Possibilities

Note: this post is a follow-up of a pre­vi­ous post of mine enti­tled, Work­load.

If you didn’t bother, or did not read my pre­vi­ous post, I’ll just give you a recap of what had hap­pened. In brief, I was the Head of Graph­ics of the school mag­a­zine, Semekar. Things hap­pened and I did not get any chance to work on any of the graph­ics in the mag­a­zine. As a result, all the graph­i­cal work was done by our Mr. James with his excel­lent taste in which every­one in the mag­a­zine com­mit­tee agreed. Strug­gling to keep Mr. James from tar­nish­ing my name as the Head of Graph­ics and partly fuelled by my care for the school’s image, I offered to redo the cover designs for his own designs were hideous.

So, as I stated in the pre­vi­ous post, he agreed to con­sider a few more pro­pos­als and so I hap­pily headed home and tried cook up some­thing. This is what I have been look­ing for­ward for quite some time, being involved in design­ing a cover of a mag­a­zine and in this case, my school’s annual mag­a­zine. What I am often look­ing for is that feel­ing of look­ing at your own pub­lished work know­ing that every­one else would be look­ing at it too, if not admir­ing it.

In the same way where I was involved in design­ing a poster for a gui­tar work­shop orga­nized by my uncle’s gui­tar com­pany. A lot of hard work was put into it until it finally went to the print­ers. I would never for­get that day when I walked up to my uncle’s gui­tar shop in KL and saw that very poster I was work­ing on all month, pasted up majes­ti­cally on the glass door in view for the pub­lic. The posters were dis­trib­uted city wide to schools and insti­tu­tions in KL. Imag­ine the amount of peo­ple who saw it and that, means a lot to me.

No, it’s not the credit, it’s not the fame. For I didn’t slap on my name on the poster and sat on my plush leather seat in my office wait­ing for poten­tial cus­tomers the next day. It’s about self-satisfaction. In the case of my school mag­a­zine though, another fac­tor came into play — that is, to improve my school’s image. To cater to those who judge a book by it’s cover, in the lit­eral sense of that expres­sion. I mean, we need to have an attrac­tive cover for a mag­a­zine that shouts out to poten­tial read­ers to pick it up and flip through it’s pages, right? And for such an under­dog school like SMK JA, the more we need to stand out.

Alright, I’m not say­ing that my work would surely appeal to all read­ers. I’m only say­ing all this because I’ve seen and heard com­ments, good ones, about my work.

So, I headed home and started on it. It wasn’t easy. I spent three nights, work­ing till 1am in the morn­ing, glued to the com­puter, fuelled by cook­ies and iced choco­late drinks. And I must say, they turned out pretty good. Con­fi­dent and all, I pre­sented my pro­pos­als first, to my peers. I wanted feed­back from the stu­dents them­selves, for they are the major­ity of the read­ers. For­tu­nately, the feed­back was pos­i­tive, extremely pos­i­tive, I say. Wuahaha!

Then, it was time to present my pro­pos­als to the big boss, Mr. James. And guess what, it was a-huge-failure. He plugged in my handy drive into his buggy com­puter while I remem­bered won­der­ing how many viruses could have been trans­ferred into it that very moment.

Casu­ally, he clicked through all my pro­pos­als with­out a word and reached the end of the stack in less than 2 min­utes before he pro­ceeded to unplug the handy drive. Blurt­ing out, ‘Hm, okay. Try to make some more designs. I’ll make some too, then we’ll see who’s bet­ter’. Frown­ing, I told him that I wouldn’t have any more time to do more — you know, exams. I guess what I said would have been a relief to him when he replied ‘Oh, nev­er­mind then.’ and that was it, three nights of hard work down the sewer, rejected flat-out.

Bum­mer. It was since that very moment I swore to give up every attach­ment to the school mag­a­zine and decided to curse for it’s fail­ure so that Mr. James would go down hard. But seri­ously, I didn’t lay any fin­ger on it at all after that episode and until now I don’t know the sta­tus of the mag­a­zine. SPM’s over and it’s still nowhere in sight. My only guess is that they didn’t make it to print­ing before the term ended. Not supris­ing though, ‘cos every­thing was in a huge mess when I left the committee.

But oh well, it’s their prob­lem now, isn’t it? If you think you can do every­thing by your­self with­out an open mind, by all means, you’re on your own. We’ll see how far can you go with that!

Gee, I really didn’t meant for this post to be this long. I really just wanted to show what our school mag­a­zine would have looked like. Well then, I’ll just get to the point. Since these pro­pos­als wont appear in any mag­a­zine any­time soon, I thought I could just share them here for the masses. So with­out fur­ther ado, the pro­pos­als with it’s vari­a­tions in six ver­sions, proudly pro­duced in Adobe Photoshop:

V1: Sim­plic­ity

This one was based on my sim­plic­ity set of wall­pa­pers I did some time ago. Minimalistic.

V2: Grungy

Inspired by the colours of the Brazil­lian flag. FIFA World Cup, any­one? Did any­one realise though, that our school logo bears that exact same colour scheme? Go fig­ure. The two stripes in the mid­dle sort of cre­ates the effect of being painted on by a roller. And it has a grungy (dirty) effect so those black spots and stuff are entirely intended.

V3: Photo

Noth­ing much, just a photo I took of our school block with a cou­ple of bars and lines and uh, the title of course.

V4: Fan­tasy

Girls would like this. Just for fun though.

V5: Notepad

A draw­ing pad design with photos.

V6: Grids

Tech-styled good­ness. Themed green to match the school’s logo. Proved itself as a promis­ing design among the rest.

Don’t keep up your hopes every­one, peo­ple whom I had shown my pro­pos­als to had pressed me to sub­mit them. But unfor­tu­nately, these designs won’t make it. Mr James and Pn Polin were pretty deter­mined in keep­ing Mr. James’ own design. So look out for it, if this year’s Semekar even comes out.