VICE Editorial Illustrations
Brief: Pick 3 editorials from VICE’s website and draw/create a static illustration for each article, using consistent design language, and animating one into a seamless loop.
Target Audience: Focused more on youth and young adults who are more in touch and focused on social media.
Articles
These were the 3 editorials I chose to make new illustrations for. They immediately got my mind thinking about possibilities with all 3 illustrations. Also, each had very different topics, which could add to the variety of compositions. subjects in the illustrations.
Style Frame Choice
Moving forward, I picked "The Reason You Hate You Birthday" to make Style Frames and concepts for first.
Direction 1: Spotlight's on You
Fully rendered illustration with smooth blending and shading with an abstracted figure as the subject. In terms of color, everything except the subject would have relatively normally coloring.
Direction 2: Whoop-Dee-Doo
Flat, simply shaded illustration with little to no gradients (which I ended up using more than I should've for this one) and bright, saturated colors.
Direction 3: Eyes Spy
Stroked background assets with line boil for animation if it moves forward, and a grungy and grainy textured and abstracted subject. Unrealistic colors mostly are used.
I liked Direction 1's composition best, but felt like Direction 3 had more potential and successful things compared to the others, so I chose to merge Direction 3's design with Direction 1's composition for this editorial.
Sketches
For "Why Do I Wake Up So Hungry In The Middle of the Night?" sketches, I did a thought based one using floating foods, focusing more on constantly thinking about food when tired.
The middle,"Why Do I Hate The Way I Look in Every Photo?" , I focused on the aspect of hating the photos themselves.
The third is for "The Reason You Hate Your Birthday" and it is supposed to communicate not wanting to be the center of attention, a reason the editorial mentioned that someone may hate their birthday. I had to use the Design direction of "Eyes Spy", so I redid it with less detail in the hair.
First Pass Illustrations
First Pass Illustrations
Combining the design direction of Direction 3 from my Style Frames with Direction 1's composition, I made the figure a bit more like that of Direction 3's so gender was a bit more unknown and making the subject as simple as it could. However, the eyes were ambiguous in terms of distinguishing the pupils and eyebrows. Similarly, the scale of the food in the third illustration was also ambiguous since it wasn't interacting/overlapping with anything.
More Sketches
I knew my compositions and concepts could be a bit better for the 2 that weren't the birthday illustration. For "Why Do I Wake Up So Hungry In The Middle of the Night?" sketches, I wanted to a metaphorical one using a pizza pillow as humor and playing with the idea of sleeping in or with the fridge in another, going with the first because of humor and simplicity.
For "Why Do I Hate the Way I Look in Every Photo", I wanted to communicate the fact that it was over phone(since that's the way most people take pictures nowadays) and have the subject turn away from them in disgust.
Second Pass Illustrations
For the Second Pass, I made the person more of a focus in the Birthday Illustration, shortening the cake to allow for the figure to be larger and filling the balloons with texture to make the illustration feel less empty. Additionally, making the spolight affect color more in the subject.
With the Hating Photos illustration, I knew I needed a better pose and composition, using perspective a bit more instead of a flat on composition like the first pass.
The Waking Up Hungry illustration needed a better idea overall. It wasn't communicating waking up or anything related to the bed, so I played with the idea of using food as parts of the bed, and thus was the pizza pillow!
With all three, the background felt too different to the whole piece, so I brought in some texture to make the whole illustration feel full and related to the subject.
Final Product
3-Up of Products on iPhone
Animation and illustrations in one composition, mocked up on an iPhone to see what it would look like as an actual editorial.
