Critique: Lonnie Barker Cover

Happy ALMOST Friday! Geez. This week flew by with all the designing I had to do.


So let me recap for you all the craziness that has been my past week. For my magazine design capstone class, it was my turn to compete designing the three different covers for the February 16th issue. The cover featured Lonnie Barker, a gospel rapper.

I planned way in advance for this project because I wanted to make sure that I had the right focus this time and to take risks. I can proudly say that I'm pretty sure I achieved that with these covers. They are definitely not complete yet, but I think I got to a good start.

Here's what I came up with:

"Rapper of Reason"

For this cover, I tried to personalize the story by featuring his albums. At the same time, I wanted the cover to be ambiguous to who exactly Lonnie Barker is with the exclusion of his picture and the headline "Rapper of Reason." That way, the reader is enticed to pick up the magazine and figure out who exactly this man is.

This is probably my favorite of the covers. I thought that not a lot of designers would think to feature the albums and music is a key element to the story. It still has a lot of work to do, such as throwing on a catchy deck, spicing up the headline and playing with the color palette.

"Hopeful Hip Hop"

I really did like this cover, but from the responses today... I'm assuming others didn't.
At first, I wanted to manipulate the image by leaving just Lonnie in color and the rest in black and white to make him stick out from behind the crossed bars. I didn't like how that turned out because the photo was already pretty dull in color. Then, I tried to go for neon to resemble grafitti and the hip hop culture that includes bright colors in wardrobe. 

I played a lot with the color palette until everything was spaced well. I also created a grungy border in photoshop to further emphasize on Lonnie. The grungy border was made to dull the bright colors to show the roughness and struggles of Lonnie.

Overall, still love this cover... probably more on the computer than how it came out printed.

"Hip-Hop Music with Meaning"

I made this cover into an illustration. Not going to lie it could've used a lot more work. I wanted the text, "Hip Hop Music," on a classical music sheet to show the contradictory of how Lonnie raps about the gospel, as opposed to the obscenities of other rappers. The cover could have been executed better if I took more time on the concept and showed more contradiction other than just the headline. Originally, I wanted to put words that described him in the placement of lyrics, but it just looked like the song was written in fragments. I'm still going to play around with it when I have time because I know I could make it look so much better than how it does now.


Anyways...  I also designed the front page of Sports for the Columbia Missourian's Thursday issue (Feb. 2). Pretty proud of that because I had more leeway to be creative. Not to mention that the design and stories are based around DGB and the national signing day. I'll try to upload that design, as well as my other newspaper designs on here once I can get them scanned. Either way, check it out and tell me what you think!