When I first had a look at the brief it did look like it was out of my comfort zone! I am familiar with Harry Beck and the Underground design but drawing maps and working out distances to scale slightly overwhelmed me! I also had no idea what I would design or map out! – my first ideas were of our house, the kitchen, my dressing table or dressing room or my route to work – none of them particularly inspired me and I really didn’t want to design a boring kitchen or house plan that looks like it belongs in a B&Q showroom!!
Research
The next step to take was to research into existing information graphics to see what inspiration I could pull from them!
I was particularly interested in the maps I found by Illustrator Heather Gatley. I am fond of using mixed media in my designs and in her designs she draws, she uses watercolour paints and there is really modern, fun, pretty type that runs throughout the maps!
Another designer I remembered who drew maps is Paula Scher. I watched a documentary on Netflix called “Abstract” where she tells the viewers how she paints maps for fun! Again, she uses mixed media in her designs – Gouache paint I think from how they look! Her style is very bright, bold, fun and very detailed!
I also had a look at one of the most famous maps in childhood! – Winnie the Poohs Hundred Acre Woods! This is an iconic map which beautifully illustrates where all the characters houses are in the woods. From looking at these designs I knew I wanted to create an illustrated piece more than creating a more uniformed design like Harry Becks Underground maps. I am quite arty in my approach and the illustrated style would suit my designs more.
I did though have a visit to Beaulieu Estate and I took photographs of some of the information graphic maps around there to take inspiration from.
The examples that I found were very mixed! – Some were in an illustrative style, some were 3D vector art and some were in the style of Harry Beck; very informative and simplistic.
I still preferred the idea of the Illustrative style; I could make my Information Graphics look beautiful whilst being informative at the same time!
Design Ideas
I had the idea to route a walking route around my village. I have only lived in the village I live in for 6 months now but it is the home of my Boyfriend who has been there all his life! I moved from the middle of a busy little town right in the middle of nowhere and I really struggled to navigate through all the fields that looked the same when I first moved there! When I first moved in and whilst it was still Winter me and Chris used to go for afternoon walks around the village for exercise and also so I would become more acquainted with the place! Now it is warm months and everywhere is green and pretty it really is a beautiful place to document! Last weekend I dragged Chris away from his F1 on TV to go for another long walk around the village to take photographs, document mileage and record any of the wildlife/plants etc that I could include on my map to really give a sense of what the walk is like to those who have never walked it.
It is a 5 mile round walk, starting from our house; we document many building on the way round – some are completely irrelevant to everyone else but are significant to us as well as some of the local wildlife like the 3 friendly Alpacas we go to see!
I took many, many photographs documenting everything! –
Once we had done the walk and taken all the photographs, I needed to write the route down and figure out what I needed to include on my map.
Drawing and painting Development
I wanted to do my design in the style of Heather Gatley and knew that I wanted to draw and paint some of the POI of the route and dot them around the outside of the map. I had the Runkeeper app playing in the background of our walk to map the miles and this also gave me the idea for the outline shape of my map, I also looked on Google aerial view to see what colours all the fields were looking down at the route;
I found a map on Google and mapped out the route and all the points I wanted to include on it.
To represent the green on her maps, Heather Gatley uses rough Green brush stokes. I wanted to do a similar thing so water coloured a sketchbook page to scan in and use for the colour of the land in my map.
The next step now was to also draw and paint all the POI from the route. After I had drawn and painted them I imported them into Photoshop and deleted the background from them, saved them as a PNG file with a transparent background so that I could put them over the top of the map without them having a white background!
I drew all these paintings very small from my photographs as I was very aware I was on a very strict time deadline; because of this some of them look very pixelated when they are enlarged. On the final map though I think they look absolutely fine because they are kept small in size.
Digital Development
I started off by roughly placing the drawings on my map to see how they would. The first problem that I encountered was that my green background was very dark and my little drawings blended straight into the darkness of it and could not be seen well at all! I tried a digital green background to see if that would work any better but that just didn’t match the feel of the painted illustrations. After rescanning the background in and lightening it up in Photoshop it worked a lot better.
I then carried on placing all of the paintings in the correct areas on the map, I had to leave out some buildings and POI that I originally wanted to include because it would have just looked too crammed.
The symbols I chose to use were very similar to a normal map. I wanted to make it as clear and simple to understand as much as possible.
The green triangle – represents exactly that! The green triangles in the village where the roads meet
A red location dot – I used these as 1 mile markers around the route
A green location dot – I used this as the starting point of the map
The red line represents a busy main road
The yellow line represents country roads used by card but which are quiet
The green lines represent public footpaths
I used a different coloured dot for each POI location point
I wanted to use a handwritten typeface for the text on the map; I knew it would not be very legible to read but I knew I would be including the key at the bottom so I could get away with using a fancy typeface which would appear on the map as purely just for aesthetics. I also wanted a typeface that looked like handwriting because it matches the appearance of my “hand made painted” design.
The typeface that I chose to use for my design was Mina. I found this on Adobe fonts by searching under the handwritten fonts. It is a modern typeface but on the map it gives an “old” countryside feel. It looks like the old fashioned town maps.
