For this project we created a magazine layout for 1 out of the 3 topics. I chose the topic about Phonebots, which is about robots who sole purpose is to waste the time of telemarketers. I took inspiration with the title being called Phonebots. The best way was to illustrate a robot on one side and with the robot holding the phone on the other hand. For the other page on the right hand side, I had the bright idea to draw the robot hand holding the facts to bring more illustration to the spread and not be just words.
Category Archives: Conceptual
Project 3: Magazine Spread
For my magazine spread I chose to do the phonebot story. I chose this because it seemed the most interesting to me from the moment I heard about it. I also was able to imagine an conceptual illustration for this as soon as I heard what it was about. I decided on the name scams for scams because its simple, rolls off the tongue and adds intrigue for the audience.
I chose the muted green color as my base because I felt like it fit well with the colors used in the illustration. I decided to go with a scam likely call because it is an image that anyone would understand. At first I toyed with the idea of it on the screen where it is still ringing and you have to choose to accept or decline, but with this story I felt like that wouldn’t make complete sense for the first thing you see. So I decided to have the phone call answered and put 20 minutes because in the story they talk about how one time a bot had the scam caller on for over 20 minutes. I also played with the location of the time, because on an actual phone call the time goes above the name of the caller, but as I drew the animation it looked like the time the call was taking place, so I decided to make it less realistic and put it under (where I think most people imagine the call time to be anyways).
My biggest problem I had with making this magazine spread is the length of the story. Since it’s such a short story I knew I needed to add more things to the spread. I knew I wanted a sidebar so that was able to easily take up two columns. I also knew that I wanted text boxes of things the bot can say that was quoted in the article to pop up on both spreads of the article to keep the continuation going. As I said prior this story intrigued me a lot that I even did some outside research on the company. This research helped me find the logo for the company that I was also able to add onto the second spread. The logo was sadly only in not the best quality but I still wanted to include it in my project. I decided to also add a tiny phone with the phonebot’s number at the end of the article to tie it all together and clear the dead space. I think this tied everything together on this page and also the previous spread while still giving information from the article.
Conceptual Illustration: Old Tech
Almost immediately, after looking at the stories, I wanted to do the Old Tech story. I thought it had the most creative freedom and the content was very interesting. I made myself sit down and for 20 mins write down every piece of tech that I could think of. Then I did that process once more but only thinking about things that symbolize the idea of “old”. After this 40 mins session, I looked at my two lists and tried to think of ways I could use and of the elements. I wanted the imagery to not be too obvious that it would be unoriginal, but I also wanted the idea and themes to be easy to recognize. I first landed on the idea of the dentures in water, in my mind they mean that someone is old and they have a simple enough shape to mimic. Then I went through my tech list and tried to mentally place items in the glass. I eventually landed on the older rotary style phones because of its shape looking like the top denture in a glass. I modeled the glass, phone, and dentures after real subjects and added highlights and shadows in order to make them seem more 3D. I wanted it to be realistic enough so that people aren’t confused at first glance. Then I based the typography and the name of the story off the illustration. The name came from the idea of a “bit” of nostalgia, where I replaced the bit with bite, referencing the dentures. The color came directly from the phone’s reference in hopes of tying them together. For the font, I knew I wanted a sans serif because then it is less likely to steal the show from the illustration. To finish off the type, I italicized the “bite” so that people would hopefully notice the wordplay. The piece still felt disconnected, so I went back to my references and saw the wire that connects the receiver and the phone and decided to model a brush off the design. This worked on two levels: it allowed me to connect the two pages and it allowed for some of the white space to be taken up above the title. The final decision/intention I had for the spread was to figure out the footer. I despised the way a traditional footer looked on and around my image. After much trial and error I rotated the text and it fit. I think it not only serves its purpose, but it is also a rule bending move that DEADHEAD Publications would be proud of. Overall, I am super satisfied with the result.
Conceptual Illustration – Personal
For this project, I decided to design for the personal article choice that is about connecting with those we have lost through technology, specifically social media.
At the beginning of my design process, I first gained inspiration by creating a design inspiration board on Pinterest where I gained insight into how I wanted my piece to look, which was collage-style. I was also really inspired by pieces Professor Layton showed in class that had a collage aesthetic, as shown below.
