Before starting the creation of my magazine, I had to research into the existing formats of magazine designs to take away some ideas and concepts to create my own idea. The Genre that I decided I wanted to follow was Rock/ Pop Punk, so my main focus revolved around Mojo and Kerrang, with a rather cluttered style to represent the style of music present.
The style that is exceptionally popular when it comes to this genre, more so in Kerrang is to have a rather large logo at the top, with a rendered image of a music artist that is made to cover some, and sometimes all, of the magazine name. It is very common for the layers to overlap, with other layers being on top of the magazine title other than the rendered image, to give a sense of depth. There is often a headline, which more often than not is the name of the artist, with a subtitle following afterwards that usually related to the story in which the artist is in.
Kerrang is particularly fond of red headers and footers, as seen in the example magazine I have shown; white text on red is very clear and easy to see in terms of contrast, so Kerrang like to use this style in order to make certain that the user can see what is included within the issue. The background is kept rather simple so that attention is not drawn away from the main image on the page; this technique is one that a lot of other magazines tend to take after too
When designing my final magazine, I waned to take some of the best ideas from the magazines I researched into, and add some of my own ideas to create a new product. My front cover conveyed the red header, whilst varying with the black footer; I thought that giving this contrast of Red above and Black below would allow for a much more graphically pleasing look, and am happy with the final result. Some variations of the Kerrang front cover use rotated objects to add into the cover image giving it a 'messy' type of style which is something that I used for my front cover; text is very common for this style, as used for my cover for the header and the sub header. My contents is rather similar to that of Kerrang with positioning, I followed the concept of using a black box header with yellow text on the inside, one of the strongest contrasts of colours to help keep a very bold and easily seen style of header. My Front Cover follows the 'F' Pattern.
A style that I decided to input was to add subtitles into the titles underneath each header; I used this to give more details into some of the page titles and make the page seem more filled than it would without them. For the subtitles I used a dark grey in order to make sure that the reader knows what they are meant to focus on first and what they are supposed to focus on next. When it came to the 'Album Reviews' and 'Interviews' I used a simple list in a font 4px bigger than the rest of the font, without any subtitles so that it stuck out amongst the rest of the page. There were other sections of the contents that I mixed together elements of Subtitled titles and Non-Subtitled titles to give a sense of contrast.
I wanted my contents to appear as if there was a lot going on, which there was. My contents is just about filled with information and references to what is within the magazine, with little space. I tried to keep a rather thick gap on the left of my page in comparison to the right, because of how the page would appear in a real magazine. This contents has been made to appear as if it is going to be on the right page as apposed to the left, with the space acting as a way to help not cut out any information with the page folds. The space also allowed for more contrast as it made the page generally look a lot more professional.
My double page spread was a hybrid of an interview and a story on the artist I chose. I rendered out the person in the picture I used for my page and changed the background to be a gradient of a Light Grey, and a slightly Darker Grey; the way this was done is very apparent, and easy to notice with the white text being placed upon a darker background and the black text placed onto a light background. I used a mix of white text and red text for the header because I felt this worked as a nice contrast, and kept the body of the text black, as this is a very common style used within Kerrang and Mojo. I tried to keep the background light while keeping the body of the text darker to create a nice contrast; my original idea was to have a black background with red and white text but I found this to be too difficult as I could not render out my models hair to suit the black background (Mainly due to my method of rendering, which including layer masks that I couldn't seem to make comply with the colour black). I kept with the colour Red in my double page spread for my subtitle because when I tried experimenting with the different colours, this matched a lot better than some other variations, that included different shades of black amongst other colours such as yellow.
The image I used on my Double Page Spread was of my model looking a lot more casual than he did during the photos that were contained amongst the rest of the pages. I felt that this connoted a much more laid back atmosphere and allowed the reader to look at the page and feel as if he was the kind of guy that would be respectable to talk to, which is what I wanted to achieve. He is still sporting his suit, although this time he is not wearing the outer coat causing his arms to appear white from the lack of black covered; this shows well in the final piece as it allowed me to display skills of rendering with similar colours as the background is a similar shade to the parts I had to render. White is a much harder colour to render out of an image, as the intensity of the colour can vary extensively, so I had to take a lot of care when cutting out the background of this image, as well as any of the other images that had him with the same style.
No comments:
Post a Comment