WEEK ONE: response.

This week's critiques of the CRMA entries really opened my eyes to what other designers think of certain types and styles of design. I could spend paragraphs and paragraphs describing my own design philosophies, tendencies and preferences, but that clearly would bore everyone to tears, so I thought it might be better to discuss what I observed (and please keep in mind that these are observations and musings, rather than judgments of others).

1. Organization is key. The way pages/spreads were organized (namely, the number of entry and exit points) seemed to be very important to the majority of the class. There were some of us that preferred to be wooed by the overall initial impression of the opening spread rather than a clearly organized layout. I do agree that in some situations organization is more important than look, but some of the well-organized choices surprised me.

2. I like strange colors. From what I gathered, I don't like mainstream colors, comparatively. A lot of orange variations, muted violets, and pinks seemed to be the colors of choice, and this surprised me. I personally prefer to use red variations in my designs, and I'll often use blues as neutrals or greens and yellows as spot color. However, color choice is obviously content-driven...

3. City magazines aren't that creative. While this isn't really a reflection on our class's design intellect, it was still an observation made in Tuesday's class. After working at St. Louis Magazine this past Summer, I was fairly familiar with CRMA and it's member magazines. A task I was given a lot was to look through the stacks and stacks and bookshelves and bookshelves of city and regional magazines around the country for inspiration. The thing I noticed then and in class was that the majority of the country's city mags do the same themed issues and the same types of generic designs over and over again.

While these might not be the most insightful observations, I'll add to the list as the semester goes on.

tbw.