I wanted to bring in a “hand-made” quality to my conceptual illustration. For this, I first sketched out an idea for my piece, which involved hands reaching out from phones to touch one another. The idea for this sprung from wanting to highlight the importance technology has had on keeping connections close for those that are far away or may have passed and you want to continue to remember and commemorate in your life. I searched on many websites to find stock images and decided on hands that are sticking their pointer finger out to each other to indicate that they are reaching out to each other. They are coming out of phones because it symbolizes how even though they may not be near they can still connect through technology. It was difficult for me to decide what else to do to the conceptual image once I had the basic hands and phones down. I ultimately decided to add circles and rectangles around the image to give it more of a collage and “scrapbook” feel as though someone was putting stickers all over the page. Aesthetically to me, it felt right. I chose greens and blues for the colors in this piece because I felt they were calming and also represented Earth-like colors to me, which I wanted to draw upon because the piece highlights how you can connect with others on technology, even if from across the world!
For the title, I actually sturggled for a while as I found it difficult to come up with a name that would bring together the whole piece. I landed on Humanity Behind Tech because in the piece, the author Nick Bilton dicusses how he usually writes about the negatives of technology and how this piece actually dicussed a positve which I thought “Humanity Behind Tech” would be fitting because this time he gets to finally highlight a psotive of techbology, an aspect of it that brings people together.
For the whole layout, I ultimately decided to go simple to save space for the words and to unite the conceptual image of the piece with a more simplistic layout that gave space to the main imagery.
Overall, I enjoyed making this piece and found that it pushed me out of my comfort zone, as I don’t make many magazine spreads. Next time, I would spend more time on the overall layout of the piece and put more effort into the imagery on the second spread.
Conceptual Illustration – Personal
For this project, I designed a conceptual illustration for the “Personal” story. This story is about how social media’s personal touch outweighs its downsides. It highlights examples where social media has helped people to feel connected to loved ones who have passed away. The story conveys the message that although these people are no longer with us physically, social media helps keep their memories alive in the digital world. I wanted my conceptual illustration to convey this same message.
I began my creative process for this project by sketching different conceptual images that all convey the message of the story. I eventually decided on this image of a social post of a family on a laptop. I felt it effectively illustrated the idea of connection via social media with loved ones who have passed. In this family photo, I added a halo above the father and also pixelated him while leaving the mother and son unpixelated. I made these design decisions to convey that the father had passed away, but social media kept his spirit alive and connected to his wife and son.
Next, I decided on the headline Connected Through Loss. I felt it effectively reflects the story’s message while also grabbing the attention of the reader. Lastly, I formatted the layout of these magazine spreads. I used blue colors from my illustration throughout both magazine spreads so that everything in the article was visually tied together. Additionally, I feel like blue can be related to heaven, and therefore relates to this story about social media connecting people with those who have passed on.
Overall, I am happy with my final design for Project 3. Designing a conceptual illustration is more challenging than many other graphic design projects I have worked on. I felt that it encouraged me to push my creativity even further than usual, however, I had fun working on it and am proud of the way it turned out.
Retro Technology – Conceptual Illustration
For this project, I chose to illustrate the “Old Tech” story. The article explained how technology is always advancing, and yet some older pieces stick around long after they’ve become obsolete.
The most difficult part of this process was deciding how to represent the technology best. The concept of revival or resurgence was challenging to design without feeling too cliche or overly illustrated. After lots of trial and error, I landed on the idea regrowth, shown through plant imagery. This seemed like a simple but effective way to illustrate old objects finding new life. I also decided to focus the deck on Generation Z as I felt it was the most important part of the article. Yes, these pieces of tech have stuck around with the generations that used to use them, but it’s the new generation who are causing the resurgence, thus making them most important to the story.
When working on this spread, I was so grateful for the large amount of good quality photographs of the technology. This lead me to focus on photos as opposed to full illustrations for my concept. I wanted to highlight the technology existing in a modern space, and high quality photographs felt like the best way to do so.
Once I had all the images together, I had to tackle fitting them together with the story. The story was shorter than I had expected, leaving me with more room for the side bar and quotes. After lots of rearranging, I found a balance between the sidebar information and the copy that felt even.
The minimal style of this spread felt like the best way to keep the technology as the focus. There was an iteration of this project that had leaves crawling all around and through the story and sidebar, but in the end it was too busy, and I felt that it took away from the intricacies of the old technology.
