Showing only Notes + Links tagged zephyr
This probably won’t be my last post ever about Zephyr, but as of today my run is basically over. I had four amazing years of being handed large sums of cash and cut loose to produce an art & literary magazine. Quite literally a dream come true. So much fun and an amazing learning experience. In the words of Paula Scher, that is some serious play. Next? Moving up and on!
The Zephyr release party today was fabulous, with lots of ridiculous dancing (to the Spice Girls, obviously) and some nice poetry readings by the authors. While it’s not quite as satisfying as holding the printed copy in your own hands, thanks to the magic of the internet you can enjoy Zephyr Art & Literary Magazine 2009 (the fruit of my recent laboring!) in fullscreen by clicking above or by visiting Zephyrmag.com!
If you haven’t contacted me already but want a printed copy, we have some extras so just shoot an email to hello [at] caseyagollan [dot] com.
Last minute Zephyr release flyers I whipped up.
Last minute Zephyr release flyers I whipped up.
Andra made this fabulous pattern for the inside front and back covers. What makes it doubly-wonderful is that the colors are all average colors of the art from inside the magazine!
This is final table of contents for Zephyr 2009. It’s basically my masterpiece in the sense that it took longer to create than any other part of the magazine and was hell to make (it involved actual calculations!).
It’s printed across two pages, but is used vertically, which is hard on a computer screen, so I’ve rotated it in this image.
Writing is listed on the left hand side in the order it appears in the magazine. The color of the bar is the average color of the nearest image, the length of the bar corresponds to the length of the piece of writing.
On the right hand is the art with the individual average colors.
We did it this way because we wanted to redefine what a TOC can be. I think we definitely ended up with something that’s way more useful, interesting, and fun! My favorite part is that it truly ended up being a table of the contents.
I don’t think I’ve slept well or seen the sunshine since we started work on Zephyr, so it was nice to sleep for 12+ hours after dropping the fruit of our labor off the printer yesterday.
Here’s the cover. We didn’t decide on this idea until 9am the day the book had to be at the printer. So the entire day was spent RUNNING back and forth between different rooms pulling everyone that was in the magazine out of class for a few minutes to photograph them with their art or writing projected onto them.
Time of Day vs. Productivity on Zephyr
Maybe I’m just a nerd (or obsessed with Indexed and infographics), but I’m having a pretty good time kicking the tires on OmniGraphSketcher. It’s exciting because there isn’t really intuitive software for charting and graphing yet and this looks like it could fit that role perfectly.
Anyways, this oversimplified* graph illustrates the idea that going to bed early and working during the day is pretty much always a good idea. A good example of overworking and not getting much done is when we stay until 10:30pm to work on Zephyr and realize that for the past two-and-a-half hours we’ve all been staring at our screens, drooling, and not-working**.
The dark blue area represents a typical Zephyr work day (2-10), and the light blue area represents today (8 - 10).
*I would probably shift the entire curve to the left, because I think my peak productive time is mid-morning.
**What is the difference or where is the line between doing nothing and incubating?
Today in Zephyr we got sidetracked (for, like, an hour) and started photographing each other with our art projected onto us. Andra took this wonderfully bizarre photograph of me overlayed with this photograph of Niki.
We came to the conclusion that all artists should be photographed with their art projected on them.
In other news, Zephyr is coming along really well! We should be done tomorrow. All that’s left is the cover (daunting!) and some really boring color averaging that we’re using in the table of contents. In fact, I had to fake sick today to spend all day (8am - 10:30pm, seriously!) locked in our little office at school to finish up, but it looks pretty great. I’ll post some images tomorrow.
Dear Gretchen is a book by LA designer Gretchen Nash featuring personal letters that she has kept inside a luggage case since childhood. Now here is the best part… She made sweet paper infographics charting the frequency of different words and topics found in her letters.
Aside from being wonderful in it’s own right, this is of great interest to me right now because I’ve been thinking a lot about visualizing words graphically for the Zephyr table of contents…
(via bauldoff)
I felt old when I noticed that her childhood lexicon included “LOL.” (via Young and Brilliant)
…and then we had a dance party.
Here’s another idea (not really a spread yet) that is fun. I have a low tolerance for strange text wraps and overlays, which usually make everything worse, but this one was like a rare alignment of the entire universe that I think enhances the poem and the image.
Worked until 10:30pm today on Zephyr, but it turned out to be very fruitful. In the beginning of the design process I get OCD about everything being super consistent and grid like. Today I finally felt bored, and that boredom let me break out of the consistency tunnel-vision mindset enough to start working on making spreads that are ridiculously fun and wonderful.
We made extremely rapid progress yesterday, something like 40 rough pages were layed-out. Today, another 10pm night, we went back over about 20 pages. This is what I call the Principle of Diminishing Zephyr Returns, the closer we get to finishing it, the slower the going gets. The infinity symbol represents the fact that we may never finish. Even though we’re still making good time, we probably won’t meet the deadline we met last year of tomorrow.
Moving on to the InDesign phase of Zephyr, put in another 9 straight hours of work today. Creating the master (a template which all of the pages are based off of) is paradoxically difficult because it’s almost impossible to anticipate all the quirks of the content before you’ve started to lay it out. However, it’s unwise to work too much with the content before making a master, because without some shared base everything will be inconsistent.
We are trying something cool with this issue: basing the text area on the golden mean. I have heard of the idea in a few books, and ended up following directions that I found on Google.
This gives us the nicely proportioned text area that you see above. However, immediately after starting, problems began to appear, such as long poems that didn’t fit well into the squat golden mean box. It’s a bit of a pain, but I added in another master that allows for longer text, and then we got most of the content in before escaping home.
