Time Magazine Article Redesign
It was 2014 and my senior year of art school. The assignment: take a feature article from one magazine and redesign it in the unique style of another. The two magazines chosen at random for me by my professor were Time and Essence, and the article was Time's "Can Anyone Stop Hillary?" by David Von Drehle. I chose a red-white-and-blue color palette in the bold style of Essence, and set to work designing the main graphic—a unique letterform H—to communicate elements of the story.
So, what qualifies this project as Designing for the Future? To my astonishment, a letterform design similar to mine was unveiled by the Hillary Clinton campaign as its new logo in April 2015.
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↑ The two issues chosen at random for my assignment.
↑ Here, a photo of the former First Lady looking to the right reinforces both my letterform design on the facing page and the subject of the article: looking to Clinton's future campaign in 2016. iStock.com photo by Chip Somodevilla.
↑ Curating graphics for the text-heavy Time article presented some challenges, but advertisements were reproduced in whole from Essence. iStock.com photo by Joe Raedle.
↑ A few of the iterations of my design as I worked toward a final solution.
↑ I chose dark blue for the letterform body to signify maturity and trust; the sky blue of the crossbar arrow to signify Hillary Clinton's ideals and aspirations; the red star to symbolize the opposing candidates—Republican 'rising stars'—mentioned in the article; and the arrow's momentum beyond the star to visually represent the author's question "Can Anyone Stop Hillary?"
↑ One of the main criticisms of my final design was that the stems of the H were disproportionately wide. Seeing it side-by-side with the logo designed by Michael Bierut for the 2016 Clinton campaign does make the case: with its stems, crossbar and negative space all the same size, Bierut's design is reinforced by its elemental repetition. A trim of about 30 pixels from each side of my design would have achieved similar uniformity.
On the other hand, the extra width of my design provides more length—and more visual energy—to my arrow, and averts any resemblance to the arrow made famous by FedEx.
