CRITIQUE

COVER: Ok, so after seeing the capabilities of the class, I just felt as though my cover design was a bit shoddy ... I was just disappointed with it, I think. Like Jan said, it was kind of hard to see certain elements of the image (basically Liberty's hand just kind of disappears). Also, I'm not sure why I had used the gradient on the background. It was an awful last minute decision, but I think it was a good lesson for me. It kind of goes back to what we talked about in Magazine Design last semester in that it was just decorative and not really useful - an effect for effect's sake. (Confession: It was so hideous and so yellow and I hated it so much that I took it out as I was converting the pdf to a jpeg. Anyway, the gradient is no longer there, but I still felt like I should kind of explain/share.) Also, putting an actual title on my cover probably would have helped ... just a thought.

FEATURE: I spent more time on this than the cover, and, while that's not necessarily a good thing, I hope it shows ... at least a little. My concept for the feature was to use a maze to show the difficulties that both the immigrants and the people such as Eduardo face when it comes to navigating the law. I would assume there are a lot of dead-ends and frustrations. At the same time, I felt as though the image of the maze I ended up with was kind of reminiscent of the layout of Machu Picchu, which is used as an anecdote in the opening of the story. The red and yellow colors I used were pulled from the various images, so I was hoping they could be an element that ties the pages together. I used the Image of Eduardo and Carrie (I think that's who that was) in the opening because I felt like that photo appropriately coincided with the opening of Besa's story. The other one's kind of made Centro Latino seem like a tutoring center, which it may very well be, but I didn't think she had said anything about that in the story ... did she? I went ahead and used them on the second spread though because I felt like the captions would probably explain their siginificance. Ok, and finally, my idea for the sidebar was to continue the maze motif.