Changes suggested:
1. Lighten Grey bars in contents page and spread.
2. Lighten the furthest left of the three gallery images on cover.
3. Lighten image of guy in lower-right-hand corner on contents page.
4. Try using same thin font used on cover headline on the spread headline.
Changes implemented:
1. Indeed the opacity of those grey bars was darker than the one on the cover but now they are all the same.
2. I originally darkened the image because I thought it was too bright. This was a mistake. It looks better now and will look far better in print than it did originally.
3. He may look too bright now but I know he'll look better in print.
4. Originally the words "Stylized" and "Portraits" were the same thicker font, but now I have used a thinner font in the same family for the word "Stylized" and I like it better. It is slightly thinner than the word "Portraits" and takes some of the weight off the giant words.
Sam, some great work here – and I don’t have much to say, but here it is:
ReplyDelete1. Cover – lots of movement and excitement and we see it all surround the face, but not obscure it. Good. Even the bar code in lower right seems to blend into the managed chaos. A very small thing, a detail really, that could be improved might be to replace the middle portrait in lower left with a face “straight on” since you have each face on the end looking “into” that middle one. I’m also not sure the colors in that image works as well as they could - which is another reason to think about replacing it.
2. Contents – all nicely placed. Make sure the page folio in lower right isn’t too close to trim edge.
3. Interior spread – Your challenge here is to find a way to unify this spread more closely with the cover and contents. Both of those are similar in many ways – starting something that really needs to continue. I believe there is one color that is causing most of the problem - the bright blue. That blue seems a bit random – it doesn’t exist anywhere else - not even in the portrait on the right page. The other thing about that bright blue is that, because of its saturated chroma, it tends to make the other, more pale colors, look quite dull.
Consider looking into the portrait that sits on the right page of this spread – and choose a color that exists there which will also blend into the colors that you have used so well on the first 2 pages.
Try sampling multiple colors from that portrait and add them to your InDesign color palette. Then if you “delete” that blue from the Swatches panel by dragging it to the little trash can, you will be asked what color you’d like to replace it with. This is how you can, pretty quickly, change the color of all elements that use that bright blue. Watch what happens, and keep in mind the first 2 pages too. You can then “undo” and replace it with the next color you sampled.
I look forward to seeing what happens next with this project.
I like this piece however have to agree with Coni. The spread stands out on its own and could be more unified with the cover and contents. Perhaps replacing the blue lines with a sample of the green found in the illustration on the right side of the spread will solve this issue. On the flip side this may give you to much green throughout your piece. Maybe try using the grey more? Have you tried making the blue lines tan and the tan boxes grey? Just a thought.
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