Up and In: The Baseball Prospectus Podcast logo design
For one of my final classes toward Web design/development certification, I needed to take a basic art/design class. I signed up for the class a couple of times in previous semesters before thinking better of sitting in a classroom for three-hour increments and trying to find my muse next to a motley assortment of fellow students. Solution? Online class!
The course served as a practical instruction to Adobe Illustrator, using projects to highlight different aspects of graphic design. My functional mind (with just a hint of flair or attempted artistry) feared assignments based on abstract concepts. But other than coming up with little graphics that represented concepts like “balance,” the class steered toward real-world applications.
For our final project, we were tasked with coming up with an 8-by-10-inch poster of our choosing. I considered multiple musical interests. (My homage to the “Judy in Disguise” album cover must wait for another day.) But then I considered what could generally be described as podcast album artwork. The real estate on an iPod touch screen begs for a visual accompaniment to all that audio, and I shudder to think how long I spent making sure my thousands of songs in iTunes carried the proper album artwork. The podcast can be considered in much the same way, and even the most basic of designs is preferrable to the emptiness of a screen adorned only by the generic, circular podcast symbol.