The typeface I used for the key at the bottom was Futura. The key needed to be legible and clear. Futura is a Sans-Serif font that I used in my previous exercise – If the face fits. It is an old typeface but still feels very modern. I just like the rounded, light feel of it. I wanted something soft looking yet legible and Futura suited what I wanted exactly.
Below is the final artwork for my map.
Below is the final finished map with the key included.
The Final Mock up!
I started this brief in a panic about what I was going to produce for it. Even when I started drawing and painting I didn’t think i would be able to pull it off! I thought the paintings would all blend in to each other and it would look too busy. I have ended this brief feeling very pleased with the outcome!
When I first read this brief I knew I would enjoy it because magazine and book design is an area in design that I particularly enjoy. From reading the brief it seemed to be a continuation of the exercise “If the face fits” where it is based around type specimen books and type foundries. I had already researched into type foundries in the previous exercise (If the face fits) so I already had some background knowledge as to what I would be designing. From my understanding of the brief it was asking me to design a typeface to use for the magazine but to also design the magazine in a similar way to which a publication would be released by a type foundry to promote their typefaces.
I knew I wanted my Type Magazine to be one of the high quality Matte or glossy magazines that cost a small fortune in the shops! ;p One of my favourite magazine venues is Magazine Heaven with my nearest being based at Rushden Lakes and inside there they have a whole host of Art and Design magazines which range anywhere from £6-£15.
Magazine Heaven at Rushden Lakes
The next step for me in this assignment was to see what magazines were already on the market and how I could make my magazine look similar to what already exist out there. I also needed to research into type foundry publications and typefaces that I could create for my own publication.
Research
As always I did some intense research for this assignment; some of which I did before I started this assignment as part of the exercise “If the face fits”. I came across a magazine publication for a typeface called FS Benjamin that I really liked and enquired with the type foundry to see if they had any of the print copies left to send me; unfortunately they didn’t but they sent me a link to their blog to their typeface to have a look at the content on there. It was then that I researched into who Fontsmith were as I had no idea really as to what type foundries did. Here is the content they sent me for the typeface:
I really liked the modern, simplistic, catchy and witty way that they advertised their typeface in their print publication. FS Benjamin was designed around the theme of London. It was inspired by the noises, the smells, the atmosphere, the buildings and the people. The name Benjamin FS originates from the real full name of “Big Ben”. It was inspired by the contrast that there is in and around London; the old signs and old buildings juxtaposed against the modern glass architecture that now surrounds the city. I liked the idea that they had designed a typeface around something and thought that I could do similar in my own design. I started to think of things that inspired me lately or what I have a passion for.
As well as producing a print publication in the form of a magazine to promote their typeface they also collaborated with Dixon Baxi a branding company to host an evening to promote the typeface and create a playlist of sounds and music on Vinyl as part of the print publication that match the mood and feel of FS Benjamin and London. I really liked this idea; it is taking the idea further than just selling a typeface as a typeface, they are making it into an atmosphere, a mood and vibes. It is not just selling the typeface it is also selling what the typeface represents, the idea behind the type and the city behind it.
I had a lot of ideas and inspiration to draw from this!
My other research came in the form of researching Pinterest. I always find Pinterest a great way to find inspiration and to be able to organise pins into sections that are easy for me to refer back to or to find. I created a new board for this assignment and then added sub sections to the board and researched into;
A lot of these sub sections shall be explained further into my post.
Now was the time to research into existing Art and Design magazines that already grace the shelves of fancy newsagents.
I wanted my magazine to be very simple and minimalist. I wanted it to look high quality and to be a high end magazine that would feature in a magazine shop such as Magazine Heaven. I wanted to have one main eye catching, attractive image on the cover to draw peoples attention to the magazine. In my head I could imagine it to be produced out of high quality recycled heavy weight gsm paper (ideally with a matte finish!) so these are the sort of magazines that I was researching into. My only thoughts were now how to create a magazine and a look around a typeface that I was to design…
Another one of my favourite magazines of the moment is a Country Living Vintage Home magazine that I bought on a whim (for a really pricey buy of £13!!) I saw it in WHSmiths a few months ago and just really loved the look of the front cover and the Botanical section that was in there and all of the vintage drawings and finds!
For some reason at the moment I really like the Botanical trend. I like the old vintage books, the cartridge paper that some of the old botanical drawings are drawn on, I like the colours and the ink drawn drawings and I like the feminine, old fashioned book typefaces that are used in the vintage plant specimen books. I had to buy this magazine just to draw inspiration from or just to look at every time I feel uninspired! – That is exactly what I did when I started ideas for this assignment. I looked at the book and knew I wanted to create a typeface based around the botanical influence whilst taking inspiration from timeless, old fashioned typefaces that appear on those old plant specimen books.
Another factor which makes the botanical theme perfect to use in my designs and type is that my article in my magazine has to be based on the anatomy of type; anatomy relates to plant anatomy and also human anatomy. I could use the type anatomy as a simile for plant or human anatomy. I did some dark, anatomy style art for my Time Machine book designs and had the idea that I could do similar for this.
