Overview

When you think of a page layout in an article you are almost instantly asleep (at least I am anyway) You don’t think of it being a visual masterpiece but it can be. A designers job is to take this possibly boring article topic and turn it into something readers are immediately interested in reading. How do they do that?

By using layouts effectively you can give an article a theme you didn’t realize it had. A voice screaming back at you to read. This is a skill that all graphic designers need to be successful in the field.

Planning

The objective is to create a professional layout for an article from the given list. Reading all the article titles I immediately chose the article subject title: gaming and design. “Are video games the final frontier of design?” This title grabbed my attention. The brief is to take this article and find out how I can make it better. Reading through it became obvious where the theme was.

The tone of the article is important to the reader. Achieving this tone is the key to getting a professional layout that people want to read. The article talks about a specific game repeatedely that has an apocalyptic theme. A land diserted that you can explore. This targets an emotional response of fear yet excitment and this is what I need to explain with layout and illustration. What would I as a gamer want to see in the article and would I continue reading?

Development

I chose to use column layout because of the formal style of the article. I chose to use a sans serif typeface to make the article clear and reflect on the modern style of writing. I included a pull quote that was bold and italicised to make it stand out from the rest of the body text. The pull quote taken was positioned in such a way that it represents the mountains due to it being high on the page and it being on the top left leads you to the body of text.    

The colour pallete used isn’t bright or cheerful but more dramatic colours to get an emotional response.  Doing the graphics myself allowed me to use a uniform colour pallete across the two-page spread making it look believable. The simple vector graphics allow for an easy read because it doesn’t distract the eye from the body of text.   

Two Page Spread – Ryan Final Final Two Page spread-1larzbf

iPad Layout – Article ipad layout Ryan-10ox3zg

Conclusion

To conclude I originally found the task to be difficult but the more I use InDesign the more confident I became. The process requires “tweaking” throughout. Little by little the layout looked more professional. Researching was the more difficult part of this task with such a large amount of layouts to choose from. Eventually, I dived straight into the development and found a look that I thought suited the theme of the article. I know that my strength is illustrations when using the computer, so bringing them into the article seemed to be the right decision.

Sketchbook available upon request