My work this week

     Another week off at the Missourian...and another week to play catch up and to prepare for spring break. My design work this week consists of my covers I'm presenting tomorrow, and the redesigns of the Show Me Dharma Logos (which I'll post Friday). 

     Here are my covers for the April second issue of Vox. This was a tough cover to do.With the concept for the cover uncertain for a while, and the lack of options for a photo for the cover...it really came down to telling the story with the words....what they say and how they say it.

     The play being covered in the story and on the cover  is about a woman in the '20s, I believe, who works in an experimental greenhouse laboratory and who challenges conventional norms of femininity and sexuality. Long story short...I know. 

     With the first one, I wanted to show the

dominance of the woman, and a sort of role reversal by using the words..."breaking all the rules" . She looks in control...she's comforting him. 

     With the second one, I wanted to show a funnier tone. Although a lot of the things we talked about in the staff meeting were really good and fun, I didn't feel like that same tone comes across in the play.

 So, I tried to subtly bring that humor into it. I used a serious photo, but I brought the humor to the cover through the words. 

     The third one came after I read some criticisms of the play from when it first came out. I got a lot of trouble for the challenges it made and the topics it covered. I used a lot of those words over and over in a typographic cover. I also tried to make the

words overlap and run into each other so they'd be covered up by "The Verge," almost as if showing how it really didn't matter what those criticisms said...the play obviously still has an impact. 

     The last one came out of what I read about the opening scene of play. It opens on the greenhouse and plants everywhere bent in all sorts of crazy directions. There also seemed to be a lot of symbolism in the parallels between the plants and women. "Splitting away into new life," "Shocked out of something they were into something they were not," "Experimentation," "Explosion of plant life into new life forms," etc.