'I'm Quite pleased with the result of this, it looks brilliant'.

I was sent this by Chris, art director at Sight and Sound magazine, who'd discovered what looks like several A Level schoolkids having a go at their version of a cover for the mag. Interesting that they're posting their work on a blog, presumably because they work 'at home' such a lot these days (but with class sizes becoming enormous, this is less of a surprise than it should be.) Year 12, let's see...that makes them what we would have called 'Sixth Formers'.

My favourite is Jana's, the hand-drawn type version, but look closely...a font? Or several? I rather like the jaunty angle of the model pretending to be 'unknown director'. I also love Jana's ballsy confidence - 'I'm quite pleased with the result of this, it looks brilliant'. Bless the lad - keep that up, it'll be useful later on in life! I like to think this is influenced by Sigh and Sound's recent experiments with hand-drawn covers (ahem).


Chris on the other hand cheerfully goes for one of the cheesiest fonts known to man, and Charlotte does a nice job of saturating a photo rather creepily and remembers to put 'An' before Historic too - extra points for grammatical correctness!





It all takes me back. But putting homework online, Photoshopping an entire creative solution and presumably receiving feedback from the teacher via wires and screens seems a little sad and lacking in something. Let's hope there was fierce classroom debate over fonts and layouts with print-outs waved sweatily in animated palms. Interesting though - give it a few years and they might well be cover stars themselves - though perhaps as directors rather than designers!