Over a year’s worth of planning finally came to fruition last month, as I traveled to west to gear up for an Alaskan cruise out of Vancouver. Spent a day before and after the cruise enjoying the lovely city of Seattle. The highlight of the cruise was definitely Juneau, Alaska.

The best thing about visiting new destinations and taking a look at what life in a particular would be like. I always find myself coming home and hitting real estate websites to find out how I can move to my favorite places from a vacation. Juneau was that place. Breathtaking beauty: waterfronts, glaciers, waterfalls, eagles, bears, whales. Just a peaceful and inspiring place.

The complete itinerary included stops in Icy Strait Point, Juneau, Ketchikan, and cruising the Inside Passage and Hubbard Glacier. Photos from the trip have been uploaded to Flickr.

But folks, these things are included in the application for a reason. A stellar portfolio is worthless if you don’t get pass the application review. And those application questions are a fantastic way of weeding you out.

When a question asks you to describe your experience using Adobe Creative Suite 5, the answer is not ‘yes’. Nor is the URL to your website the answer…for every single question.

As designers, we have to know how to sell a design to a client. The application process is the same thing; only we’re selling ourselves.

The words on the page mean something. Stand out from the crowd. Show your personality. Or, have your application tossed aside. It’s your choice.

I hope I’ve done the class of 2011 (and my own fellow 2010 graduates) proud!

Seminar Reception Invitation Front

Seminar Reception Invitation Back

Front Cover

Back Cover

I picked this book mainly because I am familiar with the content, having watched each season of the series, as well as watching the movie. Familiarization is a good thing. The second reason for picking up the book is because I just knew that the photography was going to be amazing, what with the fashion and elegance the series exudes. Sadly, the book makes a mess of it (in my eyes, anyway). While the pages contain a lot of content–there’s a table of contents that includes two introductions, background on filming, recaps of every season of the series, the movie itself, and acknowledgments–the design is all over the place.

Page 10	Page 13
Page 37	Page 174

The text pages (as shown on pages 10 and 13) are blocked in by photos that run along the top and bottom of the page (using the entire width of the page), confining the text to the middle of each page. The combination of the color behind the text, and the excessive leading given to the body text, makes the copy difficult to read. Combining that with the distracting photos (and the occasional photo bubble laid over an image), doesn’t do justice to the words or the images. Additionally, as you can see from the side by side images above, the height of the images isn’t consistent throughout the book either.

Page 92

Further along, when the images become the most central part of the book, the words and image treatment is reversed. Text is confined to thin, colorful rectangles at the top and bottom of pages. Sometimes, though, the text box and enclosed text sits three inches above the bottom of the page to make room for images. Other times, text boxes interact with the images to create a pattern of squares on the page. Because of the colored text boxes, the vast catalog of images for the book go to waste. Even without a lot of text on the page, the book occassionally tries to function as a flipbook version of the movie, as seen on page 92 (above).

My redesign of this book would attempt to respect the visual imagery of the movie’s still photography, while giving the text the room to breathe so that a reader would want to actually read the copy.

Since I am not an illustrator by any stretch of the imagination, obtaining art for a project is always a challenge for me. Especially when there is no client to bill for the work. I found some exceptional paintings from artist Aria Eden which I used to create a rough mock-up to present to class. After attempting the first cover, I was told that artwork created for the story itself could not be used-even unpublished artwork. D’oh!

The Elephant's Child Book Cover Concept (Version 1)

Scouring the Web, I found a beautiful sketch of an elephant’s face. The artist added pink watercolor to the sketch to soften the pencil lines. The use of pink gave me a unique color palette to work from to create the back cover of the book. Sadly, a week after first presenting the cover, a comment was made that the illustration looked like a body part that rhymes with “heinous”. Needless to say, this was a bad thing.

The Elephant's Child Book Cover Concept (Version 2)

Back to the drawing board, I found myself scrambling. Until I found Khawan Barton‘s fantastic sketches on Flickr. Khawan’s elegant sketches of elephants gave me the opportunity to use a more wistful font choice for the title of the book. The only comment in class was that the artwork needed a little more “meat” behind it. I am guessing this means a little more substance to help support it. The result is below. I’m fairly happy with it, though now I’m not sure about the color of the title in version 4.

The Elephant's Child Book Cover Concept (Version 3)

The Elephant's Child Book Cover Concept (Version 4)