Troubles Lead to New Ideas

Hello blog readers!!! I am very ecstatic today because of the progress that was made yesterday in class. My group and I had some creative discussions regarding font and layout of our covers. We had previously decided to have a traditional beauty magazine, however, one of the challenges we would implement would be a hint of an indie magazine style. The subtle hint would be that we wanted to concentrate on having clean lines and simplicity when it comes to the style of the text. We will have colored titles, text, etc., but we did notice that beauty magazines, especially when they include collages, have a more eclectic layout. As a group, we decided that a cleaner layout, even if we decide to do collages might also help with the cohesion of our different issues that each one of us is doing.

Our amazing teacher Mrs.Stoklosa also helped us out in the process. We were having some issues with our masthead because none of the colors we wanted worked for all of our cover picture ideas. For Catalina’s design, the white masthead would not be easy to read in some areas of her picture, but for Malena and me, the color worked just fine. So we took it to Google and Mrs. Stoklosa to see if we could get some help. Originally, we had a white border around the magazine cover to implement the subtle clean lines. We ended up removing that because it would prevent us from having the masthead be large, and we obviously wanted a fairly large masthead. After removing that, we wanted to outline the white title because then it would pop out with any background, therefore working for any of our cover images. When we voiced this to our teacher, she helped us by telling us a trick she found online. By adding the same title, different color and bigger size behind the white masthead, BOOM you have a border!! When we tried it out we loved the look of it, but we stumbled across an even better style!!! I will insert pictures so you can easily see what I am describing, but basically, the masthead has a 3D kind of look to it. We layered the colored text and the white text to create it and as soon as we did that we all screeched with excitement. We also came across the idea of having the masthead behind the cover picture, but the problem with that is that even though many magazines do that, they are well-known magazines, so the audience automatically fills in the title when they read it. Since we ours is a new magazine, we opted out of that option because, as good as it would look, we would not only need professional editing software, but it is not the ideal start for a new magazine. The color in the back of the white can also be changed around with each issue. The cohesion is still present since the main part of the masthead will be white for all of our covers, but the color can be the element that matches each season or issue.

Before you scroll down to see my comparisons/layouts, I have to clarify that the picture IS NOT GOING TO BE MY COVER PICTURE!!! It is a picture I took back in January, but I used it because I am planning on having a green background and this picture was perfect to visualize that. As for the font, WE ARE NOT DECIDED YET, THIS MAY NOT BE THE FINAL FONT, it is an example.

As you can see, the white border just makes everything appear small, it cuts off elements in the picture, and it also leaves little space to move around cover lines and the masthead.

The layout without the border is bigger and it maintains the element of clean lines and a structured layout. This cover also includes the masthead style I described previously in the post. The bottom left corner is left blank because the barcode would go there. We are still playing around with some barcode generator websites, but it doesn’t seem hard so I am sure we will have that done soon!

I hope you enjoyed today’s post and I will talk to you tomorrow with some more details!!
-Tini