The color scheme lent itself to the spread easily. Although the light blue and green may not seem like an obvious choice for a technology spread, it worked perfectly with idea of regrowth and resurgence, and was easy to weave through both spreads.
Overall, I truly enjoyed this project. I have spent time working with layouts in past magazine and yearbook work and I was excited to work with it again. A lot of the design work I do now is purely social media based, so it was refreshing to get so much space to work with.
Personal Touch
For this project, I wanted to create a visually compelling conceptual image that had never been done before. I thought of drawing a hand touching a phone from a bird’s eye angle, I thought of creating a collage of social media icons on top of an iPhone, but eventually I concluded I needed to incorporate a fingerprint into my image. This is why I chose to do my final idea, the icons masked into a drawn fingerprint.
Out of all the projects completed this semester, this was definitely the most difficult. I created clipping masks for each icon, and then had to piece them together on top of the fingerprint illustration. Every illustration was hand draw by me using the pen tool. It was frustrating at first to figure out why my clipping masks weren’t working, but eventually, after much trial and error, I succeeded.
Due to the contents of the article, plus the illustration, I decided to title this article “Personal Touch” as a callback to the fingerprint being the mark you leave after touching something, and after touching a mobile phone, your screen has visible fingerprints on it. I rewrote the deck to something I found more intriguing than the one we were given. The new deck I came up with was “Despite its flaws, social media’s ability to connect personally holds greater value” which I think does a great job of introducing the article’s topic and relates to the image.
The main color I chose to incorporate was blue. I did this because when I think of a color that is trusting and represents stability. Blue is commonly linked to trust, security, and reliability, making it an ideal color to highlight the value of authentic and personal connections on social media. Another idea with blue is that a lot of social media icons incorporate the color blue in some way, showcasing a subtle recall of popular brands such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. By only using the color blue, the colorful social media icons in the fingerprint stand out.
Overall, I am incredibly proud of my work for project 3. I think my conceptual visual was innovative, clever, and intriguing. I am very proud to be able to showcase this on my portfolio site and show others.
Conceptual
For this project, I designed a magazine spread for an article about the personal connectedness that we feel due to social media. For the core idea, I created the social media heart icon but used an illustration of “heart hands” instead of an actual heart. I used similar text and social media-related iconography throughout the composition to create a sense of interconnectedness and relation.
Conceptual Illustration
For this project, I carefully considered the three story options given to us before deciding on the article about a robot that was created to purposefully waste the time of telemarketers. I thought this was the most engaging, original story of the three and I could see my illustration going any number of ways.
I knew that I did not want to create a full illustration of a robot in my design, wanting to stay away from an image that was too cartoony or silly, but instead lean into one that is fun and eye catching. I wanted to highlight my illustrative skills by drawing every image on the page, but wanted to walk the line between having it come off as too realistic or too childish. I looked to other examples of illustrated conceptual designs in newspapers and magazines, getting some inspirations in the type of drawings I saw as well as aspects of color-usage, typography and layout. In thinking about the best way to capture the heart of the story, I thought about different keywords regarding the players in my story. Tech. Business. Trapped. Phones. I finally settled on the idea of a phone cord, and literally having someone be trapped within the tangles of the line and unable to move; a metaphor for what this robot was doing to the telemarketers’ time.
I began with the robot, using the imagery of a more modern version of a physical robot, with smooth, clean machinery that appeared lifelike. I believed this was the best way to avoid creating a caricature of a robot, while still having an image that is recognize-able to people. I chose just to draw the hand to create this sense of power the robot holds, dangling the humans they call by their fingertips. The phone was simple; I used real images of landline phones and chose a blockier, straightforward phone layout that would look good in the robot’s hand. The telemarketer was my biggest decision. I knew I wanted a good blend of realistic, sophisticated rendering with the fun, more zany element of the story. Thus, I settled on a faceless, basically colorless drawing of a man in a suit that I think pairs well with the rest of the elements. To create the cords of the phone, I originally used the preset phone cord brush available in Illustrator. But after some trial and error, and especially after learning the fact that I could not adjust the color of the black cord preset they gave me, I decided just to use the brush as a guide, creating a path of the general direction I wanted my own cord to go, and then drawing the actual phone cord by hand to make it the color and size I desired.
