You Can't Miss This: Landscape illustration and Department page inspiration

A. This week on my blog, Chris Spooner posted a tutorial about something pretty relevant to our class. I've seen a lot of awesome landscape illustrations on various cover designs and that is what he talks about. Also, he incorporates the use of texture which we just got through looking at in lab last week. The landscape illustration tutorial is nice because it uses a variety of really basic shapes and a simple color palette. Sometimes less is more, right?

The texture really ads to the layout of shapes. I sometimes underestimate the power of texture. It really does add depth to your design. For those designers into illustration design, I would take a look. This illustration style is a lot like some i've seen in many popular illustrations.

Here is an example of the landscape illustration before and after the texture effect.

B. I was browsing through some design portfolios and came across a really nice one. It was Michael Moran's portfolio. I was specifically intrigued by his use of department page designs. I am designing the department pages for Debut so any inspiration or concept ideas are really helpful. He broke his site up into types of pages he designed. His department pages were clean and navigable. I think department pages need to be enticing yet consistent with their design since they are used repeatedly throughout issues. Here are some good examples of how Moran used large and bright illustrations to compliment his body text.

I also think consistent elements are successful in department page design. The color coding blocks at the top are not only eye catching but also helpful for finding pages.