Amie VisCom

Throughout this unit I feel my design decisions were influenced by a number of factors, particularly the illustrations. In order to maintain a style and feel to the magazine, I needed a consistent style of illustrations. This was also reflected in the consistent type handling. I therefore felt that my visual research largely inspired my design decisions, along with the content of the interviews that I was working with.

I found starting the FMP very difficult as I struggled to narrow down what I wanted to focus my project on. Despite having the same issue last year, and making lists of my interests, I felt it took me a while to properly start the project as I spent a lot of time changing my mind and doing unnecessary research. That being said, I eventually went with the overheard conversations concept, which then evolved into storytelling. Due to this delay in finding my topic, I felt I could have managed my time a bit better over the first half of the project, potentially creating more experiments to help speed up the process. Having said that, I felt I managed my time well when I knew what I was doing, ensuring I gathered stories, illustrated them, and created the magazine in time for hand in. 

As I received feedback in the tutorials over the weeks, I felt I responded to feedback well, experimenting with the playfulness of the illustrations and their compositions on the spreads. While staying true to my preferred design elements and decisions, I made tweaks and changes in response to the feedback to improve my spreads, also constantly responding to visual research that inspired me.

Over this unit I have learnt to just go with my gut and try to stop holding back and worrying about things. Design wise, I have learnt more about what should be considered when designing a magazine, considering elements such as the cover, contents, introduction and types of spreads. I found it was also a bit like branding, as I had to think of a name, concept, tone of voice, and consider how the magazine could be continued across many editions. 

Self Promotion: Business Card

Self Promotion: Website Link

Final Magazine (Part 1)

Spread Development: In The Next Issue

For the final spread, I wanted to create a platform to reach out to readers to send in their stories and apply to be interviewed for the next issues of the magazine. I therefore invented the next issue in order to make it more realistic, choosing a travel stories edition. This demonstrates how the magazine would function in real life, indicating at the type of content and how it would work across several editions. To further visualise this, I illustrated a plane and some clouds to show how the illustrated style would continue. 

Visual Research: Frankie Magazine

This magazine is another that had inspired the layouts and development of my magazine. The front cover designs are simple and consistent in design with a bold title and illustration. I love the style and colour palettes used across the magazines, as well as the layout of the spreads and use of colourful headings. 

Spread Development: Shorts Spread

Visual Research: Illustrated Patterns

As it was advised that I could try to create an illustrated pattern for the background of my short stories spread, I did some visual research. I liked the idea of the pattern creating a border around the text - this would also differentiate the spread from the rest of the magazine. 

Cover Development

These images show the development of the front cover design. After changing the name from Reveal to Recount, I also changed the typeface to Aileron, the one used throughout the magazine to maintain the style and played with the text of the ‘Work Stories Edition’ subheading. I struggled with this as I felt it never looked quite right, eventually using a lighter colour and increased leading in uppercase type to reduce harshness. 

Contextual Research: Storytelling Quotes

As I started to consider what to put on the back cover of the magazine, I thought it would be effective to have a simple quote as a nice way to leave readers and encourage them to continue storytelling. As the front cover is consumed by illustration, I wanted to keep the back simple with minimal content. I therefore did some research into quotes I could use, finding this link the most useful. These are the quotes I have selected as options and will choose from the following:

“Inside each of us is a natural-born storyteller, waiting to be released.” - Robin Moore, author

“We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.” - Jimmy Neil Smith, Director of the International Storytelling Center

“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.” – Robert McKee, professor

“There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.” – J.K. Rowling, novelist, screenwriter and film producer

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." - Maya Angelou, poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist

Spread Development: Intro and Contents

Following the feedback from my tutorial and having done some more research into magazine introductory pages and contents pages, I took the advice and broke them into two separate spreads. For the introduction, I used a full bleed image of one of the illustrations featured in the magazine as a preview of what readers can expect. I also named the edition and had the introductory paragraph.

Visual Research: Stanford Business Magazine

Pentagram was a good source of research as it allowed me to source a variety of editorial examples which helped me with layout and structure a lot. These spreads are from Stanford Business Magazine, which I particularly found useful as it featured a lot of illustration. The layout of the full bleed illustrations on one side with text balanced with white space on the opposing side is a layout I had come across a lot throughout research and inspired some of my spreads. 

I also found it useful to look at contents page examples to help find structure. I noticed that the use of columns to list the contents with a balance of preview images is a common approach and organises the information well.

Visual Research: Magazine Covers

These are my favourite examples of magazine covers from the article ‘22 of today's best print magazines for creative inspiration, insight and ideas’ on Creative Boom. I like them for their simplicity and balance of bold text and image. They often have borders or relatively plain backgrounds to reduce busyness. They often have borders around images which is a look I like. I want to try to edit my cover design perhaps by changing the typeface and text to be more bold and work with the imagery more. 

Visual Research: Perdiz Magazine

I found this magazine a useful source of research as the layouts and compositions are so simple and beautiful. The use of slanted headings is interesting and something I have not seen much of before; I think it adds interest and quirkiness to the spreads. Although I have not used any photographs, I love the slightly faded tones of the images and how the white space on the opposite page with light text balances them and work well. Although my magazine is a different style, this has encouraged me to reconsider the design of my titles and headings. 

Visual Research: Breathe Magazine

Breathe Magazine is an all round good example of the type of magazine I am aiming to create. It focuses on health and well being which differs from my focus of story telling, but the illustrated style and compositions are a good representation of what I’m aiming for. I particularly like the design of the covers with minimal text and a large illustration, immediately signalling at the content.

The contents page is nicely structured and features previews of the illustrations on a small scale with the list of contents organised beneath them, which could be an effective way of organising my contents page. The spreads are playful with their compositions of the illustrations, which are sometimes full bleed page images, while others are broken up with text. The illustrations often break free from structures and flow well. 

04/05/20

This tutorial with Rich was the last scheduled tutorial of the unit. I presented what I had changed in my magazine since the last tutorial, including the contents page, cover, shorts spread and the contact information, receiving the following feedback:

Move the introduction away from the contents - have intro first spread, then contents. Limit the different typographic variations and typefaces, add more illustration as previews

Reduce the scale of the illustrations on the shorts spread - look into creating a pattern to surround the text, perhaps have a white border around the text

Play with the position of the zoomed in character - perhaps try a raw illustrated edge instead of a smooth edge to fit with the style