#viscomincontext1

After a lot of minor edits and improvements made to my process book, I was finally ready to print it. With the help of Jordy, things went smoothly and I even learned about a thing or two.

Some test prints I made first

Since my last version was really colourless, I decided to assign a colour to each project and put a banner atop each page since I'm keeping it as empty space anyway. I also thought it was a neat addition, since the sections will be really clear in the book itself - it'll be visible from the edges of the paper.

However, as I went through my sections, the colour banner started feeling more and more like a constraint. For example:

I got really conflicted with this page since I wanted to make the images for the final app really big. If I wanted them to take up the whole page, do I shrink the colour banner? Do I remove it? Or do I just fit the images below the banner? I sat on that issue for a while and eventually decided to be rid of the banner. Instead, I kept colour borders on each section title page. It'll still mark the section on the sides of the book, so I didn't mind too much.

Now as I was working on the process book, I did them section by section, starting with There's an App for That. By the time I was at the final section, Place of Words, I realised my grid use changed a lot.

This was because some time ago, I visited the library and looked at a couple books:

Throughout the process of filling my sections in, I frequently looked back on these references. I would start out by copying their layouts/the parts of the layouts I liked best, then adapted them to my own content. Eventually, I ended up with my own Franken version.

Here's an example of how the changes happened. My first section was really cluttered, while my last was more structured and neat:

In the yellow (app), my text and images were all over the place. In the red (place of words), I kept larger images up top, smaller ones on the bottom. I thought the Place of Words organisation was much neater, so I went over the entire document again and made changes:

While definitely this process book of mine isn't ideal since I left it to the last minute, I got a lot of learning experience with grid usage in it.

For the cover, I just took one of the pieces I was really proud of. I really liked my magazine design so I took one of my illustrations from there:

FINAL PRESENTATION

On Tuesday this week, we showed our final prints for the magazine and received feedback. This is what i showed:

The colours came out beautifully and I was very happy with the results. Here's the feedback I received:

The colours and illustrations were met with good reactions, especially the cover and the first spread, which I was especially proud of.

For the things I could improve: the cover and the final pink spread. For the cover, it came off as more of a poster rather than a magazine cover. To improve it, I made these changes:

Before (left) and after (right)

First, I removed the grain/noise effect I put on Relay. I first added it to match the texture of the illustration but that made it more poster-like. I made it crisp and matched its colour to the yellow circle on the background. Then, I lowered everything a bit to make space at the top for additional text. I also removed the white border since all of my text was in the image anyway.

It was cool to see how those small details made it look much more like a magazine and I'm happy with the final result!

For this spread, I was told that it looked a bit different from the rest since it's all pink. I thought about adding complementary colour accents but here's why I didn't:

Unlike the other spreads, this one only carried one idea. The first spread is supposed to cover the general idea that fashion styles can vastly change how you identify or are identified by others - a juxtaposition I helped clarify using complimentary colours.

On the next spread, it covered two ideas in the article - cultural contexts and group identities, therefore I assigned a monochromatic colour scheme to each of them. I made them complimentary as well so they would look nice next to each other. The pull quotes were the exception from the monochrome so the pages of the spread would interact better.

I've finished up on the illustrations for the last two spreads after a quick inspiration search over in Stack magazines' catalogue.

There was this magazine called Bum which caught my eye:

I was able to relate this magazine to mine since it's highly illustrative; it had a watercolour/ink style that stuck with a limited colour palette. I really liked how each of the spreads were cohesive - tied together by the same colours as their illustrations - and I thought I could apply the same to my spreads. Not only did the colour matching make the whole page look like it was part of the art, but it also brought attention to the pull quotes.

So, I changed the colours of my article's text according to the illustration on the page it was on, which brought it all together.

On the third spread directly above, the passage talks about how high fashion trickles into society as fast fashion, giving the example of Valentino's Hot Pink collection and Zara following suit.

To illustrate it, I first drew one of the models from the Valentino runway show, then later cut it into the clothes and put those into the UI of Zara's online shop; which I hope effectively delivers the idea of the text.

COVER

Now to finish off the cover.

From my last attempts, I really liked the long 'RELAY' going from top to bottom, but I left it at a clipping mask and didn't like how the illustration got covered up. So I tried a lot of variations:

I liked the layering interaction this had but it didn't make much sense; but putting the text fully behind the illustration made it impossible to read.

I tried another font, but wasn't a fan of the shapes-I felt it didn't go with the illustration.

Now with this one, I fixed up the legibility of the masthead by shortening half of Relay and placing it up front. I liked where this was going but was unhappy with the colour, so I played with a few. A lot actually but I forgot to take pictures of them.

Then I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere with the duotone so I brought in a third colour:

And from there it clicked. Triadic, similar to one of the trials I did earlier on (left), I applied the same colour to my new type arrangement (right):

I made a bit more progress on the first spread today. I finished the felt tip drawing:

I then rendered out the drawing digitally to add more depth as well as tweak some details.

