Critique: misCONCEPTions

Last week, I mentioned the three cover concepts that I was working on and had to present to the class on Thursday.  These covers were to be designed for the "Dialogues" feature, which is a compilation of mini articles that feature overheard conversations from around Columbia.

Turns out, what my cover design group and I had conceptualized as a feature on voices from around Columbia, was actually something quite different.  This caused our designs to be a little less than representative of the stories, and in turn, made them fall a bit flat.  My designs were a bit too generic, and therefore, I will be redesigning them completely, rather than simply finishing their execution.

Headache.

Of course nobody wants to hear that all of their (hard) work won't actually work, and I think my frustration read pretty clear all over my face.  But that's life. And it wasn't that I disagreed at all - I definitely understood the critiques, and am very interested in where my mind will take these designs.

That said, here are the designs that I presented last week.  At the time, I saw the story as being a modern day expose of dialogues.  For me, the mini stories are small glimpses into other peoples' lives that reveal truths about our society and our ways of communicating.

Here, I wanted to represent the eavesdropping aspect of the stories - the fact that VOX reporters had overheard these conversations, and were writing these candid moments down to later share with the rest of the world.

This cover was driven by the literalness of conversation and the act of talking. The mouths are to repressed the talking, the different voices, and the modernness of it all. I wanted it to be abstract, while still conceptual, without relying too heavily on the only thing that I thought the mini stories shared.

This last concept took the obvious "text bubble" and incorporated it with the talking mouths. The text within the bubble conveys a message that implies to the reader that it could have been their conversations that we were listening to, which  gives this implication of "you" and making it relatable. I wanted to draw the reader in by the everyday-ness of the feature, and represent the various voices within the conversations with different text sizes and weights. 

Now as I head back to work on these covers, more or less from square one, I have a better idea of what kind of message we want them to have, and what I should probably stay away from.  I'll keep you updated on my progress!

- Cassie