God day today, again. This morning I built the ads, which are cat portraits. There are different ad pages; for example a “Ads with Space Cats” page or a “Ads with Cats with Mustaches”. Not sure if the ads are on the right point on the axis between “not distracting too much” and “look like they are not fitting to the content of the magazine”, but I guess I won’t touch them again. There are actually veeeery close to the beautiful (self-build) ads in the Offscreen magazine, and I have to admit that this mag was an inspiration.
After lunch I started thinking about the cover. Which was a demotivating experience: I feel like I can’t design good covers. Hm. The feedback from the two last magazines were always: “The cover is not appealing enough”, and I totally agree – but to design an appealing cover is really challenging! Although I should be glad: In the last time I always had the weird thought: “Man, magazine design is so hard – I should do poster design instead. This seems like an interesting field.” And finally, I have it: A poster-like design challenge; perfect! Well. Seems like posters are not designed easily after all.
I mentioned yesterday that I had an idea, and here it is: I will give every “new-media-online-community-story” a thick (5pt) black border. And I will use this black line pretty often on the page.
This has three advantages:
The contra site of this new move: I had to adjust the grid a little bit – so now on every page fits less text and I have to move everything. But yeah, three days left! (And I’m really, reaaaaaaaally looking forward to start with the documentation next week, so I can’t wait!)
But I have to say, the last days were quite relaxed. It’s warm in Weimar, it’s almost 30 degree and the students are enjoying the first days of summer. I even started watching TED talks while working. Which I really enjoy, especially for the work for which you don’t have to think so much (“tidying up”). Of course I can’t focus fully on the TED talk then, and neither on the design work. Well, at least I feel I’m not that slow in moving elements while watching TED, but of course; maybe I am.