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Graphic Design 'Cause I'm New Here
Nowhere Man
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Hi, all. I'm a long-time PA reader, but I've never joined the forums until now. Being an amateur graphic designer, I thought I'd post some of my stuff here for critique. Let me know what you think and what you think needs improvement; I'd really appreciate it.
All of the following are "covers" for the (fictional) true-crime magazine Magical Mystery Stories.
All of the following are "covers" for the (fictional) true-crime magazine Magical Mystery Stories.
Nowhere Man on
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These are confusing and difficult to read. I unserstand you're going for the psychedelic look, but this could be achieved without having to go to the colour and layout extremes you've decided on here.
Even the most psychedelic album covers didn't go to such lengths.
Disraeli Gears was one of the more out there covers, but it still made sense.....kind of.
Are you Experienced still kept a flat background, so that the crazy typeface would'nt clash.
Yeah, what I'm trying to say here, is that your doing to much. Less is more, even in psychedelia.
It's corporate suck, is what I'm saying. And worse, it's cheap corporate suck.
But you're right about some of them being excessively cluttered. Especially the "Day of the Dormouse" one. The high contrast just doesn't work. Maybe putting some borders around the lettering...I don't know. The vertical lines really jack that one up.
This is a really terrible excuse for making a bad cover. Remember that your cover is the attention getter. You need to work on creating a layout that is easy to follow and that highlights the important points on that month's issue.
From a product ID point of view, you have to keep a uniform type face. You can't just change it for every cover, especially when you have no other element that ties all these pieces together; not the color scheme, not the layout, not the images. How will your readers know that its the same magazine as last months?
And lastly, I'd keep the title at the very top. There is a very practical reason for this and it is because when you put it on a magazine rack, the top is the only part that wont be covered by the other magazines.
Work on your composition.
Work on your colors.
Work on your fonts.
My advice would be like anything else, start at the beginning and keep it simple.
Research - look at Mustang's examples, look at a heap more other examples and think carefully about what you want to achieve. Magazines are tools for communication first and foremost.
Information Hierarchy - sort your information is order of importance then create a style to reinforce this
Layout - develop a layout that communicates the appeal to the browser (covers sell the zine, the contents has a different audience).
Some other tips:
- don't mess with fonts unless you are a licenced typographist, avoid anything that obviously comes standard with Adobe Suite.
- simple is good, even in the realm of the psychedelic. The 4th one is the best just because it shows some measure of restraint.
- be careful with your graphics, each cover has strong lines that direct the eye to irrelevent points.
- when trying to emulate the 70's think about the technology they were using to print and how that restricted their products. Limitation is essential for strong design and you can use that to your advantage.
keep it up, we all start at the beginning
Here's another one that I did:
If it is a project you've set for yourself, it's a tad unrealistic. If you want to ever do actual commercial design work you are never, ever going to be asked to work in a style which emulates someone who cannot design. There is simply no use for that, and consequently these would all make very poor portfolio pieces, even with the disclaimer showing your intent.
From an execution point of view, you're trying to use digital tools to emulate something which was done by hand. In fact someone putting out a hastily constructed pulp magazine would have had even more reason to be utilising a hand-made, 'cut n paste' process.
That style of production lends itself to a very specific aesthetic: cut-out collage, hand-drawn typography, high-contrast photocopied layouts with all the grain and buzz that you get from the old toner-based copiers, etc.
Your pieces, unfortunately, don't capture any of that. These absolutely scream 'bad Photoshop filters' and the inclusion of multiple, hideous faux-60s fonts is absolutely no substitute for actual hand-drawn, 60's typography. In fact, you could have actually made a more convincing end result if you'd just used paper and pen!
The main issue for me, though, is that you have started off with a poor (and poorly researched) brief. Graphic Design is all about ideas and problem solving and exploring all the possible solutions to your design brief before moving on to the computer - if at all. It's about understanding an idea and then finding the best way of communicating it to it's target market.
If you are keen on learning graphic design, there are an awful lot of sites and books which will be valuable to you, easily findable with a little bit of exploring. Good luck!
http://rock-explosion.com/catpage1.html
However in this case I think you are missing the mark.
If theres one thing a corporation does well its generally market themselves. And with a magazine the 3 points they will be absolutely certain to make abundently clear to the public are the title, price and a highlight showing what that particular issue is special.
Even corporations that are trying to fake their understanding of a target subculture will be sure to hit those three points because regardless of what sub culture youre trying to market to those three things are whats going to sell magazines.
Man, what?
Contrary to what you wish to portray, corporations are not run by idiots. No sucessful company will ever fake knowing their consumer. When was the last time you saw Nike, Vouge, Verizon, Star Bucks or Mattel market something that does not appeal to their specific consumer.
I agree with you for the most part, which was the point I was making above albiet in a less direct manner.
The OP is trying to design a cover, if I understand him, that displays the ignorance of a company trying to market to people they dont relate to. Hes trying to make a socio economic statement of some kind.
And while you are vastly right in that most corporations especially large successful ones like the ones youve mentioned do their research and market accordingly, there are absolutely MANY failed corporations/businesses/people that do try to make a niche for themselves while trying to fake it.
A perfect example being so many webcomics out there that see successful video game based comics and so they try to horde into that market by designing a video game comic themselves.
The problem being these companies/ideas pretty much always fail.
Agreed with this; even if somebody wanted that effect (and only not very smart business people would), the most cost-effective way of making something look like it was made by someone that didn't know what they were doing would be to hire somebody that didn't know what they were doing, like the business owner's nephew who had a pirated copy of photoshop lying around.
