WILL DEZINE 4 GAS MUNNY

October has been rough. This isn't news, but it has been, and it's made for some interesting visual opportunities.

I've taken lead on most of these, running with the assignment of "get all this stuff out there, OK?" which is my cue to figure out how to package all the tidbits of the day's financial happenings and get them ALL represented on the front page... somehow. Save for the "Don't Panic" CP, which is little more than a story treated right. The theme came straight from the editor's mouth himself, and the panic-button-as-main-art idea came from our photo editor. The rest — from intros to rails to spiffy backgrounds — is just me playing Tetris with good material. OK, maybe a little more work than that...






*Note: The bailout vote CP (top right) is a pre-press version. The headline (and likely some other stuff) was changed; I just don't have a PDF of the final cover... yet. I'll be swapping it out for the final version at some point... stay tuned...

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A note about the Dow item: Not a completely original concept, the falling line across the page and behind other elements. I did dress ours up with a cool graph-paper-like background grid that I didn't really see anywhere else, and I also indicated times when the Dow was "in the black" that day. That element proved an interesting adventure in itself as I essentially had to make two graphs, then superimpose pieces of one onto the other. The line element started in Illustrator, but it ended in Photoshop.

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SIDE PROJECT: I've also been working on a special section we're calling the Financial Survival Guide. That project has pretty much been a blur from start to finish. Definitely my baby, visually, and a very big learning experience.

More on that later... maybe even the whole enchilada if you're lucky.

You are here

This map turned out to be quite the exercise in assignment interpretation.

Our magazine editor turned to me for what appeared to be a fairly simple map, but he had some very specific styles in mind. I had a clipping indicating what color palette to use, another with a design/format example to follow. Oh yeah, and I had to incorporate a provided map.

OK, it sounds simple enough. But diving into the process, I found early on that I had to be methodical to ensure I nailed all the specs right in Illustrator.

It worked. My only regret is that the process is a little too time-consuming to integrate into our paper. Too bad; the graphics would be a lot cooler. Someday, maybe.

(BTW, there's no labels on this map because I was asked to allow the designer to put them on to maintain consistency with fonts. Which suited me fine since labeling is the worst part of designing maps. So monotonous.)

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UPDATE: I actually did figure out a way to integrate this style into our regular graphics for the paper using Google Earth and Photoshop. I honed the process and styles myself for a few months and am now passing off the process to our front-page designers. I'll post a few here sometime.

Let them eat pie

One of the graphic designers I supervised for a time was constantly giving me grief about the minimal number of colors available for a proper pie chart intended for newsprint.

Minimal colors? Huh? Clearly, she never had box of crayons with more than 16 colors in it. Sad.

Anyway, when this assignment came along, I decided to use it to prove to myself once and for all that she was sorely mistaken. Each of these colors is an exact match for a color in our PC color palette, which means the reproduction is guaranteed to work, and the colors will end up differentiated from one another. It ain't rocket science...

It would have been a complete victory had the final graphic not ended up running in black and white due to technical difficulties. *Sigh*

(Incidentally, this isn't how the the key/chatter appeared in print. The words were added to the page in proper format — and better arrangement — after the chart was imported into our PC design platform.)

Map style 2.0

When I was put in charge of the graphics department, we were stuck in giant rut, and our maps were really, well, flat. We were nudged to try totally different processes, and eventually turned to Google Earth. Now, all our maps start out as Google Earth images.

I keep forgetting to put any of the graphics I do up here. Granted they're not super extensive, but considering that I've come up with the process we use from scratch, I'm kinda proud of myself and think it would be good to sort of document the evolution.

For starters, I give you this monster. It's a map of the Redlands Bicycle Classic route.

This is hardly the first graphic I ever made, but it's the first really BIG graphic I ever made. Granted, the information being presented didn't warrant the size we gave it. But I was asked to create something this size to fill a double-truck spread for one of our commercial publications. So I dove in.

Using Photoshop, I overlaid, detailed and tinted something like 17 Google Earth image downloads to create what you see here. Then, with the two map images in place, I added a headline and some copy with more details about the event. (That last step was done on our PC design platform. I'll post the final page here soon.)

Start to finish, the whole thing was a valuable learning project for me... a bit labor intensive when it didn't need to be, but in the end, it helped me see what is and isn't worth the bother when creating maps.