SIERRA JOURNAL 2023 PROPOSAL
A handwritten note in the margins, a time capsule of art, a community reunited…
Cover 1
Cover 2
Interior Photography Page
Interior Art Page
Interior Literature Page
Project Summary and Goals
For my advanced Publication Design class, our project for the semester was to collaborate on Sierra College’s annual community art and literature publication, the Sierra Journal. Everyone had to create a proposal with their own vision for the 2023 edition to send to the SJ committee for consideration. The brief was to create a mock-up of the cover and a few interior spreads featuring your chosen theme.
With full creative freedom, the theme I presented was one of community and reuniting after years apart in the pandemic. My designs featured hand-drawn graphics and handwritten quotes to create a low-fidelity, sketchbook-type feel while driving home the messaging of coming back together in-person and getting away from our screens.
Research
Initial research for this project involved finding inspiration and creating mood boards of design elements that fit the messaging I was going for. Looking for typography, fonts, layouts, graphics, use of color, and other stylistic choices helped inform my direction for the project.
The first thing I really had to consider though was how to reach my audience and what they wanted to see. The target demographic for the Sierra Journal is a broad audience so I wanted something that could represent everyone's struggles and tastes universally. Ranging from young Sierra students to staff to older community members, I decided my handmade theme would reach all generations alike.
Having a simple sans serif type with bold serif headlines came off pretty traditional, almost newspaper or magazine-like, but the addition of my own handwriting and drawings speaks to the universal experience of note-taking, doodling, the return to doing things by hand post-pandemic and coming back together as a community.
My initial moodboards consisted of two very different styles, one more geometric (top) and one more minimalistic (bottom), which I ended up meshing together into my proposal, tied together through the handwritten and handmade concept.
These were my rough draft comps of the cover, art spread, and photography spread. The cover went through lots of experimenting and evolved a lot past this point.
This first version featured all computer-made graphics. The writing is a font called Antihero found on DaFont, a placeholder to be switched out for my own handwriting; the drawings were made with the InDesign pen tool, later swapped for my own drawings done on paper. Both were eventually scanned in and made into PNGs on Photoshop.
Key Elements
Type: The biggest impact here was the carefully chosen typefaces. To get a modern yet traditional feel, I went with Playfair Display which resembles many magazine logotypes. Myriad Pro, a simple sans serif copy font, paired well. These together didn’t detract attention from the art pieces showcased which had to take center stage. My handwriting added the extra flair needed to give the 2023 Sierra Journal personality and drive home my uniting theme.
Color: In order to keep the modern, clean yet edgy, magazine-like feel, I decided to keep my pages monochromatic, mostly black and white. I included pops of bold, attention-grabbing orange to make it look like someone took a red pen and started annotating the journal.
Layout: Very simplistic layouts with lots of white space are what ultimately let the art and literary pieces shine. Not overwhelming the pieces with tons of designs or cramped layouts gives the work breathing room as you would see in an art exhibition which is what the Sierra Press aims for every year, to showcase the community’s work in the best light.
Principles of Art and Design: Combining all these elements of design, I was successful in creating emphasis and contrast, unity, and balance.
Emphasis was created through pops of color, bolded text, and making the works stand alone, bigger than the rest in order to grab attention first. Contrast was created through using orange amidst a monochromatic design as well as using imperfect, hand-drawn graphics around mathematically-perfect, computer-made typefaces.
I instilled unity throughout the spreads by using the same orange pen to give equal color and line weights to all handmade elements. Using folios and paragraph styles also helped give unity to the text on each page.
I made balance in the cover by asymmetrically placing the hands reaching out towards each other, imperfect mirror images. I also had to visually balance spreads so none were too image or text-heavy in certain areas.
Project Details
My roles:
All research, thematic and visual conceptualization, planning, sketches, comps, graphics/writing, digitalization, layouts, type/color/style choices, documentation done by me
Field of work:
Publication and print design
Software:
InDesign, Photoshop
Typefaces:
Playfair Display, Myriad Pro
Mediums and Tools:
Ink pen, flatbed scanner
Miscellaneous details:
Completed in 2023; runner-up design, not published
Design instead chosen by committee for a special project–to be repurposed into a promotional pamphlet for Sierra’s Publication Design class