I’m the new Design Assistant at my college radio station!

So I work WSOU, my college’s radio station. I just started there a few months ago and it’s been so much fun.  And recently I applied to be the Design Assistant for the upcoming year and tonight I found out I got it! I’m so excited and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings designing for the radio station! It’s a dream come true!

Inspired By: Ray Toro Article

(all photos of Ray Toro are not mine; this was used for a school project and I give credit to those whose pictures they are; article property of Jason Pettigrew and Alt Press)

For my Typography II class we had to do a magazine article layout. Now seeing as I love doing article layouts and I love music, I figured this would be the perfect way to combine the two. I did a magazine article layout last year for a 21 Pilots article and I had so much fun with it that I wanted to do another music -inspired layout. We had to take an article that we found online and lay it out for a magazine.

I listened to the songs mentioned in the article which were: Isn’t That Something and For the Lost and the Brave and decided to make an article based off of those and My Chemical Romance songs, since he was a part of that band for a while.

I chose to do the black background because it fit better with the style of music than a white or light colored background. I wanted to do white text since that would stand out the most, and I chose to do red accent colors because that also fit the style of music. The red sections of text are the interviewers questions, and the white sections are Ray Toro’s answers. I added broken glass throughout the article to reflect the title “There may be expectations, but I’m Out to Shatter Them.” I also chose those two pictures to reflect the color scheme throughout the article. The first shattered glass image frames Ray Toro’s face. The others just play on the background image to keep up consistency within the  article. The text for the drop caps on the second and third pages are similar to those of My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade album. I chose to do the title on an angle because this type of music isn’t just normal music, it’s different in the sense of style and I felt that it was better represented by unconventional titling. I chose to put it on a semi-transparent box so it was easier to read and I continued that throughout the rest of the article for pull quotes which also have a smaller version of the title text.

I had a lot of fun with this project since it’s something I love to do. Article design is one of my most favorite types of design to do because you can really make a beautiful artwork by taking the type of article and representing it in your design. If you have the chance, check out Ray Toro’s Soundcloud since I can’t add him to the playlist. The songs are amazing…and For the Lost and the Brave is a very powerful and moving song. Hope you enjoy!

In Progress: Jellyfish Guitar

So here’s my in progress jellyfish for the Jellyfish Guitar Morph project. I’m really happy with how this came out.  The tentacles are the only thing that’s giving me a hard time right now. I’m really happy with how the top part of the jellyfish came out. I created a path for the shape of the jellyfish. Then I used a spray brush to get the semi-transparent look to the jellyfish.  Then I took a hard crayon/charcoal brush and created the orange stripes. I took a thin brush and made the yellow stripes on the bottom. Then I took another spray brush and took  darker color than the base coat and added some darks to make the jellyfish look more realistic. I also took another spray brush and made the reddish spot in the jellyfish.

While I was working on this jellyfish, I was listening to some more Brand New.  They released a new song last week when I started working on this jellyfish so that’s been added to the playlist too. The new song is called Mene and I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s not one of their best songs, it doesn’t even scream “Brand New” when you hear it. But that being said, it’s not a bad song, it’s just nothing amazing. It does get better as you listen to it more and more though. I also added a few songs from their Deja Entendu  album and one song from The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me. You can check out the playlist for this project here and I’d recommend putting it on shuffle so you get more of a variety.