Another interesting magazine

This magazine has some good design instruction. Most of the it is geared toward the web--but the color combinations will work in all design.

Smashing Magazine

Graphic Design Basics

Here are a couple of graphic design basics sites:
Photo composition site
Designing with color
Elements of Design

Design blogs/magazines

Ping Magazine
How Magazine
Communication Arts Magazine
Layers Magazine
Print Magazine
News Today
Graphic Design USA
Before and After Magazine

If you think you might want to be a designer, get a student subscription to Communication Arts Magazine ($39 for a year). It is a standard element in my graphic design library, and a source for great ideas.

Idea map steps

1. Write down your topic in bold letters.
2. Start blurting out any related concepts, phrases, and terms you can think of.
3. Use who, what, when, where, and why to help you generate ideas.
4. Don’t judge.
5. Don’t censor.
6. Jot it all down.
7. After you have finished jotting down all your ideas, identify the strongest themes.
8. Look for clusters of ideas.
9. Draw circles or lines to link related words and concepts.
10. On a new sheet of paper, reorganize your key themes into a “map” or “web”.
11. Now, jot down visual ideas that explain or illustrate the different aspects of the key concepts.

Idea mapping samples for downloading here

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Roll over each square and examples of the visual is displayed. This is a good tool to help you brainstorm story elements.
Link

Inspiration

There are many places to go for design inspiration. Here are a few:

• stock sites like iStock, flickr,Colors Magazine
  
• Design sites such as Under Consideration, Design Life Now
• Or interesting visual sites like Visual Complexity

News Map

This is the coolest visual I have seen for online news. Check it out.

News Map

To work, this site needs a flash plug-in. Get the plug-in here:

Download Flash plug-in

Stock photos

I mentioned stock photos in class. Here is an article from Anne Van Wagener at Poynter Institute about Stock photos. Go check out I-stock.


Stock Photos: A Cheap and Royalty-Free Disaster Plan

She agrees with me about iStock:

Istockphoto is my favorite source because there are thousands of images created by people from around the world. There's a lot of cultural and stylistic diversity available and most images are under five dollars. The site is very easy to navigate and search. And, you can earn money by selling your images on the site. But be sure to check your employer's policy. Most images created for a news organization become company property.
$1-$5

Class handout and assignment

Assignment for 1-18-06 (PDF)

Visual options handout (PDF)

[right click on the link and "save link as..." to your computer]

Angela Smith bio

Angela Smith grew up on the banks of Old Hickory Lake, just outside of Nashville, during the 1960s and ‘70s. Her family’s home was surrounded on three sides by cow pastures, which today have been subdivided and crisscrossed with asphalt. That rural environment and connection to the past gave her the foundation for a career that is now expanding to blend history and technology.

After she graduated from Belmont University in 1984 with a degree in English and communications, she spent 20 years working on the cutting edge of a huge graphic design technology shift as a designer and graphic production specialist. Six years ago, she decided to weave her new media and graphic design experience with her passion for historical understanding, using storytelling and documentary filmmaking as primary tools. To learn more about those areas, she is enrolled in the certificate program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She has completed a master’s degree in history at MTSU in May 2007, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in public history.

She’s taking an opportunity to use what she’s learning in hands-on teaching. Among the documentary film projects she has supervised with undergraduate students at Belmont and graduate students at MTSU are Belmont’s beginnings in the 19th century; the transition from Ward-Belmont women’s school to the Baptist-affiliated Belmont College in 1951; the Nashville sit-ins in the early 1960s, the history of RCA’s historic Studio B on Music Row; and historic preservation in the city of Murfreesboro.

She is also collaborating with fellow PhD student, Brian Dempsey, on a documentary about heritage tourism in the Mississippi Delta.

Linda Quigley bio

In the Summarium, a newspaper you’ve never heard of published at a north Alabama elementary school that no longer exists, Linda Quigley, then 11 years old, had her first byline in May 1960. In the next decade or so, she wrote for every student newspaper and local weekly in that little Tennessee River town, earned a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of North Alabama and a master’s in journalism at Penn State University. In her 30 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, she interviewed hundreds of famous people, from President Jimmy Carter to First Lady Tipper Gore to basketball superstar Kareem Abdul Jabar to French cooking guru Julia Child to NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume and a whole lot of writers, painters, musicians, hairdressers, mountain climbers, gardeners, undertakers, soldiers and moms and dads in between. They all had a story to tell.

As a reporter, she says, you tell people’s stories the best you can. Sometimes their story has been told a hundred times before and you have to find something different. Sometimes it’s the only time anyone will ever tell it, the only time a person’s name will ever be in the newspaper until they die. Even in an ever-changing media world, the day when you can publicly dignify one human being by telling their story to an audience of readers is as important as anything else you’ll ever do.

Now she’s in her seventh year on the media studies faculty at Belmont University. She hopes somebody she teaches this year, or next year or the next, will have as much fun as she did chasing those stories.

Visual Journalism post 1

In class Thursday we told you about some Web sites that have good visual journalism information:

Ron Reason
Poynter Institute design section
News Designer