Intro
Our third brief, and last of the module, is called Article. We had to design the page layout for a two page A4 magazine spread, and a web page of the same article for a fictional magazine called The Short Attention Reader. We were prompted to, and given a tutorial in using Indesign to create our final pieces. As this is a program I have never used before I found this very challenging, but by the end of the semester I found that the difficulty made me enjoy this project even more, as I think this has been one of my favourite briefs.
Development
We were given a choice for five different articles to use as the basis for our page layout, I chose the article titled Let’s start designing a future that gives us a future on design and environmental sustainability. My initial idea was to try incorporate some of the content of the article into the page layout. After a few sketches I made a quick mock-up article spread.
When I was finished with this mock-up I decided I wanted to take it in a different direction. I was looking more at the context of the article (climate change and the environment) rather than the tone (warning). I chose to base the layout and colour scheme on the warning, dangerous tone of the article itself, and instead of using a column layout, use a combination of columns and rows to create a modular layout.
In the second sketch you can see the idea of creating an entire page of a single graphic, possibly a deer (it ended up being a deer). I recently started using Photoshop, so I used an image with a creative commons license (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer) which I heavily edited using the threshold tool, alongside editing hue and saturation etc.
For the background of the spread I chose a “warning” yellow colour. I used hatching over the image of the deer, as this acted as a leading line from the top left of the A4 double spread to the body of text on the second page, and reinforced the associations with danger or warning signs due to the use of the yellow and black colour scheme.
The modular layout allowed a large variety of interesting graphic design techniques to be used, I really enjoyed experimenting with alternative layouts and ways of placing drop text and captions.
After the A4 pages, I had to convert the article layout so that it would fit an Ipad’s screen. The alternative style I chose would not have transferred very well to an iPad format, so I decided to keep the visual language and colour scheme but create a new layout from scratch. We were told to imagine as if the page was to scroll downwards, as it was in portrait orientation, and we didn’t have to include any navigation or drop-down menus.
Both designs are aesthetically pleasing, and suit the style of the article as well as being eye-catching. Sources such as warning signs and other similar articles influenced the colour scheme and graphic style. I used the sans-serif font source code pro because of it’s semi-futuristic style, and legibility.
Final pages
