The Daily Tar Heel front page on Jan. 29, 2013 included an illustration of bar taps accompanying a story about trends in alcohol consumption in relation to the UNC basketball team. Design & graphics staffers Anna Kim and Jessica Karsner illustrated the taps. Below, Karsner talks about the process behind the design.
As a brand new staffer at the DTH, I didn’t really know what to expect on my first day. I signed up for the Sunday shift not realizing the upcoming weekend was a busy one for the DTH.
Kevin Uhrmacher, the design & graphics editor, gave me page 5 as my first task. Easy enough.
I finished up the page and asked Kevin if there was anything else I could do. With it being super busy and all, he asked me to help Anna Kim, another staffer, with an illustration of beer taps that would be running later in the week.
Not really knowing what he was talking about, I blindly agreed. Anything to help! He sent me over to talk to Anna, who showed me a Diversions cover (the DTH’s Thursday local music section) from last semester that we were trying to emulate.
The concept was that each tap represented a school that the UNC basketball team had lost to this season, so Anna and I each took 3 taps and assigned them to schools. I worked on N.C. State, UVa. and Florida State, while Anna worked on Butler, Indiana and Texas.
The last thing I did that night was add the school logos. Before we left, Anna and I agreed that we would use her spigots on all of them to create a uniform look – hers looked so awesome, and I could tell she spent a lot of time on them.
I expected Anna would be the one to finish up the illustration the next day because I was new to the staff. But she wasn’t able to come in the next night, so I was happy to work on them.
When I got back to the DTH, Kevin was working on the UNC tap. He handed the project over to me and I started adding shadows and highlights and playing with glows and opacity to make the tabs look more realistic.
It’s not until this second day of work that someone mentioned this illustration would be on the front page. I realize now that I never thought to ask where the illustration was going, but I assumed they wouldn’t give me anything big. I mean, it was literally my first day.
So with that piece of news, I felt a bit more pressure to make it even better. I continually went back to Kevin asking what I could do to make it better. Is this color too dark? Does this need to be shorter? Is this the right Carolina blue or does it look purple?
Everything started coming down to the details. 11:00 p.m. rolls around, and I finally handed it over to Kevin for the final touches.
The next morning, I grabbed the first paper I could find, and there was the image I had been staring at for 7 hours with my name under it. I couldn’t stop looking at it. I had to show everyone I knew. Obviously, I sent a pic to mom. Tweeted about it. I’m pretty sure it’s on Instagram. What can I say? I was excited.
Check out the article that accompanied that graphic here.
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