Exercise Magazine Pages - Part 2 "A Sign of the Times"

"Select a title" the instructions say..... too much choice!
I thought of;
Time of your life
Making it
Make it now
Keeping the dream alive
Hard to get
Once upon a time/life
and many more
but I've settled with "A Sign of the Times"

 

Some ideas for layouts. My thoughts were that the story could be about clocks, house sales, fashion, technology or pub signs

This is a lot harder to do than it looks and I have a new found respect for the people who do it for real. I started with hand drawn illustration because I was worried about copyright and I didn't think I had suitable quality photos on my phone. The layouts with drawings look amateurish to me so I went back through my photos and I think the photo designs look a lot better. I like a full page photo but that causes problems with text colour.

I think this is my best effort, the clock is interesting but not distracting and the text is easy to read on it. Not having too much text on the page gives a feeling of space and is welcoming - not too much to read if it turns out to be a dull article! It wouldn't be attractive to all readers and it would be important to identify the target audience before starting on the design. The clock would appeal to the middle aged middle class - not a very adventurous design.

My tutor suggested a tighter crop on the clock face.

I think this is what he had in mind

and as ever he is probably right

Exercise Magazine pages - Part 1

I chose to analyse the Veterinary Nursing Journal partly because of the simplicity of it's layout. A lot of the magazines I looked at were distractingly busy which made it difficult to see the underlying grid and visually unattractive.

The magazine is A4 and uses FF DIN Bold for headers and titles and Minion for the body text. The main colours are green and blue but orange and purple are also used and pale orange and lilac are used in some text boxes.

The Magazine feels "clean" because there is a generous use of white space and minimal advertising which tends to be laid out as whole page spreads.

 In my mockup I have used Segoe Semibold and Times New Roman to replicate the typefaces in the originals. Publisher can't cope with anything right on the margins so I've moved the top bar down a little so that it can be read. (My cats acted as models....)

 

I tried some alternative layouts still using the original grid as a reference point. I like more white space  but this may make the reader feel that the magazine has nothing to say which may not be a good message for a scientific journal...

I'm not really happy with the colours either, orange always looks cheap to me and green is traditionally associated with the veterinary industry.

 Green and dark purple is easy to read but I prefer the lighter green with a blue (below) I think this looks fresh, clean and modern