Midterm Portfolio

For my midterm portfolio in Viscom II, I chose the following six pieces. They are in order of the most recently created. I didn't use many of the things I did at the beginning of the semester. I think I finally got into the groove of using a grid and paying attention to small detail, so a lot of my more recent work looks better.

Assignment: Using photography shot by you at Thousand Hills, create a 2-page magazine spread for the article "Time in the Woods".

I wanted to try a one-column grid for this layout, just because I hadn't tried it before and there wasn't too much text to be used. I centered the body copy underneath three photos of Thousand Hills scenery. The picture on the left had some oranges and reds in it which I sampled to color the text for the headline. Since this spread is only in its first revision, I believe I'm going to take more pictures of colored leaves close up to use for the three images at the top of the right page. I think the one column of text was successful in this layout, though.

Assignment: Using a professional(looking) photograph of your choice, create a 2-page magazine spread using the image. Text not supplied.

I chose a picture of a golden lion tamarin mainly because I'm interested in rare animals, and thought it was a professional looking picture. When deciding on a client, or theme for my article, I thought it would be appropriate to imagine the article in National Geographic. For this reason, I chose to zoom in on the most intriguing part of the photograph, which is the tamarin's face. I made the column on the left of the photo black to contrast with the golden orange of the monkey's fur. Also, I wanted to be sure to create hierarchy with the text, so I focused on the word "Tamarin", added "the golden lion" above it, and a subtitle in a smaller font just below the headline.

Assignment: Create a 2-page magazine ad for Rapala crankbait fishing lures. Text supplied.

I decided to use a COB of a young man holding a large fresh water fish for this spread. I chose the tan and dark green colors to get a camo sort of feeling since our viewer's would probably be hunters and fishers. This poster has been through many revisions, starting with moving the focal image from the right side of the page to the left, creating a red info box on the top right, adding lures to the main body of text, and making many minute decisions while typesetting.

Assignment: Create a 2-page magazine spread for the article "How Safe?". Text supplied.

This was a spread with very little text to work with. I used stock photos of peppers and a food market for this layout. I wanted the colors to be bright and catch the viewer's eye, and I think that was successful. Some of the revisions I made throughout this poster were finding new images, resizing/scaling images to take up more space, turning the body of text into three columns instead of two, and working with text wraps.

Assignment: Create a text-heavy 2-page magazine spread for the article, "The Secret of Feeling Full". Text supplied.

At first, the amount of text on this spread was a little intimidating. I realized that there wasn't a lot of space to take up, so I found an image that the text could interact with, and that was the curly fry. This was the first spread I really figured out the text wrap settings on, only after manually (and tediously) spacing the text to wrap around the curly fry! The orange informational box on the right page went through many different areas of the page, but I think in the end it sits well at the bottom.

Assignment: Create an informational poster listing events for Native American Heritage Month.

For this poster, we were required to list the events for Native American Heritage Month, which was more text than we had worked with on a single poster. I wanted to try something new, so I water-colored some Indian corn. Although the image is a little pale, I think it still draws some interest because of the contrast between the headline and the illustration. Apart from the illustration, I like the handling of the text at the bottom. It is simple and orderly, which I think creates good overall flow while maintaining structure with the organic image.