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

Assignment 4 Part 2

I've done some fiddling since last night

I'm not sure I'm happy with it but I think this is a bit better. What do you think?
Then magazines tend not to ptint articles on white paper so would this be better?

Amongst other things my tutor thinks the question mark graphic could be improved so
I did a bit of fiddling and I think this does look a lot better

 I wondered if a few lines make it easier to understand?

 and I did some experiments

but ultimately I think this is the best version

Whilst researching Type magazine I came across this title sequence for a film. Her Type magazine is good too.
Examples of typography and design magazines are difficult to find here in leafy Hertfordshire but I came across the website of Baseline Magazine

Assignment 4 - Show me

I started this project by messing around with font ideas in my sketchbook

 Starting with the idea of typewriter font

 and then just trying random ideas wherever they took me

 I'm thinking that the font at the bottom of the above page is the one I'll run with but more of that later.

These websites gave me some good information for my article

https://ooomf.com/blog/the-science-behind-fonts-and-how-they-make-you-feel/
http://www.wiseinkblog.com/design/8-fonts-to-never-ever-ever-use-in-your-book/
http://ilovetypography.com/2008/03/27/extreme-type-terminology-part-2/

The brief is a bit random. I have no problem with linking what makes a typeface interesting and how it is constructed but how to include question marks in a way that flows within the article? I decided to use them as an example and maybe put them in a box of their own.

My research didn't come up with much specifically about question marks although I like the idea that they developed from the latin quaestio which was abbreviated to qo and then;

I decided to focus on the differences in question marks in different typefaces as an example of how text can vary and found a selection of different styles

I tried layering them to show the differences better

Fun but not very clear or informative

"The question mark can also be quite difficult to make, because it requires you to balance an open curve over the dot below". This website  has a lot of detail about creating new designs, the quote (and some of the only information I could find about question mark design) was about halfway down.
I went back to my sketchbook

Which lead me to;

I'm worried that my font won't work large size on a magazine cover

I tried to make it bigger then fiddled with it on the computer

It needs a background. I though about printing blocks but I don't have any and it seems to be cheating to steal someone else's so I cut lots of letters out of the paper

 I used the negative feature to get this

 and tried playing with distortion

Don't like this its too busy so I went back to my sketchbook

 I quite like the idea of doing some simple drawings of printing blocks. There is an artist who does flowing line drawings very successfully but I can't find who they are at the moment or I would credit them. Alternatively I took some photos of my keyboard which is a bit disgusting until I hid it by trying different effects,

 I like this one best

with the font over the top you get

 Or better still

There is plenty of room to add this months features. I would like to do something more interesting with the title but if it is to stand out in a magazine rack it needs to be at the top.

For my font I drew it out on an A3 sheet of paper in pencil at 2 different sizes

 Which I traced over with different sized pens

 and laid out the headline for my article

Which I have put in a greeny blue 

This is the article

I think my layout isn't great but I'm struggling to get Publisher to not put hyphens in words in odd places so this was my best compromise.