I felt like Baskerville or Mrs Eaves was the ideal typeface to match the botanical theme I was aiming for. Even though Mrs Eaves is not a vintage typeface it is based around Baskerville which is. It was also designed for use in book design. I also really love the intricate, ornate ligatures of Mrs Eaves, I wanted to try and recreate that with my own typeface. I have a pretty style of hand lettering so I figured I would use that but add in inspiration from Mrs Eaves and Baskerville.
I started off with drawing some rough sketches of the different parts of a typeface and some different styles that I could explore. I particularly liked the PE ligature that I sketched. This gave me ideas for the rest of the typeface.
I used a specimen sheet of Baskerville from a previous exercise (A typographic jigsaw puzzle) where the typeface was dissected into all its parts to piece back together again. I figured that I could use this as a base to design my own typeface from. It gave me ideas of how to design my typeface, I knew I would have to design it all as completely separate parts (dissected) and then piece the letters together from the parts. Once I designed certain parts of the letters; such as the stem, I realised I could then use them again in other letters, e.g. I could use the stem I designed on all lowercase letters such as b,d,h,l but also use it again on the uppercase characters like D,T,H,F,E etc.. The bowl on the b could also be used on the d.
What happened next was that I spent endless hours with a pack of tracing paper, armed with erasers and a whole pack of HB pencils and I sketched out my upper and lower case alphabet for my typeface. Before I mastered the full alphabet though, I drew out “Type” first as this needed to be perfect as this is the focal point of my whole magazine.
Once I perfected “Type” I then created the rest of the alphabet- lowercase, uppercase, numbers and symbols.
The sheet above are the parts I created that would make up all of the uppercase letters and alphabet.
This is how my letters turned out. It looks very Avante Garde and reminds me of Biba! It also looks like a Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven poster I used to have in my house. Clearly without knowing it I have some 1970s influences!
The sheet above are the parts that make up the lowercase letters and eventual lower case alphabet.
Above is the final lowercase alphabet! I actually quite like the b and d. Again, I am feeling a 1970’s vibe with this!
I needed a name for my typeface and asked my boyfriend Chris for any ideas, he actually came up with the name I used for it – Vine! In his opinion it looks like a vine with all the twists and twirls and to be honest it tied in perfectly with the plant botanical influence I wanted to use. I had also visited Beaulieu Estate whilst doing this assignment and there was a trumpet Vine there that I took a photo of as inspiration and to potentially use in my magazine design.
The trumpet Vine at Beaulieu
Digital Development
The next stage was a painstakingly long one! I had to take my drawings of Vine and draw them in Illustrator and turn it into Vector lettering to eventually import into a programme I bought called Fontself which turns your vector lettering into an actual font! How exciting!!
Eventually I drew out all the parts of the letters and pieced them together to form my letters. I then imported them into Photoshop to measure them out on a baseline and to an X-height and Cap height etc..
I mentioned earlier that I bought and used Fontself to create my typeface. I downloaded it from their website and then it is opened up in Photoshop where you can drag your letters into the programme directly from Photoshop to create your font!
When the typeface has been made by Fontself it can then be downloaded as an actual font!
The only downside to my font is that it actually looks like the gimmicky, tacky font called Jokerman! I did watch a YouTube video on how to use Fontself though by Chris Do and he did seem to design a version of Comic Sans so it could always be worse! Also, because I did not spend as much time as I would have liked creating the typeface the sizes all came out wrong from my hand drawn baseline. That is why letters such as the J sit way too high. It takes years and years to perfect a typeface though so I am pretty pleased with the one I have created and also it has given me an idea of how type is created! Even if I have done it in an amateur way, I have gone through the correct process of designing a typeface. I did read about optical illusions after I had created this though and wished I had created the X differently. Where a thin line is obstructed by thicker lines they seem to continue on a different path; i.e the X. To balance this illusion the thin diagonal strokes must be placed at different angles parallel to each other. The greater the contrast, the more this illusion happens. It can also be visible in Q, W and ampersands. I would definitely have another go at designing a typeface however, maybe when I have more time though and deadlines are not looming!
My next step was to figure out how to turn my title into a beautiful magazine cover!
I already mentioned how I had the idea to use a drawing as the main image for my magazine cover; similar to what I achieved with my HG Wells titles that I did earlier in the course. I had the idea to create an anatomical design which links to the anatomy of type but is also similar to plant and human anatomy. Whatever design I chose to do would also have to relate back to Vine also.
This is the design I came up with; very similar to the art I did for one of my HG Wells covers, in fact I used the drawing of the heart I used for that in this. The heart relates back to the human anatomy and the vine that is wrapped around the heart and the type represents the fact that it is also living in the same way. I also googled vine flowers and it came back with Red flowers which matched the colour scheme I was going after.
The heart I used in my HG Wells covers
Once I had drawn it up, it really did look like a good piece of vector art!
As much as I love Black and White line drawings, with vector art it just doesn’t look as good. I had the idea to do Duotones on this but none of the colour schemes I came out with really worked. I decided in the end to colour it in. Once I had it coloured it in, it gave me once again Avant Garde vibes.. like the sort of illustration you would have found on a 1920s postcard or in an illustrated Victorian style flower book. Either way, I liked it!
