VOLUME: Vol. 1
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VOLUME: Vol. 1 〰️
Pump up the Volume.
A brand new magazine with no shape, no form, no plan, no look, no feel, no nothing. But slowly, and then very very quickly, nothing became something.
You don’t get a lot of chances like this in your design career. A printed art magazine? Full creative freedom? The most gracious, excited and trusting client of all time? Is this a dream?
Vaporwave-inspired design for VOLUME: Vol. 1 (with soft-touch covers!)
This project came together in the way many things come together when you don’t know what you’re doing. Chaotically and then… kinda perfectly? From working with vendors and clients on the size, shape and paper types, to treating every content piece design as an individual work of art, to adding so many little extras no one asked for, no stone was left unturned (to the horror of those looking at my timesheets).
I got scrappy here and did an art photoshoot in my kitchen by using a loose opal as a camera lens on my phone and using it to photograph other loose gemstones on the floor, to add a bit of sparkle to a piece about The Sheldon Gala. I guess now’s the time to mention I collect loose gemstones. Don’t rob me. You’ll never find them anyway.
A team of a dozen or so designers worked on the visuals in this magazine, and I tried my best to cultivate an experience that felt creatively freeing and fun for everyone. Since we don’t get many chances to really show off what we can do without a lot of rules, here it was. Wanna do a photo shoot? Go for it! Wanna illustrate? Give it a shot. Go with what you feel and don’t overthink it. A lot of “yes, and” without a lot of fear created a piece that may have to some, felt like a giant pile of unrelated content pieces. A cacophony of differing styles. Scary! But I always knew it would magically come together. I knew patterns and themes would reveal themselves if we just went with it, and trusted the team enough to give their best. And it worked!
Various types of content and many styles of design all mesh together with a few tweaks to color and typography along the way, but embracing that each piece has it’s own style. I liken this process to making a quilt from scraps. But like, really nice scraps. Not ones you throw away. This is why I don’t use this metaphor.
A “Coming Soon” teaser I edited together from in-progress work in the middle of the team’s design progress. This was created both to get the client excited for what was to come and to quell the fears of my nervous coworkers.
It started with a name, and a concept. I came up with the name VOLUME: Vol. 1 to help the magazine speak directly to music and sound. But it’s more than that. The Sheldon also makes volumes of space on their gallery walls for artists. VOLUME fills up space, but it can also leave it wide open. Whether it’s loud or taking a resting beat, VOLUME is a container to speak about all the art that takes place inside and outside the walls of this storied space on 3648 Washington Avenue.
From there, and in a very in-the-moment-fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants sorta way, I crafted an overall wireframe structure of the magazine as content was being created. The “plan” revealed itself through the process. I ended up separating our existing content into 7 sections, giving them all thematic titles and and title pages. One of the sections is specifically a “quiet” place in the piece – with 2 entire spreads that feature visuals only with no “content” at all. In a way, this organizational structure for the magazine has the features of a live show or a great album. An intro, a warm up, a crowd favorite, an intermission, a screaming guitar solo, a fade-out, and an encore.
The Table of Contents and section divider pages (below) helped tie the whole piece together visually and thematically, and gave all the various design styles and tonal changes room to be themselves.
Fun fact: all the backgrounds on the section divider pages as well as the Table of Contents are really the pixellated views of a smooth gradient background the way InDesign displayed them in “Fast” (low-resolution) mode. But I thought they looked way cooler than the gradient so I went with it, and made it the actual background. Cool story I know.
Okay, let’s get real. I’m leaving a lot out of this story. It was really really rewarding to make this. But it was also really difficult. Like cussing and screaming to myself while crying difficult. The time to complete a large undertaking like this was very underestimated, and the time it actually took left me in a position to be the person both in an extreme hurry to meet a hard deadline, and simultaneously going way “over” time. What the fuck is time anyway? Shut up. Anyway, imagine your coworkers in a circle around you, looking at their watches, tapping their fingers. Waiting for you to finish something. Except you’re not even close to being done. That was the situation from start to finish in which this sweet little art magazine was born. She may look innocent, but she is a warrior. Born of fire and fury!
I DID meet the deadline by the way. But I truly thought I might get fired over this project, or possibly get someone else fired. Feeling this way made me work even harder to make it amazing. “If I get fired over this, it better be the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Which brings me to it winning awards. Take that, haters!!!
Left: Picking up a GOLD Addy award for VOLUME: Vol. 1. Right: A love note from a magazine-appreciator. Helps make all the hard work and relentlessly choosing excellence over ease worth it.
Beyond feeling victorious for creating uncompromised work under extreme circumstances, my absolute favorite part of this magazine is all the little “secrets” it contains. And yes, it probably took a bit of extra time to add them. And no they didn’t need to be added.
But also, yes they did!
Small type with funny quips, little comics in the margins, a piece at the end Chris Prestemon and I created just because we had a weird extra page after all the ads moved around. Lots of minute details people might miss the first time around when they flip through it in the theatre. But I bet at least for a few people, VOLUME makes its way into their bags at the theater. Then because it’s too pretty to throw away immediately, one morning they thumb through it while drinking coffee. Then they see something they didn’t notice before. Something that makes them smile, or makes them remember all the hundreds of big and small things going on at The Sheldon. Something that reminds them that it really is worth the extra effort to create something special. Even if it’s not “necessary.” The uneccessary is so important.
I find it surprising and inspiring to see anyone bother to do anything creatively they didn’t have to do. So I hope a few people have that feeling when they see this magazine.
Credits
Client
The Sheldon Concert Hall and Art Galleries
Agency
Paradowski Creative
Design
Terri Mitchell
Tyson Foersterling
Natasha Zerjav
Loren Zaitz
Haley Hoffman
Vicki Vincent
Joerdan Carney
Jon Simons
Ashford Stamper
Copy
Amanda Burch
Emily Bihl
Hannah Koberstein
Chris Prestemon
Cody Spotanski
Chris Ward