Pack Your E-Readers, Tweens

Business feature page. C4. Lately I feel guilty for avoiding difficult stories :P This is the downside of letting us choosing stories we like. As the result, too simple stories limit my way of imagination. Hmph... what a bad excuse for bad design. Duh, it's all my bad! 

Anyway this time highlights still works well, I guess. Young e-readers. Tweens and teenagers are adding e-readers to their backpacks. There was no such concept on it, basically I just played with colors and composition, and yet still fun! Okay stop reading and watch it now :D

Step by step: Combating Censorship

BBC World Service made a money deal with US Government to combat censorship on TV and internet in countries including China and Iran. Haddas page 8. 

There were two possibilities about focusing the idea, either it's about the money or the media itself. And since it's more like politic, it's good to think more about the 'freedom' of people accessing more information. 

As usual, super decent sketch!

The awkward part of this idea is putting one more zipper on the ear. I tried to put one but it looked awkward, so I solved it by putting headphones and yeah now they guy is wired in :D

I traced on Illustrator then once I was done I transferred to Photoshop for applying texture and everything.

And this is the page (:

What's Your Star Sign?

Let's flash back a little bit with my work last year :) First assignment was requested by Osama, it's like a feature and lifestyle section. He wanted me to make illustrations for 12 zodiacs. The clue for this task is putting some Oman and Arabic elements into the artwork like beach, sea, waves, fort, palm trees, and some Arabic characters.

I wasn't really focusing on my first day at office. You know the kind of feeling when you're still new in a new place. I didn't finish my work on that day and wasn't happy either with the result so far. Thank God it was Wed, so it means the next day was day off. 

When Osama asked how long it would take, I scratched my head 'coz I couldn't estimate how fast I could work. Hmmm... that was embarrassing :'D I did more research and re-worked on the sketch and everything at home on Thu since I had no idea when exactly I could finish it. I successfully finished some of the zodiacs on Thursday (with some pain in my back) then easily finished the rest of them on Friday. 

Aries

Taurus

Gemini

Cancer

Leo

Virgo

Libra

Scorpio

Capricorn

Sagittarius

Aquarius

Pisces

They stop putting zodiac page on Mezaj long time ago, I think it's due to some Islamic beliefs or something similar like that. This below how they look like on the page.

C4 Back on Action!

I forgot the last time I did illustration for C4 (Market Section page 4 on Times Publication). Since it's full page, it takes some time to work on it. However now we have new schedule which allows us to illustrate C4 again. And this time, even better for the illustrators: including designing the whole pages, technically, gasp!


What we used to do in the past is sketching the whole idea for the page and after we're done with the artwork, we just give it to the designer who will do the rest on InDesign. Well, if there's some necessary change, the illustrators can do it easily. But this time I need to do everything by myself :o


I used to work slightly with InDesign before. Long time ago... not even remember when it was. When I opened the program again I didn't even feel dejavu at all. It was like totally I forgot. Actually I designed a C4 page before, and it got featured on http://npd.snd.org/ :D Too bad it didn't win 32nd SND. I gotta admit that the printing was horrible on that day's issue. When I was working on the page, I kept asking Waleed about working on InDesign. Thanks, man!

This got featured >:)

And now here it goes again, C4 back on action with me. We are likely given one story everyday for each of us (either Times designers and illustrators). The story always comes in advance. So I have like one week to learn the story and make the concept for it.  It's so much better when I do it in advance so I can save some time and I can create good illustration :)

First mortgage market story

The latest page I did for C4 this week is about mortgage market. I did couple of illustrations about the same theme before. This time, the story is very tricky to be illustrated! It's about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (combine their names as Frannie, same rhyme with Grannie) causing mortgage market trouble since they undercharge the insurance they provided. To clean up the mess, the have option either to raise the fee for its guarantee or to lower the max.amount of mortgage she could guarantee. The first option takes more time to adjust and the last one is faster but riskier. So what could the idea be?