Now was the time to start designing the magazine cover!
Designing the magazine cover
I wanted a cover with lots of negative space, to look minimalistic and to be instantly eye catching and bold to look at and these were the final contenders for my front covers. I really struggled to choose between the middle one I went with and the bottom one with the parts of the letters in the background. Everyone I asked chose the bottom design, but in the end I thought the simple plain background worked better and didn’t take the attention away from the main image. It felt like the bottom one was trying to hard to compete against itself. I did ask one of my colleagues at work (she is a Textiles teacher) and she said when she saw it, it reminded her of one of the matte expensive magazines you buy from fancy exhibitions and museums! BOOM! I met my own expectations! ;p
I created the illustration in Illustrator and then exported it as a PNG with a transparent background so that I could import it into InDesign and change the colour background to whatever I wanted. I worked to a 4 column grid. The typefaces I used along the bottom of the magazine were Helvetica, Meta condensed Bold and Meta condensed book italic. They all work well together and bring contrast to the layout.
Designing the introductory pages
On pages 2-3 I really wanted to give an introduction on what I was going to write about rather than going straight into the article. The brief specified that I must mention the anatomy of type and write about what I have learned from how type is designed. I decided to put a twist on it and write about how I made my own typeface; I had the idea to do “The anatomy of Vine” an article telling the reader the process involved with making Vine. I would put a spin on it and make out the magazine was interviewing the designer (which would be me). To do this though it meant that I needed to keep a similar layout and theme to the front cover. I would also need to showcase my font- Vine. This particular article would be more like a type foundries publication that they would produce when they were promoting one of their typefaces (just like FS Benjamin). With this idea in mind I then created the next phase of my magazine design and drew an illustration to represent Vine.
My printer ran out of ink! (above!)
I then did exactly the same as before and turned my art into vector art. I did not need to draw around the text though as that is now an installed, useable font! ;D
I really toyed once again with which version to go with. I really liked the contrast in colour against the bottom grey and the top left bright green and really did think that the green would have been a better option to choose because of this, but then I decided to keep the pages in repetition with the front cover and went with the grey.
I wanted my illustration to fill the whole right hand page and then have an intro on the left. The introduction is basically a blurb which says that Type Magazine is interviewing the designer of Vine and is exploring the anatomy of type. I wanted to keep negative space and not have the pages crammed full of information. I wanted to keep the clarity and cleanliness. I decided to use an enlarged V (In Vine typeface) for the left hand side and then sticking to the same 4 column grid I placed my introductory text in the 4 columns along the bottom. I made sure that the text was aligned to the baseline grid so that the text aligned along the bottom. The green boxes along the edge are just to bring some contrast ad colour into the design.
Designing the Anatomy of Type (Vine) article
I am not going to lie.. I pretty much winged this part of the assignment! I started from scratch in InDesign with no prior sketches, just an idea in my head and then kept on developing it from there!
These are all the versions of it that I tried out before I reached my final version (bottom right)
I wanted to have that illustrative element in it again to match the rest of the article so I took pieces off the illustrations I had drawn already to create a new illustration. I wanted it to also look like the Vine was alive as much as the typography so had parts of the letters growing off the vine and a heart growing from one of the branches; again, this ties in with the anatomy part.
I originally wanted the text to flow through the piece as if it were a vine; winding up the page, but with the amount of text this was impossible. The only way was to stick to a 4 column grid again and have the text flow throughout it. I used green at certain points in the design for contrast and that “pop” of colour. I used a pull quote in a green box to separate the text up and I used some photographs of where I designed the typeface.
Designing “What makes a typeface interesting?” article
I also designed this article slightly differently.. I also winged this and developed it as I went along! One thing I knew though was that I did not want to use the heading “What makes a typeface interesting?” I googled exactly what does make a typeface interesting and it came up with 5 points:
Contrast
Originality
Legibility
What is the purpose
It’s more than a font
These points made perfect sense to me and I easily wrote up an article stating what was important about all of these facts and how they helped to make great type!
I did however read a good quote – “View your typeface as a living being, a natural entity” oohh it felt deep! I loved it! It tied in again with how I was trying to liken type to human and plant anatomy. I searched Pinterest for “Type anatomy” and there were images of type being torn apart to reveal bones and muscles. I loved this idea! I drew my own version of it on a letter A. I would use this as the main image for that article!
I drew the first version in Black and White and scanned it in and then went back to the original and added colour just so I had two versions I could choose from. Eventually I decided that the colour one was the best and I imported it into Photoshop to tweak and adjust the levels and colours etc.
I am actually quite pleased with how this double page spread turned out. I did worry for it at the beginning because I just could not get the sizing of the “A” right or get the heading to look right. In the end it worked out better when I broke the heading up into different point sizes and lowered the opacity on parts of the type. I used the quote that I found as a main heading; I felt like that would draw attention more and add more curiosity to the article than directly saying what the article is about. I kept the same 4 column grid layout but decided to place the text slightly differently; I placed the text in an upwards direction to resemble evolution. To add more depth and for that element of contrast I also used different point sizes and changed the opacity for the headings as they moved upwards.