So the idea I had was to have a split visual of the model - have two opposing fashion styles. This was to mirror the idea of how different fashion styles can change how you're identified socially.

Although you can kind of tell from the shape, it's not obvious since it's all the same colour. I added a bit of piercings and tattoos to highlight the punk-ness of the right side but still it did not stand out too much.

So I tried splitting the image:

I liked the effect of the blending mode that I did on the right. The change in colour did well to split the image so I developed this further. I also tried out the image as a spread and felt like it could still be improved.

I found the blending mode that let me change the hue of the selected layer and was able to have a green-pink split. Honestly, colour picking for this magazine has just been drawing with felt tips as I pleased, then working with its complement later in the digital stage. I feel like it's worked well thus far.

I was really happy with the colour split so I rendered the model even more. By this point, I was starting to feel discontent with the plain colour background so I added some halftones for texture.

I tried putting the text on top of the halftone but it became a pain to read. I also tried putting a white background on the text itself but it wasn't a style I liked so I got rid of it immediately. So ultimately I just pushed the image back by two columns to leave plain white for the text.

Now I found the main title to be in an awkward place, and the white area on the right strangely empty; so I moved the title to the right:

And I think this is what I'll be keeping. I might tweak the text colours a bit more later, but overall I enjoy the spotlight on the model but still having the clean text.

Now moving on, I took the same halftone background idea to the other spreads:

For these, I kept them monochromatic since I wanted the split colour at the first spread to mirror the article's overarching theme.

Looking at the colours side by side, I think they go together nicely? Since they're all based off of the same set of felt tip pens, the colours were already cohesive to begin with in terms of saturation.

I didn't want to choose an overall colour scheme since I followed the themes of each spread, which I think works better for the article. At least I'm sure they're not clashing.

I haven't touched my process book in a while, so I finally started putting things in. I'm starting with There's an App for That.

Previously, I had settled on a layout that I liked and verified through printing, but it was all placeholder text with no actual images. So surely enough, after adding things in I started noticing it wasn't that nice at all. This is the old version:

And this is the overhaul I'm currently working on. I ended up changing fonts. I wanted to keep the decorative main heading, but thought the serif body text I had going on was clashing with the heading. I changed it to a sans serif font as well as increased its size and found it looking much better.

Moved things around a bit more and eventually got to this:

I continued working on my front cover again today. I experimented with using the text as a clipping mask and letting the illustration shine through. I quite like the effect but I think the illustration gets covered up too much. I'll try intertwining them next time.

Then I went back to my second spread, the one that feels really empty. I thought the illustrations were a bit random in comparison to the context of the text around it, so I decided to reiterate the illustrations into something more appropriate.

For the left page, I took the red bangles mentioned in the article. On the right, I drew Adidas shoes with the thought of 'sportswear' being a group identity. It's not exactly what's mentioned in the text but I think it's still relevant. Still, I'm happy with the result.

Now I also illustrated an image for the front cover and imported it into Photoshop for some additional detailing, but I was not happy with how it turned out.

I was trying to go for a half-and-half look on the model, one half being prim and proper whilst the other being punk-alternative. I didn't plan out my sketch very well and that resulted it in looking imbalanced; the proportions were off enough to bother me. I also tried putting it in Indesign:

It wasn't too bad but it could be better. So, I'm working on drawing a different image that will hopefully be better.

So I had my 1:1 tutorial yesterday and raised my concern about feeling stuck. Briony gave some suggestions but to be fully honest I was too stressed to remember. As per her instructions, I printed out my spreads to have a feel for how it looked. I realised the font size was too big - somehow I used 12 pt.

In the process of checking my prints I had a few ideas come to me too. I first drew my models with felt tip pens, then experimented a bit with digital edits on top of those:

Once again, the marker drawing + the photoshopped image didn't line up and it bothered me. So I tried drawing digitally on top of the felt tip illustrations. I also played around with adding type to fill in the emptiness of my page:

I'm liking the digital + analogue illustration layering and I think it's what I'll go with then. But the type I'm not content with and want to change.

Now I also started drawing my cover image since I've been putting that off. I knew since the beginning that I wanted a big image of a model, so I found a reference and drew it with felt tip pens:

Since I want the front cover to be more special, I layered on some coloured pencil on the skin areas to add even more texture and dimension. I then tried out this image in Indesign to play with cover layouts:

I haven't experimented much yet but so far it's interesting. The type I think might not be working as well as I'd hoped, but we'll see.

In the middle of this, I also looked back at my layouts and tried figuring out what was so awkward about it. I think it was the width of my columns. I did a quick skim through magazines at Stack - I looked at the fashion, design, and illustration tags in the store.

Here's two examples that I liked. I noticed that their pages had two columns of text across the entire page width - so I went in and modified mine and I think I'm liking it better now!