Looking back on 16 weeks...

First semester of grad school is in the can and it’s time to look back now.

But before we get to that, let’s look WAY back:

On a cold – by Miami standards – morning in January of 1985, I walked into the offices of the Metropolis, the weekly student paper at Miami-Dade. I took a student work study gig as a staffer, and I ultimately became a section editor and weekly columnist. My advisor was Jose Quevedo, a former Tampa Tribune writer who ditched the grind of a medium sized metropolitan daily for a career in academia. Jose was a great teacher who had found his calling; and he taught snot nosed 21-year olds like me how to write and what went into design of a newspaper. He stressed the importance of design. If you couldn’t catch the reader’s eye, he’d teach us, it didn’t matter what you were writing because no one would read it. My time on the Metropolis was colored with collegiate journalism awards like the Pacemaker and All-American. When Jose died of AIDS in 1992, I lost the most important influence on my writing that I ever had.

A year or so later, I was editor-in-chief of the Sunblazer, the weekly student paper at FIU. Unlike Quevedo’s style and heavy hand in teaching us at the Metropolis, the Sunblazer was a total DIY thing. I’d be in that office until 4 am on deadline nights some nights, toiling away on a gigantic copy editing device that they are probably still making monthly payments on. We used light tables to align copy, and we were literally cutting and pasting to make things fit using exact-o knives and invisible blue ink. After getting promoted to editor in chief from sports editor, I wasn’t just doing my page and leaving. I oversaw the design and layout of an entire eight-page paper, week in, week out. 

At some point,  I did what my dad did: I cashed in my writer dreams, got a job, got married and had kids. But I never forgot about writing. I did lots of part time and freelance stuff over the years, but couldn’t let it go. Hence, here I am, at 47, back in school.

I decided to apply to NSU when I looked over the curriculum and saw that there were courses in all sorts of writing styles. Editing, Layout and Design was one of the classes I put a star next to, and it rolled around my first semester. So I was really looking forward to it.

I guess I didn’t expect the technological challenges of this course. I knew technology would have changed in 25 years, but I didn’t really expect to have the difficulty that I had. That caught me off guard. That I couldn’t really grasp it – even conceptually – really bothered me.

But I dealt with it, dug deep, realized I wanted to be in school and discovered Microsoft Publisher, which seemed to have saved me.

The one thing I come away with is that in 25 years, the design concepts themselves haven’t changed all that much. It’s the technology that has evolved, and I am figuring out a way to evolve with it.

Design Your Own Book Cover

The book cover was our second project and, of course, my second panic attack.

I decided I was going to design the cover for my first collection of short stories. I took a bunch of words I liked together (and that, frankly, described my life for a while last year) and combined them with a photo I took from my favorite seat at my favorite pub, Brogues over on Lake Avenue and K Street, a place that I have gone for refreshment and inspiration on many occasions.

Downtown Lake Worth, where Brogues is located, is an area that probably peaked in the late 50s or early ‘60s. It’s fascinating for its contradictions: It’s kind of run down and grimy, yet it’s a few blocks from a nice strip of beach;  small theatres and gritty punk rock clubs sharing street time with a Starbucks and a kava bar. There must be a thousand stories hiding under the gray sidewalks; a lot of my stories are set here.

For this one project, I decided I was going to take Gimp head on. I read a bunch of tutorials, read a bunch of stuff about it, and thought I could apply it to the book cover. Or so I thought. Despite my confidence, I couldn’t really do much with it.

I discovered Microsoft Publisher at this point, and this discovery (thanks, Sara) probably saved my grade in this class. While it doesn’t do as much as Gimp, it thinks like the Microsoft products that I use every day. The limitations creatively were worth it for the sanity it provided.

There isn’t a lot of difference between the original and the revision. I changed the font to Forte and made it bigger. Forte kind of had this old feel that made it look like the title script for a 1960s TV show. That fits the area. It was also kind of a fun looking font, which I thought provided a neat contrast to the grimy area shown in the photo. You’ll also note that the photo is a little bigger than the original. I was able to get the whole photo the second time around. 

Laying Out Someone Else's Text

As for the brochure, well, who could forget this?

Alarming, no? I mean, who knew yellow could be so loud? I sort of don’t have any problem with it conceptually: I wanted to use bullet points to get the ideas across in a quick way. I figured that anyone who was interested in using this type of service would want to know what it was all about pretty quickly. I wanted to use primary colors because I read somewhere once that kids do better when surrounded by primary colors.

Somehow, this yellow and red thing resulted, and it was freaking ugly. Nothing could be further from the tranquility of a sleeping baby than this visually disturbing, yellow and red creation that appeared surprisingly violent.

I also didn’t like the font. I used the big, bubbly Gil Sans in the original. One of the Before and After readings suggested that we use the same font family throughout, and in the original, I used Gil Sans bold and italic along with the regular. The font just didn’t do the job, though. In the revision, I decided to use Bradley Hand. It’s kind of fun and playful, so I thought it would work better with the newly softened brochure.  I did, however, keep the Gil Sans for the phone numbers and contact info. The numbers in Bradley Hand just ran together and were hard to read.  

I found this one to be the most challenging of the assignments, both the draft and the revision. I struggled with it from the get-go.

Here's the revision:

It still isn't perfect: that middle fold could be improved, and I go up and back on the black versus the pink. But at least it won't scare little kids.

Visualizing Data

Week 11's adventure brought us the Visualizing Data assignment. In this project, the idea was to take some information and make a visual for it.

This was one I liked a lot. The readings and links showed us a world of ideas. There was so much you could do. I found some interesting information on social media, and my first attempt was essentially a glorified graph that tracked the number of Facebook and Twitter users by age and gender. It was pretty, and it got a point across, but it was very generic. It didn't do anything for me and, as such, no one ever saw it. Until now.

The World Series had ended, and an improbable champion was crowned. The St. Louis Cardinals had rallied from eight games back on September 1, 2011 to earn a playoff birth. The Cards stormed through two rounds of playoffs and into the World Series, where they beat the heavily favored Texas Rangers. Fittingly, the Cardinals' manager, Tony LaRussa, announced his retirement shortly after, ending a 33-year run as a major league manager.

LaRussa's career got me thinking. He's got to be in the Hall of Fame, winning three different world series titles, six pennants and earning manager of the year honors four times. So I created a graphic that would present an argument for his enshrinement into baseball's Hall of Fame. The finished product was a bit clunky; but keeping in mind how limited my design skills actually are, I was quite proud of it.

But it didn't really do it's job, did it? It told how great his career was, but there needed to be a comparative element to make it more effective. In the revised version, you've got LaRussa's career stats as compared to the two most recent managers elected to the Hall of Fame, Whitey Herzog and Dick Williams. As you can see, LaRussa's honors trump either Herzog or Williams and, as such, makes a better argument for his enshrinement.