Student Literary Magazine Cover Design

Due  Thursday, November 3rd 2005

Class Critique: Friday, November 4th

This assignment is truly a graphic design problem for you to solve. Mrs. Works’ Creative Writing and Independent Study students are going to begin to produce the annual student literary publication from NCHS soon. This magaloid is an annual publication that will showcase not only the literary talents of our students but also those gifted in the visual arts as well. (If you are familiar with national literary magazine of "Teen Ink", it will be on a format comparable to that…)

Your artistic skills are needed to not only submit work for publication but to design the all-important cover.   The name of the magazine is "Writers’ Block". (A nice play on words, isn’t it??) You will need to incorporate the title of the magazine into your composition. Before you tackle this assignment, consider all of the possibilities in terms of how you could interpret the title of the magazine as well as some ideas that were suggested by Mrs. Works’ students to help better communicate the theme of the collection of works such as:

As always, your finished work must demonstrate an improved knowledge of the technical aspects of Adobe Photoshop CS from the previous projects you completed. Pay careful attention to the use of the elements and principles of design. Your final composition must demonstrate several techniques and effects. Utilize multiple layers (more than 6), cutting, copying, and pasting, as well as, adjusting each of the layers, and use of text. Continue to develop your drawing, painting, blending, and layout techniques. Each layer should blend seamlessly into each other.

Image and text should be combined in a pleasing way and work harmoniously together. Focus on effective use of color (or lack of color) and value. Make sure that the final image has a focal point that is clearly emphasized. Please, BE CREATIVE in your composition. Don’t just copy and paste pictures from other sites without making at least 6 significant changes/alterations to the original image before importing it into your work.

Originality and creativity are one of the most important aspects of this project. I would caution you on using any pre-existing images from the Internet since you can run into the legalities copyright law problems. To avoid these possible pitfalls, I would strongly recommend that if you are to use images that are of a photographic nature to include in your composition, you should use the digital camera instead or work from scanned photos of people that you have taken.

I would also suggest that you make use of the tutorials that are on-line to incorporate some of their effects into your work.  Links to the tutorials are located at the top of the Computer Art Web-Page.  You have three weeks to work on this assignment, so make good use of EVERY class period in the lab.  Do not waste the class time you have because that is part of your overall grade for this assignment. 

Requirements for this project are:

Just a reminder, you can also submit additional works for inclusion to the publication, aside from the cover assignment. Mrs. Works has mentioned that there are spaces available in the magazine to include a section for student art work. These do not necessarily have to be in a digital format, so you can submit works in other mediums like pencil, charcoal, paintings, etc. So, take advantage of the offer to have your work PUBLISHED for free.

Jessica Riggs