Newspaper editorial final

Here is the final version of my editorial illustration with the article. I added some texture to the background of the illustration--just some halftone dots because anything more than that was pretty busy and took away from the concept.

Newspaper editorial proof

This is supposed to be printed in grayscale (halftone), which makes designing hard for me. Typically I'd want to do a line drawing if it's supposed to be black and white, but it seems like a lot of editorial pictures have an emphasis and shape (although those, like from the New York Times, are also in color...). Anyway, I'm not super proud of how this one turned out. But, I think it gets the point across.

Editorial spot: Concepts

The news article I decided to do is an article about a "new technology [that] uses brain scans to see what a person is watching." It appeared on ScienceNews.org, titled "The mind's eye revealed." If you're interested in the most recent paper about it by the scientists, it was published in Current Biology.*

The tagline implies something that isn't totally true--the scientists didn't just hook a computer up to a brain and record what the person was watching. They used a fMRI to record brain signals for a few hours while the three participants watched movies. A computer recorded the signals and used them with the videos to create a model for what the participants were seeing. After the program was "trained" the participants were shown a couple more video clips, and this time the computer read the signals and picked from a library of 1-second YouTube video clips something close to what the model determined the participant was watching. The researchers then averaged the model's top 100 choices into a compiled video of blurry shapes that are remarkably (and eerily) similar to what the participants were watching. I've included a video clip from the original article at the end.

Anyway, here are some concept sketches for the editorial spot:

There are a lot of different ideas I have... not quite sure which one I like most so far. Right now I'm favoring the TV connected to the head showing a brain on the screen.


More on the research:

Link to video of what the participants saw and what the computer reconstructed. (You might have to be a member of the journal to see it...let me know if it doesn't work.)

*Citations:
Nishimoto, S, AT Vu, T Naselaris, Y Benjamin, N Yu, and JL Gallant. 2011. Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies. Current Biology 21: 1641-1646.

Newspaper editorial spot: Inspiration

I decided to do a scientific article spot similar to those found in The New York Times. I found some illustrated spots by some artists below.

Here is one by Chris Gash, who has done spots for the NYT since 2004. I like that it is pretty simple but presents object agnosia--the inability to recognize objects--in a very insightful way that is visually appealing.

What's interesting is that Gash also posts his concepts or "honorable mentions" on his sketch blog. Here are some of his other sketches for the object agnosia article:

Here are a couple other examples of recent spots that I thought were visually interesting, by Joyce Hesselberth and Yvetta Fedorova. The illustrations take a interesting twist or point from the article and present it in a way that catches the eye and makes readers interested enough to read the article.

Newspaper editorial spot: Brief

Client: The News Gazette (Central Illinois)

Project: Newspaper editorial spot illustration

Specifications: Create a spot illustration to accompany feature article for The News-Gazette.

Reproduction: The art will be printed in black and white, two column inches wide.

Justification: In college I liked to read The Science Times, a special part of The New York Times that came out every Tuesday. The short articles about new scientific findings frequently had spot illustrations with them. I plan to find a scientific article and design an illustration for it.