The typefaces that I used for this layout were;
Abril Titling for the main heading
Futura light for the main body text
Futura light Italic for the sub heading along the bottom
Designing “Question marks” article
This is the section of the brief that really confused me. I was actually wondering whether it was a trick question and the answer was so simple that It was staring me in the face! However, I had a snoop at fellow students work and it seems that none of them were any the wiser! The only answer that I could think of was that the brief was asking for a history of the question mark… I mean, who did come up with that for a symbol? a squiggly weird shape! – this is where I got the idea for my final page!..
I searched on Google and found the above link, that explained to me that the question mark was possibly invented at the time of the Egyptians and the design of the question mark based on a cats curly tail! Well!.. I have heard things that make less sense! -With this in mind I thought about drawing an illustration of an Egyptian cat to use on my design and make its tail in the shape of a question mark. It also made me think of the quote “Curiosity killed the cat” – this is also where a person is curious for answers!!
This is the drawing I ended up with! In his/her paws is a ball which makes up the lower point of the question mark on his tail! Again, I went into Illustrator and drew him/her in vector!
It was then time to work on the final page. I decided to make the final page a single page because I really did not think I would have that much information on the question mark to fill a whole double page spread.. plus also I am aware that the brief states “short” article and mine currently are like essays! :S (I wanted to get the layouts right though and not cram the information all on a double page spread!)
The typefaces I used for this page were:
Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk – the main heading
Sutro Light – for the side blurb (which is Egyptian designed)
Franklin Gothic Light – for the body text
I struggled with hyphenation in the left introduction blurb column.. I struggled to choose a point size that would fill the space but also stop the words from having hyphens. In the end I went along with it because I have seen magazines use hyphens and also because I did not want massive rivers between the text; I am still learning how to adjust the tracking/kerning accordingly. Changing some of the text to Red brought attention to that specific part of the article which is actually quite important to see why this article is as important as it is and also because of contrast again! It adds a pop of colour!
Conclusion
Overall I am pleased with how this assignment has turned out! When I started this typography unit I felt very scared and overwhelmed and now I can say that I have learned so much and I am feeling confident about using typography in my future designs from now on! I particularly love book and magazine design so really enjoyed this brief. I am becoming more familiar using InDesign now, again, I felt a little overwhelmed when I first started. I still need to improve on tracking/kerning etc to make sure that my type looks perfect on my layouts but that will come with further practise! I think I have met what the brief has asked of me, except I have possibly gone about it in a slightly different way.. The only thing I could have improved on was to make the articles “short” but I was too busy experimenting with how to lay everything out whilst still keeping negative space and making it interesting. I had a lot of information to fit on one double page spread!
This brief again for me was a bit out of my comfort zone. I don’t really read books and had no idea what book I would even review! I also do not read book review articles so again needed to google some of these for this brief.
I found most inspiration from The New York Times book reviews. The style of the magazine is very clean, minimal, legible and informative. I would use these publications as inspiration for my article.
The next step was to choose what book I wanted to use for my review or what image I wanted to use on my article. I had the idea to use a generic book photo for my article such as a someone sat reading a book or books laid on the floor but then came across this one on Pexels.com..
“The strength in our scars” I had never heard of this book as to even know whether it was a real publication but I searched on Amazon and it is a real published book. This seemed the perfect book to use as I already had a perfect photograph of it I could download for free and use in my article. The photograph reminds me of Autumn/Winter and it seems like the sort of book you would curl up in the warm and read. It adds a homely feel to the article.
I started off by designing the layout of my article. The article would be a single page and I took inspiration from The New York Times Review. I noticed how The New York Times has a very bold but attractive looking typeface as their logo. It looks like a typeface you would typically see on the front page of a newspaper, I wanted to achieve a similar sort of style. I found Abril Titling on Adobe fonts and knew that this would be an ideal typeface to use for my article heading. The New York Times is very well known for its book reviews and in their reviews they use the same typeface they use for the newspaper title which is I guess to tie and relate the two together. I decided to do the same for my article and used the same typeface for both my newspaper names and also the main heading. I then added a sub heading of “What we are reading, reviewing and rating this month” which allows the reader to know fully what the content on the page is about.
I took the information for the title of the book I was reviewing from Amazon and also stole the stars review from there and then made the rest of the text for the blurb of the book Lorum Ipsum. I have noticed in other magazines that they rarely review one title and that I would possibly have to include a few more reads on there for the article. I noticed how some magazines highlight their favourite books of the month from the rest and this is what I have tried to do by adding a frame around mine and the title “This month we love”. I used Pink as the colour of the frame and the heading box because this contrasts against the black and makes the whole layout “pop”. It is also a very feminine book which matches the feel of it well.
When I searched for this book on Amazon it came up with related reads and they are what I have used for the other publications on this page. I copied photos of the books from Amazon and then cropped/edited to use on this article.
