Critique

I agree with Maggie that brainstorming a strong concept for the breast cancer assignment was a challenge. It was hard to incorporate all aspects of the story: Heather's life, her battle with breast cancer, the theatrical performance and using humor to help get you through the cancer. Kristin's cover (the winner!) did an excellent job at incorporating the ideas of breast cancer and humor/clowning around in a very classy way. My cover didn't have any references to breast cancer, which I believe is its major downfall.

I thought the most important message was the use of humor as a coping strategy (for breast cancer or any other illness) and took a cue from the well-known aphorism "Laughter is the best medicine" (note: I really like how Maggie transformed this to "breast medicine"). To create the cover image, I took a photo of a pill bottle. In photoshop, I discovered the bevel and emboss tool in order to write "laughter" on each of the pills.

For the spread, I wanted to continue the "laughter is the best medicine" theme and, thus, used a clown image as the U in laughter. (see www.flickr.com/photos/mmmappingdesign to view the images) The clown's laughter fills a medication bottle. The background color was chosen to imitate skin tone, and the arc within the second spread intends to mimic the shape of a breast. The main aspect I would change about my cover and feature design would be to better incorporate the idea of breast cancer. This idea is absent in my design but, due to the focus of the story, should have more prominance. Limited brainstorming time was definitely a factor. If the perfect idea didn't come to you in time, you have to just roll with what you've got.

Next up in my designing efforts is the feature spread for the VOX article about the large quantity of Subway restaurants in Columbia. I'm currently in the brainstorming process and will prepare my rough ideas for thursday's lab. I'm also looking forward to the Meredith trip. It will be fun to listen to everyone's ideas and then implement them into a prototype.