{"id":6404,"date":"2013-06-30T11:12:29","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T17:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=6404"},"modified":"2013-06-30T11:15:33","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T17:15:33","slug":"i-did-something-i-actually-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/newspaper-stuff\/i-did-something-i-actually-like\/","title":{"rendered":"I did something I actually like!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t post about specific stuff I do at work very often because … actually I’m not sure why. It ain’t modesty, I promise. I think I’m still just delusionally assuming that if I don’t post specifics about my work that no one at the new job (new? I’ve been there a year!) is going to find this corner of the internet and discover what a nutty broad I am. That’s crazy, I suppose, because surely by now they have already figured that out. <\/p>\n

ANYWAY! For three weeks I have been working with the editors at the Montgomery paper to illustrate their huge series on violent crime<\/a> in the city. I had spent a lot of time working on The Commercial Appeal’s True Crime series<\/a> a few years ago, so I felt pretty equipped to tackle the topic from a design standpoint. Except this time around, the editor was not enthusiastic about the photographs that went with the main stories. So he asked if we could go conceptual. <\/p>\n

So here’s what I did. <\/p>\n

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I’m a bit self-conscious about my ability to execute conceptual designs. I’ve felt that it’s been a weak spot for me since I didn’t get much graphic design training in college (I was on the media design path in J-school; graphic design fell under the college of art) and I spent the first seven years of my career cutting my teeth at a paper that had amazing photographers and an amazing illustrator. There really wasn’t much of a need for me to do conceptual illustrations. So that muscle never got worked. <\/p>\n

But I took the editor’s challenge and had a moment of inspiration one evening while digging through stock art. I found this one piece \u2014 a spiky blue wave drawing. I had my way with it in Photoshop and ended up with a huge and aggressive wall of red ink engulfing nearly the entire front page. I thought there was no way it would fly with the editor and suspected it wouldn’t fly with anyone<\/i>, so I ran it past my creative director (email subject line: “Is this crazy?”). He enthusiastically greenlit it and helped me refine it. And then the next week’s photographs were also week, and so we decided we’d have a trilogy of illustrations. <\/p>\n

The roots are my favorite. They are hand drawn. Er, mouse drawn. (I should get a tablet.) And that is the third iteration of them. They started out just at the top, and then I had them go down both sides of the page, but my boss told me they looked like Frodo’s head. (They did. And Michael Jackson’s.)<\/p>\n

It was a ton of work but I’m happy with how each of these pages turned out and with how they all work together. Kudos to the editor for going with such a bold idea \u2014 many editors might have balked \u2014 and for letting me come up with ideas that strayed from his original vision. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t post about specific stuff I do at work very often because … actually I’m not sure why. It ain’t modesty, I promise. I think I’m still just delusionally assuming that if I don’t post specifics about my work that no one at the new job (new? I’ve been there a year!) is going to find this corner of the internet and discover what a nutty broad I am. That’s crazy, I suppose, because… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14,245,57],"tags":[2214,2155,1242,1968,1334,537,1969,2172],"class_list":["post-6404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspaper-stuff","category-shameless-self-promotion","category-work","tag-art","tag-design","tag-illustration","tag-montgomery-advertiser","tag-news-design","tag-newspaper","tag-tsunami-of-violence","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-1Fi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6404"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6410,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6404\/revisions\/6410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}