Once all the elements were complete, I went for a light blue backdrop for my image, keeping in mind the aesthetics that come from picturing the words “tech” and “business,” and found a more futuristic, blocky typography for my headline that felt similar to something you would see in coding, without being too obvious. On the second page, I laid out my text, retained the light blue coloring for my sidebar element, and then carried over parts of the images from the first page, namely the phone and the cord. I felt I was still missing something, specifically a brand new drawn element, and so I went back to Illustrator and drew the robot’s hand again, this time completely open.
Finally, with such an interesting story with crazy quotes about the thought process of the AI, I chose to select three of my favorite quotes from the reading and magnify them to draw the reader’s eye. Overall, I am quite pleased with how my design came together, proud of my abilities in illustrating and happy with the overall look of my design because of the various elements I chose. If I could do one thing differently, I think I would have created another original illustration element for the second page instead of just carrying the entire phone over. Something fresh and new that maybe fits a little better with the layout of the page.
Project 03: Conceptual
For this project, I took a look at all three potential stories for my magazine design and sketched a few ideas. However, I felt more drawn to and eventually chose the story by Nick Bilton. He writes about the idea that social media and technology bring people together in a way that outweighs the many negative consequences of technology. I first thought about ways to conceptualize the concept of social media having a personal touch or a way of conceptualizing the connection between two people due to technology. I did not want to simply personify a piece of technology, like an iPhone into a human-like figure, but I also did want to draw a connection between technology and humans. Therefore, I ended up coming up with this idea of two abstract human figures hugging each other but made up of popular social media icons. In this way, it is as if humans are fostering this connection with each other via the social media or technology they use.
When creating my imagery, I knew I wanted to stick with a pretty simple, almost monochromatic color scheme. I stuck with shades of blue to give the overall magazine design a techy feel. For the background, I used a blue and white center gradient and added a screen-like texture. I also tried to create human figures for my hand-drawn image in a way that reflects early 2000s tech design. I took inspiration from the Frutiger Aero design style that was popular in the 2000s. The name comes from Adrian Frutiger, a Swiss typeface designer, and Windows Aero, a visual style used in Microsoft’s Windows Vista software. This is where I got the inspiration to keep the human figures more rounded and have varying shades of blue with highlights of white.
Once I had designed my conceptual image, I worked on the headline. I chose “BEYOND THE SCREEN: THE UNEXPECTED DIGITAL HUG OF TECH” since my imagery reflects two figures filled with media hugging each other. I aimed to convey the message within the story about how technology goes beyond just being technology or media to creating positive benefits for users. After I created the headline, I had the idea of formatting the headline and deck into Apple iPhone text messages. I think this element of my design fits into the overall technology and social media theme of the story and imagery, as well as fits into the color scheme I chose. To match the text message idea, I selected the default Apple iPhone text message font family “San Francisco.” I wanted the font to be as close of a match to what a real text message might look like. I carried over this font into some of the other elements in my design such as the sidebar and pull quote. For my body text, I chose Roboto because I think it is easy to read and matches well with the theme. I also ended up creating and adding a scroll bar to both spreads on the farmost right side. I think this adds another tie-in to the overarching technology theme and works with the formatting of the headline and the deck.
For my second spread, I wanted to continue the tech, Frutiger Aero media theme. I first carried over the exact same background and color scheme. I also added some more hand-drawn technology-based imagery such as a mouse cursor and forms of modern technology like computers, a tablet, and a smartphone. I also carried over some of the social media icons that make up the hugging humans on the first spread into the tops of the last two pages creating another tie between the two spreads. The scroll bar is featured on the second spread as well but moved further down as if the reader has scrolled through the story.
For my additional elements, I included a sidebar designed in a way that is meant to reflect what a notification panel might look like on a user’s phone. Each section of the sidebar featuring fun facts about social media is designed to look like its own notification with hand-drawn icons. I aimed to create a sidebar in a way that does not break the overall theme of the design and instead adds to it. I also pulled out a quote from the story that I thought encompasses the overall message of not only the story but the conceptual imagery on the first spread as well.
Overall, I am pretty proud of my design work. I think I did a nice job at consistency and connecting both of the spreads. I think I also added a lot of technology and media-based design elements to craft a cohesive theme that matches the content of the story. I did struggle a little with making sure the pages did not end up with too much empty space due to the story not completely filling up both spreads. However, I think I worked out an effective solution. Although I like my conceptual imagery and think it gives off a Frutiger Aero vibe, if I re-did the project, I think I could push myself further to design something even more creative while still reflecting the content of the story.
