Week 1 in review

I saw this post from the blog Publication Design that was published on election night. The post discusses an interactive graphic from the New York Times that asked users, "What one word describes your current state of mind?". A frequent reader of the Times, I saw this graphic during the election. I think it is such a great way to involve readers while supplying them with information about other people around America were feeling that night. The most popular words were played up larger and bolder than less common emotions. Words that were featured included, hopeful, relieved, euphoric, disgusted and my personal favorite, sassy.

This reminds me of a fun online application called Wordle. The application takes a block of text or a URL and creates something called word clouds that are similar to the graphic above. Words that appear more frequently are larger, while less frequently used words are smaller. It's both a cool way to see how often certain words are used as well as a cool typography treatment. Definitely worth checking out! Here is an example I made using the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for the University of Missouri.

Winter/Spring semester started last week and it's been a little hectic. I'm looking forward to settling into a routine and adjusting to the different production schedules I have to follow. Once that happens I think things will be a bit less stressful. At the start of this week, my classmates and I submitted a cover and feature design in competition to get published for the Feb. 5th issue of Vox. I have mixed feelings about what I turned in. I think that I had a decent concept for my cover, just not one that was fully realized. What I submitted is to the left.

In addition to the cover, we also submitted a spread. I think my spread was a bit conventional. I didn't do anything too fancy, however I did try to emphasize the two different sides to the story. I noticed that a lot of people in the class decided to lead with the headline "Two faces of the economy". I chose not to do this because I didn't think that the two men profiled in the story should be labeled as the two faces of the economy. Rather, they were merely offering two separate views on the economy and the issues surrounding it. With all that in mind, I split the story into two main parts by using larger subheads paired with a picture of each subject. I think this story really lends itself to being split like this, so I want to continue with that idea while working on my revision. Right now, I'm not really sure about what I want to change to better express that idea. When I come up with a good solution, I will be sure to post it here.