Being able to work as a graphic designer means you can demonstrate with your designs why you are worth the extra money you charge over "some random dude who has a copy of photoshop", so making designs created to look like they were made by "some random dude who has a copy of photoshop" doesn't do you a whole hell of a lot of good.
I'm not saying nobody will ever pay you for shitty design (there's way too much bad graphic design done by amateur "dudes with photoshop" types out there for me to claim otherwise), but you're not going to draw in any successful clients that can afford to pay their designers a livable wage with this kind of work.
If you're looking to make a living (or even an ok secondary income) doing design, come up with goals that result in work that says, "I AM WORTH MONEY", not elaborate backstories that result in work that says the opposite.
Twitter
I am not attempting to be a professional graphic designer. I am attempting to be a professional writer. Right now, I'm working on a novel. It's hard, creative work. And it's hack work just like the covers. But it's much better hack work. When I work in Photoshop, it's to unwind, and maybe create an "artifact" that might exist in the world of my novel.
In a way, it's very gratifying that you all think the covers suck. They're kind of supposed to. Magical Mystery Stories is a magazine that exists in the world of my novel. True crime stuff--hard men on dangerous streets and so forth. In the Forties, it's very much a knock off of someone who's knocking off Raymond-Chandler. By the Sixties, it's a hippiesploitation rag that tries to out-Hunter-S.-Thompson Hunter S. Thompson, but without the talent. You're certainly free to criticize me for making something that's not good, but please keep in mind it's not intended to be good.
Enough mindless chatter on my part! We need Huey Hoot!
I would say the two main reasons people post in the AC are:
They want to socialize with other artists.
They want to get feedback on their work.
If your attitude is that you want to show off your work but not at least take into consideration other people's feedback, this may not be the right place for you. There are plenty of artists here who have worked for years to improve their craft, and it's not really fair to them for you to ignore their valuable advice. Please take this into consideration with your future posts.
If you enjoy the process of just making imagery on your own terms, with no real aspirations to go anywhere with it, that's absolutely fine -- BUT you shouldn't really have bothered starting a thread about it.
As Nib says, it sort of takes advantage of people's time when they've looked at your work and posted crit in your thread.
If you'll kindly supply me with your details, I will now invoice you for my valuable time.
I can think of a couple threads that owe all of us a lot of money.
I still want to encourage you to work on your covers in a way that raises your skill with every piece you do.
Good luck!
At least now we know why youre here.
However, as a writer it is even more important for you to understand your characters and their motivation for creating the things in their world. And theres no way the character in your book would create covers like youve created. And if your commentary on the corporate world is going to sound at all believable to your readers you really need to understand what youre doing and more importantly what your characters are doing.
So the crits on your artwork I think are still pretty valid.
There are many artists out there who work in a naive style. Olly Moss has done it in the past, and the primitivists made their entire career off making art which looked like it was drawn by a child.
The difference between that and what you are doing is sophistication and believability.
I feel like a broken record because I just posted about believability in another thread but here we go again
When you look at the primitivists work, you know it was intentional and not a lack of skill. It's in the subtle things that they do, the design decisions that they make which you probably didn't even realize they were making.
The work still works, it achieves the goal of making you think it is a naive drawing, but still holds up as a well designed piece of art.
If you want to be taken seriously, you should be thinking of this.
There are ways to break some of the rules without throwing all of them out the window
and if you look carefully at much of the naive design and painting done by professional artists, you'll see that yes they've broken some rules, but they've enhanced some as well to make you think "wow that's friggen dissonant... but it works.... why the hell does this work? this person is a genius"
I feel like you've simply tossed everything out the window and the result is it looks like it was designed by some fool who picked up photoshop for the first time.
this is not something you could ever use in your portfolio as others have said, you simply will not be taken seriously, because you haven't approached it as a professional designer. There is a way to make something look "bad" without it looking bad. (i can't believe i just said that haha) the goal of the designer is to get the message across and your messages are being lost when you use this approach, that is the main thing you have to keep in mind. these images are completely illegible, therefore you've gone beyond bad design into the territory of design without design which just plain does not serve the purpose it's supposed to.
A suggestion I have is adhere to a grid while using your dissonant color schemes
or use a good color scheme, break the grid
break grid and use some dissonance in color, but use well thought out type.
right now you have bad color, bad type, no grid, and poor imagery
how could you possibly call this thought out design?
i mean i guess it's a statement of sorts to break every rule on purpose and deliver a steaming pile of crap
but then you can't call it design, you call it conceptual high art, here's your beret and cigarello...it's been done already though so you don't get the gold star for innovation that you may have been looking for.
First off, even though you say it's supposed to "suck", it's not a good way of going about anything with graphic design.
Graphic design at it's heart is centered around commercial art. While it is supposed to be as cheap as possible (for the most part), it doesn't have to "suck".
Your images are all unreadable for several reasons. First is color choice. None of the colors I see work well together. Go to adobes kuler and find color palettes from there. It's an amazing site trust me.
Second is the font choice/point size. Far too many point sizes make it cluttered. Stick with 2-3 sizes and you'll be sure to have a more successful piece. The fonts are all too similar as well. This takes away from the hierarchy of information on most of them. I can't tell where to begin reading.
Third, and this is targeted more for the mystery magazine at the top, is filters. It looks like a picture ran through multiple filters. To me this always looks cheap and unprofessional. A lazy way of doing things, and trust me, I know lazy.
More later. I think it's a very interesting set so far. Would like to see more in the future.