For all four years of high school, I was a member of the staff of the Voices Literary Arts Magazine. By sophomore year, I was on the editorial staff, which is to say, people who were dedicated enough to put in the long and strange nights and days sifting through entries and putting the final product together. After I left the large and crowded halls of Eastview High School for the smaller and more comfortable passages of the School of Environmental studies at the beginning of my senior year, I still traveled after school to Eastview for Voices.
Taking up the responsibility of making posters for sophomore, junior, and senior year, I made a series of posters that were altered versions of propaganda posters. The first round I put up in sophomore year were largely stolen, which, from what I gathered from listening to a sticky-fingered acquaintance, was because they liked them so, so much.
First is Chinese, middle two are Soviet, and the third is from the US decring Nazi book burning. I was experimenting a lot with fonts back then, ease up. In senior year I took a slightly different route, reflecting our more scientific theme. A higher resolution one of this one does not exist so far as I know.
One of my favorite parts of the entire submission, editing, and publication process was the selection of the theme. In retrospect, it may have been corny and lazy to make every issue explicitly themed, but it sure did make design much easier. In 2002, my freshman year, I was uninvolved in the process and the issue ended up being titled “The Mayfly Diaries” with the issue containing chapters that represented different times of the day. The opening piece in the book was a poem that I wrote about the act of writing that, more or less, was me trying to get away with a thinly veiled sexual metaphor. It worked.
With the next issue, in 2003, we were more indecisive about a specific theme. During the layout phase, I just began to assemble a plaid pattern in Photoshop. I wanted a more sophisticated, but familiar pattern of red, black, brown, and yellow lines culminating in what usually is the standard midwestern couch throw flannel blanket, with a lazy midwestern theme coming forth. It ended up being a tartan theme, held together by a flimsy paragraph in the foreword. I made the above design, and am generally happy about it.
Here we see the second of the two covers I made, and the first of the two themes I proposed that got selected. In my junior year, 2004, my angst gently suggested that the theme be about the eerie sameness and emptiness present in the suburbs that surrounded the school. I opted out of writing the foreword, and it ended up in the hands of a man who is now a College Republican. It was more praising than critical, but heck. I got to draw the cover in colored pencil. It turned out okay, except the copy I got for free gave the cover an unsightly white border (above). I mean, this is the big leagues, District 196 Print Shop. Jeez.
In my senior year, 2005, I made a whiteboard-intensive plea for a sciencey theme based on the powers of ten, with the recurring theme of the constant patterns in the universe from atomic to galactic scale. It got accepted by the staff, and I drew up an extensive series of ideas for the cover, clip art, layout, and vellum pages. Not being satisfied with how I had actually executed the idea, I assigned the actual illustration to a friend, who did an excellent job. I cannot locate a copy of this issue, but its cover was a striking pattern of electron orbits and distant nuclei. Epic.
Then I graduated.
