Outlet Final: Results

Got three hours of sleep last night. More than some people got, but less than others. I think it's just about the ideal amount of rest- long enough to keep you from being tired during the day, but not so long that you're not super loopy from lack of sleep, so you're like on a creative high. Some of my best ideas come to me in that half-wakeful early morning state, and this is a thin version of that but spread out all day.

I spent more than $50 this morning between printing stuff out for the Outlet and also nabbing that sandwich combo at Jimmy John's (right cater cornered to AlphaGraphics*) for breakfast (Lulu Club. It blew my mind.) All pages, printed out and mounted on foam core board, can rack up the costs pretty quickly.** I spent more than $20 for the donuts and sundry for my cover concept, before that, as long as we're counting how much this project has cost me other than man hours and blood sweat and tears.

So, print and mount on foam core board. Bring to class. Hang up on the walls. Everyone gets one sticky note per piece needing design solution, to vote once per piece. The design at the end that gets the most votes makes it into the final magazine, and so there's a team who has to decide in which order the winning designs are placed, and everything. There are factors to consider in doing this: some pieces need to be arranged recto and verso, the spread a certain way, for instance. There were a lot of black and white/monochromatic pieces that wound up winning this year, so the team there had to decide how to arrange those throughout the more colorful pieces, is another particular challenge.

How did my designs, on which I've spent so much thought and effort, fare? Well... I was right. It was anywhere from 0-4 of my pieces that were chosen for publication. I thought I had a shot at getting at least one in there, but, the thing is, objectively, I'm just super terrible at graphic design. Kind of an issue, when the gauntlet is to be good at graphic design. No matter, though. Because this isn't the way the story ends. It wasn't just the individual designs that needed to be chosen; there were also the group designs...

The way the teamwork works, in case you weren't aware, is this: each team comes up with a concept for the design of the table of contents spread and the introduction page and everything, then each member of that team comes up with their own designs for that concept- and at the end, the best of each of those is chosen, and a little spit polish is maybe applied to tie the disparate designs together into something more cohesive. Or, if you're the team I'm on, you don't do any of those things. In our team, TENKS (I'm the "E" in that,) we all just did our own thing and then chose the best of those near the end and presented that as our final concept. Not that we did that deliberately or anything- just, the concept we chose at the beginning was just basically pretty terrible, and so we all just kind of abandoned that individually, each of us behind everyone else's back in a way that made it at least seem deliberate. Was at least my interpretation of events.

Assigned to do something creative for another class, I brainstormed for an hour and a half and came up with a Little Red Riding Hood theme. Little Red is an idea, and the wolf/art student has to dress up as an outlet/grandmother. In the end, the idea gets eaten/plugged in, turning the lightbulb on.

intro and contents page

art gallery cover

sample page in art gallery

contributor bios spread

faculty credits

 In the end we didn't go with that one either, but I still showcase it here because there's a valuable lesson here which I'll never learn because forget that noise: if your design needs explaining, it's not a good design.

I mentioned that the story wasn't over yet- and indeed it's still not over. So here's the rest of it: TENKS won both the cover and the interior design concepts, or in other words more accurately, Natalie of our team won those things. Which means, plus side, extra credit for each of us and not just her. Minus side, the source of the extra credit is the fact that, while everyone else can relax now that they've submitted their files and were either selected or not, TENKS's work has only just begun, in that we've got to compile all of that and arrange the artwork gallery with the final selected artworks and come up with extra pages for that and extra pages for the inside covers and... there's just a lot to do. And with 5 people in our group, with the group size of the rest of the teams being 4, guess who actually got assigned zero things to do?

Yep, yep, same guy who didn't win any of the design votes either.

Which means now I've got time to watch things again. I spent this evening finishing the Chopped Teen Tournament grand finale, and watching the "Pusher" episodes of X-Files which I've been meaning to do ever since learning of my synesthesia (cerulean 2 is a gentle breeze...) Not Zootopia, and it's certainly not because of time crunches wanting to spend time this evening blogging instead of watching movies or anything else; these three ~45-minute-each episodes add up to ~2 hours 10 minutes, which means that I didn't actually save any time over Zootopia's 1 hour 48 minutes. Zootopia, I usually watch it when I do with a notebook in hand, or at least within proximity, or in theaters sometimes just taking mental notes to jot down later-- and it's snowing and cold and I didn't want to jog out into that for a notebook, back to the apartment from the lounge, when there were other things I also wanted to watch.

But maybe that's just an excuse as well. Zootopia- "So far away, and such a big city," but really it's been so long since watching it it feels weird just to jump back into it arbitrarily; I'm not sure if I'm putting it off or ritualizing it or just biding my time or what. First world problems. There are a few other of my favorite films in the shape of a man*** that I've been meaning to get to as well (Lion King, Fantastic Mr Fox, Fursonas) and also gotta finally catch The Little Prince, but I doubt this will turn into any kind of marathon-- though, heck, that wouldn't be bad either.





*No word though on whether they cater to the cater-cornered printers.
**One of my designs, a nonfiction piece about T.S. Eliot, was 7 pages long.
***I've got major qualms about that word "anthropomorphic," (seriously Lion King is up there) but "furry" just makes it sound like it's coming from within that fandom so that's not the word I'd use either (Fursonas is quasi-liminal in that regard.) And it's not like I enjoy these movies so much just because I am one of those either (furry) (half-barring Fursonas again) but because they're great movies any way you slice them, so maybe it's not that ritualistic? But yeah it's totally that. Equus was the son of Fleckwus was the son of Neckwus...