I used a mix of typefaces on this piece;
Abril Titling – The main heading
Mrs Eaves Roman all small caps – Sub heading – (“What we are reading, reviewing and rating this month”)
Meta Pro Hairline – Introductory paragraph (“It’s self help September…”)
Meta Headline Pro Comp Bold – (“This month we love”)
Meta Pro Condensed Normal – (“The strength in our scars”)
Freight text Pro – The main body text
Mrs Eaves Roman all petite caps – the bottom running headlines
There is great contrast with these typefaces; there is Mrs Eaves which is a serif typeface designed for use in book design – (romantic books) and then Meta which is a Sans-Serif font and a style of it (condensed bold) which is very bold and heavy. I used light hairline typefaces for some of the softer text again to bring contrast in and also because they are very feminine publications.
The final mock up – (because it is a single page spread I used a version of my software article and turned it into an advert just as a filler for the other right hand page).
This is an area I thought I would struggle on! – I love magazines but have absolutely no idea when it comes to anything technical or computer software etc! I borrowed a lot of techy magazines from the library in the school I work in but to be honest none of them inspired me!
However! My boyfriend shouted out to me one night from in the living room that the new Iphone 12 was on a TV advert and it was in purple, TADA! This is what I would do for my article!
The images that I got for the article I found on Google images and just saved as JPEGS and then cut around them and tweaked them up in Photoshop.
I wanted the article to best reflect Apple as much as I could. They have a very distinct, simplistic, minimalistic “clean” style of branding. Obviously, Apple use Helvetica for their typeface in their branding and I looked very closely to see what the tracking was between the letters in their words (I worked it out at -50) to best match how they write “iphone” in their advertisements.
I knew this article needed to look modern, clean, legible, eye catching and bold. The idea I had in my head was a play on words with the use of the colour Purple and the Purple Rain song by Prince. I combined the two of them to form “Purple Reign” (implying that the iPhone rules). I knew that to use one solid block of Purple in the background for my article would be too harsh and that I needed to break up the design a bit. I had the idea of using purple blocks to a) break the colour up on the layout and b) to navigate the eye across the piece. I think it really worked! I am pleased with how this turned out!
I knew that I could not just use Helvetica in this piece; Helvetica is Apple’s brand and this is a completely separate magazine I am supposed to be designing for so I knew I needed to find some more appropriate typefaces that would work with Helvetica but also bring in that element of contrast. I did use Helvetica light for the body text though because it gives the layout a soft, clean, legible feel and it is still contrasting against Helvetica.
When I was designing my “If the type fits” specimen book I found a gimmicky typeface that was used for Pepsi (called Pepsi) I used this for the Key features piece on this article. Although it was designed for Pepsi, it looks very modern and futuristic which matches this article ideally! It also brings in contrast against the soft type that already features in the design.
I used Lorum Ipsum dummy text for the whole right hand side but added text of my own on the left hand page just so the reader knows what the article is about. I found the key features of the iPhone 12 online and then wrote them on this page.
I had a lot of fun with this article! I know the brief was to use 500 words of Lorum Ipsum but I somewhat bent the brief slightly!.. I got a little creative with this article and actually wrote out a fictional storyline!
My first task was to find “Sheila”. In my head I imagined a soap magazine where they feature articles about what is happening to the character in the soap that week and then sometimes they interview the actor themselves to get their view on what their character is up to – I went along with this idea for my layout!
As always, I searched Pexels for a photograph of someone who could vaguely represent a famous soap actress and came across these;
These photographs and the girl in them gave me Lacey Turner vibes from Eastenders so I decided to go with them! The fact that she was “shushing” on one of the photographs suggested to me “the naked truth”! I knew that I would have to definitely use this photograph in the article. They also looked like a casual photoshoot that an actress would go on for a magazine.
I googled photos of Soap magazine articles to see how I could design my layout; just as I designed the other layouts in previous exercises, soap magazines have a very similar layout to “trashy” women’s gossip magazines.
I decided to base my design around this article relating to Casualty. I liked the layout; It uses limited colours, bold typefaces, catchy headlines and everything is aligned to a grid. The image in the middle brings the whole layout together, the image is the focal point and everything else sits flush around it.
I decided to use contrasting colours in my design. The photographs that I found on Pexels and decided to use have a very dominant Blue background; I needed warm colours that would contrast against this. I chose Red and Yellow because they are contrasting but also because they feature prominently in women’s magazines of this sort.
Just like the Casualty article I researched, I used a box on the right of the design as a spoiler for next weeks episodes and used headings at the top and bottom of the page for the information on when the programme is on and further reading material over at the website. I named my fictional programme Westenders.. LOL!
The typefaces I used in this article were:
Univers 65 Bold – For the main heading “Will Sheila tell the truth?”
Univers 65 Bold Oblique – for “naked”.
Meta Headline Pro – for the introductory paragraph “Will Sheila finally expose Max…”
Helvetica – For the body text and the top and bottom running headlines
I have used all Sans-Serif as the article is quite a serious topic and also Sans-Serif are the best for legibility and clean looking layouts. I think all the typefaces work well together; some would disagree having a display font such as Helvetica for body copy but I think it works. I particularly like Meta Bold as it “pops” out against Univers and Helvetica which are quite similar typefaces.. Meta is very bold and condensed which adds that element of contrast.
