For our unit 1 we were told that we would be designing our own magazine cover’s and double page spreads with an audience of college students. At first when i heard this i thought that it would be alot easier than i found it was. I didn't think about all of the stages put into designing magazines, such as choosing the font’s, the alignment, fitting things into columns etc...
Looking at other magazines really inspired me and helped to give me an idea on what my finished piece should look like.
Before we started our own magazine and double page spread we made an artist copy of a magazine. The magazine i chose to do an artist copy of was a woman's magazine called ‘Bazaar’ For this task we had to use in-design, an adobe programme that uses columns which helped us to place text and images without it looking out of place. My first step was to take an image similar to the one of Jennifer Aniston in the background, so i took a photo of my friend Hayley standing in a similar position. Although Hayley had dark brown hair i tried my hardest to morph her face and hair into a similar shape as Jennifer’s to make it look as close as possible. I then had to search through ‘Dafont’ to find fonts as similar as the ones used on the cover. Once i had found the font i had to Kern and adjust the size of the letters so that it looked right! I also used the eyedropper tool to select similar colours for the lettering. After doing this artist copy i realised how hard it was to made a magazine cover as i didn't notice how many steps there were into making one.
My original idea for my magazine front cover was to have a spray of a woman as the background instead of your everyday average model background you see on most magazines. I thought that using a different media like this would be a good chance to mess around with new materials and maybe discover a skill of mine. I printed off an image of my friend Amy and used the light box to trace each part of her face onto a separate piece of paper, this consisted of the eyes nose mouth, hair, face and neck. Once i had completed this i used a craft knife to cut all of the elements out so that i had a clear stencil ready to spray. I decided to use black ink instead of colours because firstly the colours that i would have used were not available to use in ink, and secondly, if i did it in black ink i would easily be able to change the colour on photoshop to a more accurate colour. I then cello taped the stencils to a vertically standing piece of cardboard and used a blow pen to spray the ink. At this stage i was pleased with the outcome. It was only once i had scanned the pieces onto photoshop that i noticed i had cut some pieces too big or too small as the bits didn't fit together and looked distorted. Even though this didn't end up how i liked it i did like the sprayed rustic effect it gave so i gave it another go. This time i used an image off the Internet of Lana Del Ray. Instead of cutting all the bits apart this time i instead applied the ‘cutout’ filter to the image on photoshop so that all of the levels were similar and that i would easily be able to cut it out depending on the shade of the selection.
This was very successful and worked extremely well, although i decided not to use it in my final piece because it didn't go very well with the masthead i had made. I decided to call my magazine ‘EGO’ because i thought it had a catchy ring to it and sounded like a magazine teenagers would read. I decided to make the font look as if it was food so decided on a selection of food teenagers eat and it came down to donuts :P I drew the outline in pencil and then went over it with a fine liner, scanning it into photoshop to then fill with colour.
I found it very hard deciding on a colour that would look appropriate. I wanted it to stand out and look bold and interesting, but at the same time i didn't want it to look tacky so i didn't know whether to use bright colours or subtle colours. I tried a variety of colours in the end, some that contrasted such as the green and lilac and some that were next to each other on the colour wheel such as the blue, purple and deep purple. In the end i decided on a completely different colour for it with a plastic wrap effect over it which made it look 3D.
My final magazine was called ‘EGO’ As i have explained i wanted the magazine to sound catchy, therefore i chose this name. I decided on the orange pink and green colour palette because i thought it was very unusual. When i researched teenage magazines on the net alot of them used bright colours and had a hand drawn feel to them so i took this on board when doing my own! for my background i took a photo of my friend Amy and added a layer on top that had a gradient on it, which helped the image to fit in with the colour scheme. I also added the cutout filter to the picture giving it a graphic feel to it, hopefully drawing attention to it as its something quite unusual to see on a magazine. I struggled on the cover lines because i didn't know what fonts to go for. Initially i decided to use very hand drawn looking fonts because i thought it would fit in with my chosen theme that ran through the magazine, but once i had done it, it looked to hand drawn which made it look anything but a magazine, so i had to re-do it. This time choosing more graphical square looking fonts and upping the size so that they would stand out more!
I also added stickers and a bar code to make it seem alot more authentic and professional. I wanted my double page spread to be very different to any other. Because we did the double page spread in indesign i was able to use the columns which helped me to place the text on the left hand page in the correct area’s which made it look neat, practical and tangible. I thought laying my text out as an eyesight chart would be a nice twist to the magazine but i also wanted to make it look slightly rough to fit in with the grunge theme for the pages, therefore i went on to make a stencil for the letters and ended up spraying these with ink instead of something for the front cover. This worked very well and looked very rustic and vintage against the crinkled paper looking background. For the page on the right hand side i found twenty grunge items of clothing and overlapped them on the page like alot of girls magazines do when they talk about clothing etc... I thought this worked well having the text and the images separated because it drew your eyes to either side of the page as they were both different.
Over all i am exceedingly happy with my final as it came out better than i had planned :)
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