 

What I thought was like arrows going up and down, but it's too classic. Since I got good sense of humor as always, the page will likely always turn into a funny disaster. I came up with Grannie, rocket and turtle. Anyway there's quite something new here. Collage. I had so much fun doing it. It's like doing copy and paste with aesthetic sense. But this technique only works when you have enough time to play around. Tricky!

Final design ;)

Step by step: Holocaust Google

Lately I did some illustrations for Haddas section of Shabiba. They usually request illustration (or graphic) for first page, page three, six and eight (last page). Page five doesn't require request anymore since it's daily mandatory for me :P

Holocaust Google

I like doing illustration for page eight because usually there are enough space to play around with not so much text (600 up to 1000 words). I'm so picky which illustrations I want to carry for this step by step section. Then I decided to come up with a story I called Holocaust Google. The story is about Google adding more archives (including photos)  into their searching directories about Holocaust history, victims, and survivors, so people can find out more about it. 

The illustration was started as a humble sketch below. Didn't have much time to sketch very well!

Then I started to make the all the outline in vector.  Actually it's not really outline in vector though.

Using masking in Photoshop, I started to put rough texture in the white area. 

 

 

 

 

 

I removed the outline then it's done!

See the illustration on the whole page below :D

SND32: Year of Bear

Last December people in my department were crazy busy preparing papers for 32nd SND Competition. We got tons of pages to select, either they were from Shabiba or Times. It was like never-ending work; from digging and collecting old issues, labeling and assembling the pages, to making explanation for Arabic pages. I remember many of us were so frustrated due to small mistakes we did. There are some tricky parts in the rules, which made us several times labeling our pages. 

And now the wait is over, the result has come! Times won 37 awards, including one silver and overall Judges Special Recognition. Shabiba won 8 awards. We were kinda disappointed that Shabiba won very few because we really hoped that it can be some kind of breakthrough for Arabic newspaper from Oman to win international competition.

I was also disappointed that there wasn't any single illustration that won ): neither from me or Lucille. Our illustrations won on News Design Page category though. Anyway, it's still a very good start and I'm happy for everyone. Hopefully we can prepare much better for the next year. 

The thing that makes me excited is five of my illustrations won Awards of Excellence for News Design Page category. These pages are on Market section on Times page four. We are used to call it C4. And two of them consist bear. Yep. Bear.

Feeling Gloomy by me & Waleed Rabin

This was the first best page I conquered with Waleed. My first inspiration was Boog from animation movie Open Season. But then Waleed said Boog was too cartoony so I made it little bit more serious. The basket was my idea, then Waleed added some 3D shaped currencies in it. Then here it goes, our cute huge bear looks really gloomy. 

Stock Market by me & Greg Fernandez

The second one is another bear. This time it has so much adrenaline in it, the panicky bear is going down on the roller coaster while the bull stays cool waiting to go up slowly. Many agreed that this illustration is very funny. Sometimes I just don't feel anything about my own artwork until a person told me,"Ha ha, this is very funny." I made the idea for this story. I made several sketches until Adonis told me to pick up my own favorite. Well, of course roller coaster was the most fun of all. Greg did the page. I had some time fixing the railways to be adjusted with the text. Adonis added the idea to put the railways above the title. It was quite sometime to finish the whole page, but now we know that work hard pays off, as always (:

I have two pages honored as overall Judges Special Recognition, one of them is the gloomy bear and the other one titled Emerging Financial Centres. It's basically about world-third-countries who have potential to retain global economic in the future, like China, Brazil, and India. I remember I was so lost thinking about the idea for this story. I read the story over and over but nothing came out of my brain. When the panic comes, I started to rattle in my spinning chair, then suddenly my brain forced itself to come up something. Eggs.

Emerging Financial Centres by me & Greg Fernandez

At first, I planned to put the text inside the eggs, but Antonio said that it would 'kill' the centre of the image itself. "Oh well, maybe next time I can make other illustration that can be integrated with the text," that's what I thought that time. Antonio helped me made the egg shape perfect. Then I gave the rest to Greg. And I hope I'm not mistaken, Srinivas also helped out with the page. Thanks anyway for everybody who helped out with this whole pages!