In the main text for the article I used Helvetica but broke the text up by making part of the interview in Red; again for contrast and to also make the interview easier to read and pull parts from. I used a pull quote inside a yellow box to bring attention to the piece. I made sure that the quote was quite juicy to draw attention and pull people in to want to read the article!
I kept the main body text left justified; this allows the reader to read it more clearly rather than having the text justified and there being more spaces (rivers) between the words therefore making the eyes tired having to jump further between the words.
I also used different point sizes for each of the headings, sub headings and body text; I used 12pt for the body text, 90pt for the main heading and 24pt for the introductory paragraph. The rule is when using different pt sizes to make sure that they are at least 3 pt sizes bigger or smaller than each other to allow for that contrast to show. contrast to the design but also it helps separate elements and make it easier to read. Contrast is not just colour – Contrast is also in typography with line widths, point sizes, different styles, Sans vs Serif, bold/Italic/regular etc…
Although I did write up most of the article when I wasn’t really supposed to.. I did use Lorum Ipsum for the far right hand side box.
Part 2 of this exercise was to design layouts for 4 different commissions! – Overall I found this a very long exercise to complete! I loved designing for the typeface specimen book but by the time it got to part 2 I was finding it tedious!
I completed the commissions – but I don’t love them… I think because I was out of my comfort zone with gimmicky typefaces (and the fact I had to use several of them!) and that there was a lot of text for a very limited space. I struggled with the lack of negative space in my designs.
Version 1
When I read the brief was to make these flyers look like a “club night” I knew it would involve making a lot of the design neon and bright! I firstly started off doing what I always do by looking at Pexels.com for a stock photograph of the happy couple Mandy and Josh. The one I found on there seemed perfect for the occasion.
I then opened Photoshop and started to create the purple background; this was a plain purple filled box with smoke effects which were created using brush effects in Photoshop and then I just enlarged the brush to make the smoke bigger. I also needed to blend the photograph in with the background so I applied a layer mask which allowed me to delete areas of the photograph to blend in with the background.
I went onto Adobe fonts and chose typefaces that would closely match those which would appear on club night posters. The two that I chose were Ayra Double for the main text and Ayra regular for the body copy. The double lettering looks like neon tubing which is ideal for the flyer that I am creating, all that was left to do was to make it look bright like neon. The way I created the neon glow was to add an inner and outer glow to the text and change the levels to however bright I wanted it.
The final mock up
Version 2
For version 2 I went along a similar club theme, I googled images of club posters and a few appeared with neon frames with images inside. Again, I searched Pexels and found an image of a neon frame which would be ideal to put my photograph inside.
The frame is at a slight angle so I replicated this with the type. I used Uniwars for the typeface of this flyer. Uniwars is very modern/techno and it makes me think of DJ decks when I see it.
Version 3
For this version I went onto Pexels again to see if there was another “club” background image that I could use..
I found this one and decided that I could use it in my design. I altered the vibrancy in Photoshop and made it the correct size for my flyer/invite and then started on choosing typefaces and putting the photograph on there again. I changed the opacity of the photograph so that it blended in with the backdrop and then placed a black frame around them.
The typeface I used for this version were Lust Script and Lust text. Although they are the same font, they give two very different looks to the flyer. Lust text is suitable for the information as it is legible and easy to read whereas Lust Script is ideal for the attention grabbing headline of the flyer.
Part 2 of this exercise was to design layouts for 4 different commissions! – Overall I found this a very long exercise to complete! I loved designing for the typeface specimen book but by the time it got to part 2 I was finding it tedious!
I completed the commissions – but I don’t love them… I think because I was out of my comfort zone with gimmicky typefaces (and the fact I had to use several of them!) and that there was a lot of text for a very limited space. I struggled with the lack of negative space in my designs.
Version 1
I work in a secondary school so should be familiar with ways to lure teenagers in but sadly when it comes to activities such as after school clubs, many are rarely interested! The common things our teenagers like nowadays is money, phones, food or Gucci clothing!!! BUT! nonetheless I battled on with the start of this brief! 😀
I believed that if I made it look fun and appealing I might be in with half a chance so once again I sourced out Pexels.com and typed in “bored teenager” a host of images appeared and in particular a range of images of the same lad in various thoughtful (or lack of!) bored poses! These were perfect and once again I could adapt them to what I needed!
I also found one bonus photo of the same lad model but this time looking really amused with himself which I thought would be ideal to show that the after school club is ace!
In our lessons at school we do a project based around Pop Art which is the idea I got for this brief. I had the idea of a marvel style comic book with the images in where he starts off bored but then ends up happy and entertained. I also thought that I could use the typography to look like comic book style – possibly in bubbles, shapes, speech bubbles etc.
