Project: T-12.03
Patron: DOP
Medium: QuarkXPress 6.0, little illustrator, little photoshop
Status: At the printers
Deadline: next friday

Boy has it been a while. I guess thanksgiving played a part in that.

Did a long week and then a short week, and finally got the next Trinity out the door this friday. I think this is really the first one where we weren't rushing at the last minute. I actually got a chance to do some fine tuning on this one - though the printer still threw us a curve ball at the end of the project. Note to Designers: Check with your printer which spreads will be in color when doing a color cover. Apparently 24 and 32 pages are the same config - 28 pg are different. Ok, well so no biggy. I moved spreads around within the same family of articles (Like Convention 03 goes for 6 pages) and just sort of knocked my head against the wall that I didn't get in touch with the printer sooner NOR did the printer give me a clearly laid out estimate at the beginning of the project. Ah well. Chalk it up to experience. We did our first run with a pantone color throughout the piece, also added 2 more color spreads since they would be the same price.

My article layouts weren't as inspired as the last one, but I was able to add a few more details like title of magazine to run throughout the top margin, or creating a specific style for the photo credits. I started using impact a lot more through this one, sort of as my "accent" font, but I think I want to move the times new roman in a different direction so you get that lovely thin/thick look with the impact. I'd also like to have a bit more white space and leading - it just seems like a very compact little magazine.

I've been looking at a few magazines but maybe I need to pick up a few more to see what other people are doing these days. I'm at a point where I'm no longer designing in a vaccum against a deadline. The next few issues should have time to solidify in presentation.

I'm also at a point where I realize that there should be some kind of style to the thing; which I guess I've created to some extent by default; and I should probably think about what style I want that to be before I add or remove anything. Like sit down and actually have a design presentation to MS so that she knows where I'm going with it. Might save some missunderstanding later on.