Nintendo Power/A-Z Mythological Creatures

[The Mask of Norro]

Alright, so here's a bit of a run-down on what I had to do for these, before I show them:

One of my original projects for my QuarkXPress class was to do a two-page magazine spread. The article could be hinted to go on for many more pages, but we only needed to do two. Originally, when I did this project, I still sucked hard at Quark and as such it came out horrible. So at the end of my quarter, as a makeup assignment, I re-designed the two page spread and turned it in.

The coolest part about that? It's being submitted to get put up on my school's wall now.

Then with the dictionary project, that was my final project. We had to have at least 28 pages and it could be on any topic of our choosing, so I went with mythological creatures A-Z. I had alot of help with this from Lorina, actually... I wanted illustrations for my book, so I bought two books on mythological creatures and scanned in the drawings they had of some of them, but Lorina actually illustrated a good portion of the book (Elves, Fairies, Griffins, Jormungandr, Nymphs, Qilin, Vampires, Werewolves, Xiuhcoatl and Zombies).

The hardest part about designing this, as well as the two-page spread? I had to design them for print, which meant all my images HAD to be 300 dpi, CMYK .TIFs. In print, you never use .JPG or RGB... at least, not if you want good results. So there I was during the course of these projects with 20+ images on my harddrive that were 300 dpi and CMYK... the file size was *massive*.

The dictionary in particular took a good few weeks to finish. Lorina wound up illustrating all of the images she did in the timespan of three days (while having to work on her own projects at the same time), so obviously by the time she was getting towards the end of the ones she was doing, she was suffering from artistic burnout (she *hated* her drawing of the werewolf... I liked it but yeah, like I said, at that point she was really getting tired). At one point she needed to take a break, so our friend Rony took to drawing one of the creatures (Loch Ness Monster) for her.

Oh, and I'd like to apologize for the size of the images. To output the jobs for print off of QuarkXPress, I had to convert it to an Adobe PDF... and the file size for that is way too massive to upload to the internet without proper server space. So I had to view it on my computer and take screenshots of the images to put them together. The text isn't all that legible because of that.

The print jobs came out fantastic though: everything is legible and clean. Keep that in mind before you say anything about not being able to read the type

Bah, I'm rambling at this point. Anyway, here's the results of my projects from college

(click for a larger image)

Dictionary:

Front Cover

Special Thanks & Table of Contents

A & B

C & D

E & F

G & H

I & J

K & L

M & N

O & P

Q & R

S & T

U & V

W & X

Y & Z

Credits

Back Cover

So yeah, that's about it. Comments are of course appreciated

If I can, I'll try to snap a few pictures of the printed results. I printed two copies of both (the dictionary's being kept by my teacher as an example for future classes, hells yeah!) so I coud probably take some pictures of the results to show you guys the size of them and whatnot. The dictionary's pretty much like a flipbook, but the magazine spread is pretty much the same size as a standard magazine page spread. I had it professionally mounted though, it looks damn nice. I had it printed at FedEx Kinkos... they really do great work if you can get the right people to do your project

Edited April 6, 2007 by The Mask of Norro

[Docpepper]

Wonderful work as always. Loving the magazine layout and the Dictionary is great as well. Top Notch stuff. With stuff like this in your portfolio you shouldn't have any trouble getting a job

[The Mask of Norro]

That's what I'm most excited about; my portfolio. I've got a good couple of designs made that I'll be putting in my portfolio already, and I still have 8 more classes to go before I take my portfolio class... so by then, I'm going to have plenty of material. That's why passing this class with an A and having these projects turn out as great as they dd was so important to me.