated into my tangled vine theme. The original mental layout was primarily what the final product looks like: cartoon vines wrapping around the copy, supporting tags with my wisecracks or pull quotes; the background would be either woods or a wall of ivy duotone treated. As I did last project, I developed some large scale conte-on-newsprint layouts which I further developed into tighter pen and ink drawings. These were scanned, Pen Tool traced, and colored in Illustrator using various shades of Pantone 369C. I copy and pasted them into InDesign (Place was messing with the colors something horrible) where I inserted the text. The background image was manipulated in Photoshop and brought into InDesign. I used three different paragraph styles to streamline my work. The leap from mental image to printed version wasn’t as impressive as I’d hoped it’d be. I am, however, comfortable turning the project in since it shows where I am heading; I just haven’t reached the end of the path yet. I will invest more time sexing the piece up when life allows. In the end, I don’t think anyone can claim that this time around the piece is predictable.