Goo Goo for GOCA

This was the final assignment for my visual journalism class. The idea was to create a 2 page spread from scratch with entirely our work. I chose Serbia native Gordana Rasic, a molecular biology major at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She also runs her own fashion design company called GOCA designs. She provided me with these great photographs in which i chose my color template for the spread. I took the pink tones used in the drop cap, sidebar and Serbia itself from the color of her lipstick. I chose the pale yellow color for the other countries from the background with the floral designs. I chose to make the pictures very large because they are so colorful and interesting. I mean she's a weird looking girl. I chose the headline, I don't really remember how, but I liked all the g's and o's so I decided to focus on the typography a lot. The sidebar is all about her struggles trying to pursue fashion while her parents rather her focus on her school work. I was pretty satisfied with this spread, not my best work, but I didn't hate it. 

Serbia, land of the raspberry

For this assignment we were to create a map of of country for our final project. We were doing a story on an immigrant to the United States and create an info graphic highlighting their native country. My story was about a girl whose family comes from Serbia, a country in eastern Europe. When I have done projects like this in the past I have used Adobe Illustrator, so it took me a minute to get used to layering on Adobe InDesign. The trick is to trace over a photography of the country we chose. By locking the map and making it more transparent it was easy to trace over it. I then traced each country individually and the Adriatic sea. I then created an embossing effect on Serbia itself to highlight it, not just with a different color.