Smoke rebrand

I’m happy to announce that I got the job at Smoke, and I am now officially one half of the creative design team. I am working with a fellow journalism student called Nicky and together we have the monumental task of fully rebranding, designing and creating a 64 page Freshers issue of Westminster’s Smoke Magazine in the next 8 weeks. Hooray was my response to finding out on Friday – but now, quite frankly I am a little worried about the size of this task and juggling full time bar work, boyfriend and social life into the equation… But bring it on!

I’ve decided that I will vaguely log on here what’s happening with the Smoke rebrand and how I find being a Creative Designer. Obviously I won’t post layouts and ideas etc due to my contract, but I am really excited that I’ve been given the opportunity to be doing what I hope to do when i graduate next year.So far I’ve been using a mix of the Paper App for iPad to do rough sketches of layouts and pages, which is so easy to use, and great as you can literally start sketching anywhere you are. I zoned out into my own little world on the tube this morning to create the image below after a meeting with my Creative Director. I then use inDesign to mock them up, and Photoshop to tweak images.

I’m currently doing some research into past editions of Smoke (which started back in 1992) and some of the old magazines are brilliant – the design, content and overall tone of the magazine is great. Here are some of the covers of the old issues ranging from ’99-’13, that I’m planning to incorporate into a layout. I can’t wait until all of the content is with us so we can really make a dent on the majority of the designs.