Ringling College of Art + Design — November 2016, September 2020
This project was a practice in editorial design. The A/180 magazine is designed to be a journal into the exceptional, detailing people, thoughts, and actions that challenge the status quo. We were encouraged to seek out interesting articles about current events in the world and design a short magazine that would highlight these findings.
Originally, this project had no deeper meaning or problem to solve, and was purely for the sake of getting a handle on publication design. However, I had my own issues with it as time went on. Through no fault of anyone or any design restrictions, I had created something that I felt was completely uninspired. In November of 2016, suffering from artistic burnout and no inspiration, my goal was just to make something to the best of my abilities with a passing grade. I was never happy with this project, and it wasn’t until September 2020 that I decided to do something about it.
Coming back with fresh eyes and a lively mind, I looked at what I’d created before, and scrapped it all.
I had kept a few of the original design elements that I genuinely liked, but there were a lot of glaringly-lazy parts, that looked as if they were just put together with little thought. When thinking about the direction of these revised pages, I know I still wanted to keep them simple. I’ve always loved working with images, so I took this opportunity to incorporate some very basic text + imagery play. I also broke away from the 100% sans-serif use and used one of my favorite, more elegant fonts.
I reworked the logo, put more thought into the layout of the covers and pages, and kept the color theme for each individual issue.
The newer designs aren’t too far from the originals in terms of style, but I’m much happier with them, and feel they look a lot better than their uninspired counterparts. I think there’s still room for improvement, but if I kept working on this project, I don’t think I’d ever stop…
Although this wasn’t the first time I had done so, scrapping a project this big proved to be the best thing I could’ve done, for the sake of my mind and this project’s outcome. Too often, I’ll try to play around with the existing design to make something better, and too often, it’s a moot point. Giving yourself a blank canvas can allow your mind to wonder about possible ideas, instead of being stuck in one direction. Not only that, but having time away from a project can prove useful. If you’re able to give yourself a breather, whether it’s for a couple days or a couple months, it could serve you well.
