“Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.”
– Charles Eames
For this project, we went deeper into the area of graphic design and started working on layouts. In particular magazine layouts.
Magazines are interesting because they often have a lot of elements that have to work together and still be aesthetically pleasing, especially in fashion, life and travel magazines.
We started out with finding and analysing articles we liked. This consisted of finding the underlying structure, the number of columns and locating the margins.
For inspiration and reference, I already had a board on Pinterest with layouts that I like, so I used the designs I had on that to analyse on.
Pinterest board: https://pin.it/thakehrbapfd6q
The article I have used in my designs is “Let’s start designing a future that gives us a future” by Nicolas Roope. (https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/10/un-climate-report-united-nations-nicolas-roope-plumen-opinion/)
It’s an article from Deezen about Environmental Sustainability and I started out being inspired by this design
I wanted it to be a factory in between the two pages, and then have the smoke from the chimney cover the top bit of the page
But when I put it on the page I didn’t really like it, so I analysed some more designs.
I did quite a lot of these to get inspiration and to find a pattern in which layouts I liked the most. A big part of what I found hard to start with was finding a good place for pictures. But analysing other designs like this really have a useful insight.
So after this, I felt more ready to go into InDesign again, I chose to work with 6 columns because most of the layouts I had had 3 or 6 underlying columns. I also chose to keep my graphics to only one picture and I wanted that picture to of course say something, but to also be quite easy and pleasing to look at, because again, I found that that is what I was drawn most to in other designs.
In my next designs, I use two different pictures
In the end,I chose the one of the icy mountains, because ice is something we all associate with global warming in this context. And it will in that way give the article more power, even though he doesnt actually mention the ice melting.
So now that I knew that I started playing around with a few designs.
When it comes to the fonts I used in my designs I had drawn inspiration from magazines like these
So a very simplistic type with no serifs or change in weight. The title is bold, the intro is made into an “element” by either giving it another shape (not licked in columns) or by underlining it.
For the body text I wanted something that was easy to read, but that didn’t draw too much attention to the type at first. So I chose Banschrift, because it went well with Zona Pro, that I used for all other text.
I decided to stick with this design
I then did a few variations of it, unfortunately, I lost some of them.
To give the design it’s last finish I made baseline grids to align the text.
iPad design
for the iPad, I wanted to transfer the layout from the magazine to a new format.
I knew I wanted to keep the big picture in the top, and I also decided to have it in “6” columns. In practise 2 small columns and one big in between them.
I then chose to put quotes in the right-hand column and picture information etc on the left-hand column I wanted to keep the title and byline like they are in the magazine to keep the layout as close to the magazine as possible.
I then created a baseline grid and added the top bar of the iPad to give it more of a realistic feel.
And in the end, by two final pieces in PDFs: