Research and Development
James Thornes
NEW VISUAL LANGUAGE
MASTHEADS The first thing about mastheads is that it is the first thing that you are going to see when you look at the magazine. Its the part of the magazine that never changes from design to design and issue to issue, this pat stays the same and creates a look that people look for when they look for the magazine. A masthead when you start your magazine should be bold and show off your magazine off to the customer and it should do this among other magazine of the type. It should also be blendable, this is because once the magazine has a viewing of people that by it alot and it can be seen for the design
and not just the masthead then the masthead can be blended with the surrounding design and not stand out as much. As you can see to the right i started off by doing some quick sketches these sketches were the first bit of design that i did and on the magazine and so the sketches had no real set rules and so as you can see my mind was free to do whatever it wanted.
MASTHEADS Once i had finished with my first designs i quickly moved on to doing more designs. These designs were done on Illustrator and were just vector concepts on what i had already created on paper. I did add a couple more designs that i liked and took a few out that didn’t really fit the theme that i decided on. As you can see many of the designs to the right are very random and so i chose which one were the best using a pole and using this pole and by own thoughts i came up with the best three designs which i had come up with.
The designs i think are very bold and work very good within the ideas that i had planned or the rest of the magazine. The pole was created using a method of just asking people what they thought of the mastheads and getting them to write down what they thought of each design, i labelled each of the designs so it would be easy to tell which design they were talking about. I got 8 people to look at my designs, these included many people from other students and tutors. The three design i chose are below.
I then moved on to the cover pages and how these would be finally laid out, i decided to go with a minimal design for the magazine and so i opted with modernism as the main theme, i really like this style and how it has progressed over the whole magazine. I think that the white of the magazine show the future of the magazine as that is what you see from future based films, everything every minimal and white. As i as going for a minimal design i went with a three columned cover page this was a good idea i think as i then split the magazine in to 2/3rds and used it as a photo that would wrap around to the rear of the magazine. I really liked this
idea and what it left was even better. I have always been a fan of big binds to a book or magazine for this reason the 1/3rd that was left over on the magazine i would use as the bind. I added the masthead here along with simple text explain what the magazine was. In the end i decided that adding the issue number would not be needed as the magazine was only going to be a one off thing, but if i was to add one it would be instead of the title which i placed just underneath the masthead. This i think is a good idea as magazines don’t really have title and so this “title� would just show that it is the first of something that could be a lot bigger.
COVER PAGES
CONTENTS
The contents of all thing was the hardest thing for me to create, the reason for this is that because there was very few pages in the magazine there wasn’t a lot of i could do with it, because of this problem i have chosen to go with a big type to show the pages and then have a smaller thinner typeface to say what is on each of the pages, i think that this will be a god way for me to show the contents of the magazines without it been too cluttered and hard to read.
INNER PAGE CONCEPTS
As for the inner pages i needed a lot of type to show what that image were showing to the audience, in the drawings below i have added areas on the opposite page to add the type i think this is a good idea as when you first open the page you are joined by a large image covering the whole page and then you have to look over the page to see what the image is and what it shows. It also give you a reason to look over the age to see if there is anything else it wants to tell you, this then gives you more images to look at and read about. I really like this method of getting people to look through the magazine and i think that it is very effective.
As you can see i have added lines across the whole page where images are not, the reason i have done this is because i think were the title and type are needs a separation and so with this it does it. It also allows a line for me to sit the title of the page on, i think that within a magazine the title of a page needs something to sit or hang off in some cases.
On these page i have started to use some of my past work to show it off for what it is. I think that with some of the methods i have used to show off my work are great and a really interesting way in which to do it. Within the work i have used i have placed type to talk about the project and what some of the best parts are. I have used the three columns to set my text in giving it a edge to edge viewing platform. I also like that i have added it at the bottom i think that this frames the page off well and also pushes people to look at the next page as it goes from left to right.
As before i have kept the same theme going using the lines with the title to support and express the title. I think that it gives it something else to look at and so you can be thrown the title instead of having to go look for it on the page. On the first double spread below i have added on the second page a cool concept which i think would look really good when i am finished, it shows off the image well by adding a black background behind them making them stand out more and giving the page something else that the rest of the magazine doesn’t have.
INNER PAGE CONCEPTS
INNER PAGE CONCEPTS I think that with the last pages you are either going to be hooked with the magazine or not and so for this reason i have not added anything which would make you have a second look or make anything pop out, if you are liking the magazine you are going to look at it. Although i have done this i have still used the same methods as i have done with the rest of the magazine. I have added the lines across the page that the title sits or hangs on, the only difference here is that i have cut it off 2/3rds across the page as i wanted to try a new concept which i had not tested yet and i can say with the mock-ups and drawings this has worked fine.
Type Styles I decided that if i was to use a minimal styling throughout the whole magazine i needed to use a type that was very minimal and bland yet interesting and easy to read, because of this i couldn’t just chose one typeface i needed to use a few that mixed well together.
Regular, the reason that i have used this font within the magazine is that i think it is a great font that is modern and minimal and yet is normal and simple enough to be a typeface for a simple title. The last typeface is Helvetica Light, i have used this version of Helvetica for the body text i have done this As you can see across i have because i think Helvetica is very added four of the fonts that i used. I good at been a simple text and really like these typefaces and what because i had already used the each of them gave to me during the regular type it had to be less in production of my magazine. The your face and the only way to do top typeface Arial Black, i chose this was to use a thinner smaller to use this font as my masthead font this been the one you see on type as it gave the best outcome the other page. when the type size was large and was the main part of the page. The As you can see there is more than second typeface is Futura Medium, four typefaces on the page across, i chose to use this font because this is because there is a variations it as like the other font yet it was of the Helvetica font on the smaller and not as bold this meant magazine and so i had to add them that i could use it for the inner page too. The contents is created using titles without it becoming the main the Helvetica typeface, this creates thin going the page that you look two more sizes of the Helvetica at. The third typeface is Helvetica typeface.
HAMBURGEFONTSIO123 Type: Arial Black Font: Regular PT size: 130 Leading: 156
HAMBURGEFONTSIO123 Type: Futura Font: Medium PT size: 30 Leading: 40.8
HAMBURGEFONTSIO123 Type: Helvetica Font: Regular PT size: 16 Leading: 19.2
HAMBURGEFONTSIO123 Type: Helvetica Font: Regular PT size: 87 Leading: 104.4
HAMBURGEFONTSIO123 Type: Helvetica Font: Light PT size: 13 Leading: 12.5
HAMBURGEFONTSIO123 Type: Helvetica Font: Light PT size: 36 Leading: 43.2