I started off by designing the poster in Illustrator; all the brightly coloured vector art I drew using Illustrator and then imported into Photoshop to bring the photographs in. The typeface I used; Chantal (which I used in my typeface specimen book) is very “teenager friendly” it is like a mix of handwriting and graffiti. It is modern looking and to be honest it is fairly legible! I tried to use complimentary colours throughout the design for contrast and overall I think this version works really well!
Version 1 final mock up
Version 2
Version 2 has more typefaces used in it which is what the brief wanted.
The typefaces that I have used are:
Pepsi – (“Feeling got at” sticker)
Mati – (girls, football, LOLS)
Felt tip Roman – Body text
Chauncy Pro – (“Bored” sticker)
Continuo – (“Nowhere to go”)
I feel I could use more typefaces in this design using the words and typefaces as stickers on the cover of the notebook and the doodle typeface to look like scribbles on the notebook cover. I have tried to appeal to the youth of today by using an image (again, courtesy of Pexels) of what could be a teenagers bedroom with an iPhone and earphones and school exercise book. Snapchat is a popular app with teens to snap photographs back and forth to each other and that is exactly what I have tried to do with the image of the bored boy on the phone screen. All photographs that I use are free to download and use from Pexels.com.
I have used modern, bright colours again to try and attract the attention of teens and the typefaces that I have used are all fun, gimmicky, young and teenage friendly! I have used what I believe to be the most legible typeface for the information on the poster and I have set the black type against a bright yellow background to make it stand out.
Although this poster isn’t as visually eye catching as the first one I do think it appeals more to teenagers with the use of the IPhone and earphones photograph. The use of all typefaces work really well, especially using the typefaces as the notebook stickers in the design. I like all the typefaces I have used in this design even though they are fun and gimmicky. They all match the feel I wanted to create with this poster. There is a mix of childish handwriting, bubble fonts, stencil fonts and a “speedy” boyish looking typeface which I quite like.
Version 2 Final mock up
Version 3
This poster is my least favourite. I tried to bring some of the Swiss style to this poster by using Sans-Serif typefaces; Neue Haas Grotesk 95 Black and 55 Roman for the lower information and Uniwars for the top headings. I also used the colour Red which relates to the Swiss style and is also a colour that . I followed the theory of the Swiss typographic style that is the typefaces don’t need to be ornate and fancy to grab someone’s attention; a good Sans-Serif typeface does that itself. With this in mind, I kept the poster really simple with just bold headlines, the one image and the following information in the bottom corner. This version is possibly the least engaging for young people but the bold catch lines might just help to draw them in a bit.
Part 2 of this exercise was to design layouts for 4 different commissions! – Overall I found this a very long exercise to complete! I loved designing for the typeface specimen book but by the time it got to part 2 I was finding it tedious!
I completed the commissions – but I don’t love them… I think because I was out of my comfort zone with gimmicky typefaces (and the fact I had to use several of them!) and that there was a lot of text for a very limited space. I struggled with the lack of negative space in my designs.
Version 1:
The final mock up! I really struggled to find a free A6 mock up for my advertisement; I had to buy this one for £6 off Creativemarket.com! The mock up magazine looks like a local magazine though which meets the brief.
I started off by finding a photograph of flowers off Pexel.com. I figured I could alter this photograph and change the colours etc to fit my designs. For my first version of this advert I kept the colours and the image exactly the same apart from I enlarged the photograph to make it fill most of the space.
The typefaces I used for my first version were:
Didot LT Pro Bold
Didot LT Pro Light
I used Didot Bold for “Flourish to our church” because it is very feminine, soft, classy and ornate. It perfectly matches the floral theme of the advert. I added in elements of contrast by using bold against Italic, Thick and thin weights and a mix of serif and sans-serif typefaces. For this particular style of advert Serif typefaces are the best (even as headings).
I tried to keep a hierarchy to this design by making the most important information stand out first because this is what needs to draw the viewer in first and then the secondary information (least important information) comes after. The main heading needs to draw the target audience in first and then if the reader is interested in learning more they will then continue reading the secondary information.
Version 2
Version 2 – Final Mock up
This version is very similar to version 1. I have kept the same typeface for the main heading and the same typefaces for the rest of the design. The only typefaces that really suit the style of this commission are Serif because of the feminine, soft and ornate style. I chose to make the background Pink on this one, again, because the style and theme of advert is very feminine and soft and I wanted a colour to best match that. The photograph I kept at its original size this time and centered it in the middle of the advert. I added some pink blocks behind the text and lowered the opacity just so it was more legible against the backdrop and the flowers.
Below is a version I tried out using different typefaces and by changing the colour of the text to try and add some contrast. The typefaces I used were Didot Bold and Al Fresco Bold. It looked nice but for the purpose of the advert which is to try and get people to respond to it, it just is not very legible, clear or easy to read.
Version 3
Version 3 – Final mockup
This version of the advert is probably the most eye catching and appealing with its neon pop of Pink and bright contrasting colours. I have used Didot for the “Flourish to our church” again and Clarendon for the rest of the information. Didot is hands down the best tyewhich work the best for this kind of publication. I used the same photograph but cut around it in Photoshop so that I could add the pink in the background. I also kept the text white so that it stands out against the bright pink.
pinkangeleno.com 