Vue project 1013

I've been letting the covers slide for a couple weeks, but this one jolted me back into action.

What do you do when you get a horizontal picture for use on a vertical cover?

• You can do a couple things. Using Photoshop, you can clone an element of the picture to add height. In this case, you could make that grass a much larger area.

• You can leave it horizontal and use the space for type. Lots and lots of type. (That's the approach the designer has taken here.)

• You can (depending on how much leeway you have for photo abuse) (hey, it's handout art of a band, there has to be leeway) stretch that thing to make it fill a more reasonable amount of space. (That's what I did.)

And, I rewrote the headlines. I think my "Oh, Snap" headline is perhaps too flip for the subject of the stories inside (war photography, funeral photography) but I can't resist a snotty headline.

For the flag this week, I'm using Nick Shinn's Beaufort. For the headline type it's the old reliable, Rockwell.

And -- white space.

Vue project 1012

I like the moose antlers as a wine glass shape.

Three fonts for the headline of four words may be overdoing it.

I don't think the background of this drawing helps. Maybe if the people in the background were moose I'd like it better.

I like the color choices quite a bit. These colors really compliment the illustration's colors.

Vue project 1011

I think this cover is fine. The photo is great, and it leaves a lot of space at the top for the headline stuff. The green of the headline and yellow of the logo don't have much to do with the coloring of the photo. I'd probably try to pick some colors that are more complimentary -- or just go with white or gray. The "Vigilante" type treatment may be a little over-fussy, but it's okay.

Edmonton Metro's new look

Edmonton's free daily newspaper got a new look today.

Here are some pages, comparing last Friday's to today's edition.

Moving from dark green to bright green. Also changing display typefaces (I think the text type remains the same).

Here are my guesses at to what's being used for fonts. Headline font: Lyon Display from Commercial Type. Metro logo and secondary display font: I was going to guess Helvetica, but that's not it. This font has a round dot for the period. I'm stumped. Looks like one of the sans fonts Entertainment Weekly is using right now. [Update: The typeface is Graphik -- also from Commercial Type. Thank you, Mark Simonson.]

Also: A different ad configuration on the top of the front page.

Gone are the flipped one-column section headers. That's probably for the best. I think it was a little awkward going down the side of the page -- just to abruptly end at the bottom advertisement. 

I was not a fan of the gradients going on in section heads -- though I didn't mind it on the front page logo. 

The refurbished Metro logo gets big play (although making it white on a light gray background downplays the big play).

Interior pages carry through the brighter look. Note the folio has gone from dark green and gray to all bright green. The folio color now changes with the sections. The previous design kept the green/gray folios throughout.

The new pages may be slightly narrower on the trim, but the image size seems to be the same.

Features cover reworked. Purple rather than gold? Yes!

An interior features spread. Using the bold headline type exclusively right now. I'm guessing that may change with time.

Sports front page. Red for sports. 

Inspired by Saul Bass

The wonderful 1955 movie poster for "Man with the Golden Arm" by Saul Bass has inspired many knock-offs. (Here's a great blog post showing the range of original Saul Bass posters for this movie. And another nice posting about how Saul Bass designs are mostly ignored by modern-day DVD cover designers.)

Here's the original. (As always, click for an enlarged view.)

And a lobby card version from the same time.

And a poster I spotted on the street last week.

And a design I did in 1996. I should've paid more attention to the lettering on the original, but this was pre-internet and I was working from memory. I should have also just worked in black plus one color. Making the hand in color is overkill.

And the inside layout -- which benefits from being restricted to just black and white.

Vue project 1010

Thought the original cover was nice. It's using some white space -- which I always like. The addition of the paint brush struck me as not needed, but overall, the original cover works.

But I wanted to push it a little further. I know nothing about horses. But after some thought, I remembered the Edward Muybridge horse study photos. Found a set of those photos on the Internet, converted it to silhouette, and I had an instant herd of the beasts.

I was also inspired by this month's (March 2015) National Geographic cover story opening spread on science skeptics. 

Headlines this week are Bitstream's version of Antique Olive named Incised 901. Logo is made from Monotype Bell. I decided to do a unicase thing with the "E" letters just to mix it up a bit -- because, you may have noticed, Vue Weekly has a lot of "E"s. Those lower-case "E"s kinda start to look like eyes.

Although one of the main players in the story is named WHOAS (Wild Horses of Alberta Society), I decided to blunder ahead with "WHOA" as the main headline. It's short, it's punchy, it's horsey -- and I cannot resist a "Matrix" reference.