Progress.

Beautiful, beautiful progress.

Table of Contents Colors

I finally found colors I like for the table of contents:

And it'll be continuous with the rest of the magazine, because the little circles in the corner of each page can match the colors.

Quirky.

This took a little longer than anticipated. I was going to do two designs today, but now that I have a little extra time I think I'll start designing more spreads after vacation. I looked at this:

And then I copied it and made this:

The only thing I might want to add to this is captions for both photos. But that should be easy and I'm otherwise pleased with it.

And on the fifth day, he created spreads. . .

Today I designed another example design for people to use (the fourth one below). All of the designs I've made so far are based on previous Carpe Diem spreads, but on Friday I want to look up cool professional spreads and copy them.

Just for reference, here are the four designs I've made so far:

Opening pages!

At the beginning of class I helped Sarah and Nate get started on their designs by putting the bare template and the finished templates on the server. Then I designed this:

Obviously I'll continue to tweak the colors on the table of contents.

I want to have pictures of the editors in all of the bubbles, looking coyly at the letter or otherwise being silly. However, I am exceedingly proud of the Robert Downey Jr. gag and would be perfectly willing to keep him there.

Little Circles

Today I experimented with a new idea:

I don't know if this is a good idea, but I like it. We'd replace the galaxies with pictures from the next and previous page. We didn't have much time today, so this is really all I did this class. I put it in all the designs I have so far.

My table of contents design!

For most of this class and last class, I was creating this:

I really like this design so far.

This is just a first draft. Obviously I'll have to tweak the colors and the layout. It looks a bit strange at the moment, especially that "GALAXIES" thing on the bottom. I don't know what I was thinking when I made that. Also, the number of dots will have to change once the actual stories start coming in.

But I was thinking - wouldn't it be cool if there were a theme of pictures in circles throughout the magazine? Maybe we could have at least one circle-picture on each page, or else have little "Previous Page" and "Next Page" previews on the top corners of each page, with little circles depicting what's next.