Almost there...

YAYY I HAVE GOOD NEWS!! I finished fixing the story for my two-page spread!!!!

I already edited it on canva into my spread, but I did not insert the pictures because I am still editing them. I want to talk to my group so we can finally make sure that we are all cohesive without issues. I also went ahead and got my Table of Contents done, without adding the pictures either. I have started working on editing my ads, so hopefully, those will be ready soon. Surprisingly, I changed my mind about having an ad for loose powder, I am truly convinced on doing a fashion ad, especially because I truly liked a lot of the pictures I took with my long blue dress.

For my story, I used these to help me out a bit:

Youtube Video from POPSUGAR Beauty

Blog about writing

That’s it for today, sorry it was short but the pictures of my progress will surely say much more.

REMEMBER: I added the page number just now, but I also have to add the pictures!

Talk to you soon!

-Tini

Plan B for Pictures

Hi, welcome back! It's been a while! This week was certainly hectic since it was my spring break and my friends had made plans almost every day, so it was tough trying to juggle all those plans plus all the homework I was given and my magazine. Thankfully, I have amazing friends that were willing to help me out with the magazine. On Wednesday, 5 of my friends came over and I was able to get 90% of my pictures done. Unfortunately, we were not able to go to the locations I had mentioned in a previous post because not only was there a time crunch but a couple of days before I was in Miami with my friends and it was insane. There were a lot of people, it would rain then stop, then rain, then stop. So, I told my friends that plan B was the park in my neighborhood. It had a gorgeous field with hills and trees and that is where we took the pictures!!! I still have to edit my pictures, which you will see in an upcoming post, but I was not able to take all of them. I did finish all the pictures that I needed models for though, I just have to take the easier ones, like the makeup all laid out, etc. I was able to take some behind the scenes footage, and I wanted to include it here but let me tell you something, it was over 20 minutes worth of footage!! My friends and I went a little crazy and we just set our phones to take videos of me taking the pictures or my friends taking pictures of me, so I will later go through the footage and determine which parts to include because trust me all 10 minutes of it is not interesting. Other than that, it has been a good week for progress. I started my 2-page spread; it just needs some tweaks here and there, but it is coming along. I am hopeful that today and tomorrow I will at least have the pictures all done. I also started thinking about certain things I would like to include in my CCR, and some of it includes the BTS footage, so that is why I am also not including all of it.

Just so that today’s post is not THAT boring, I will include some pictures as a sneak peek, but remember, they are NOT edited yet.

PS: I have many shots and angles, but these are just to give you an idea

This one my friend took of me when we were in Miami and frankly, I love it. So I am hoping I find a way to interpret it in the magazine. 

Since my week was so busy, I had to take any chance I could. When I was at the Miami Open for my mom's birthday, I found some good backgrounds... but it was night time. I am hoping I can edit the light just right for these pictures, but they would be my last choice:

Talk to you soon

-Tini

Stressful Week Ahead

I have no way to start today’s blog because I am extremely stressed out and don’t know how or when I am going to take the pictures I need. I have tickets for the Miami Open tonight, ACT tutoring for 3 hours tomorrow, then too much AP Lang homework, plus my friend is visiting from Chicago! I am slowly working with my friends on figuring out a schedule but I can expect a very hectic spring break.

On another (good) note, I decided that one of the days I take pictures of my friends, I am going to try and take some that could work for a fashion ad. I want to try and have a fashion advertisement as a backup because I don’t know if the loose powder ad will actually come out as I want it to. I found a couple of pictures from an H&M ad that I really liked because they are dainty, simple, and clean. I want to try and replicate that but with the more colorful approach that will be all over my magazine. I also know that I want specifically my friend Anto and Vero to appear in a picture together because their contrasting features would draw a lot of attention; one is tall with brown straight hair, the other is short with blondish curly hair. I am supposed to meet with them on Wednesday and hope that I not only get the makeup pictures done but also some of the fashion ones as well.

These are the inspiration pictures for my backup fashion ad. I like them mostly because it is not busy and confusing, which is what my group and I are going for in our magazine.

I am sorry today’s post wasn’t so upbeat and bubbly but I am beyond stressed right now and cannot think straight. Taking the pictures is something I was looking forward to, but sadly I don’t knot if I will be able to make it all the way to Miami to take them. I’ll just have to see how the week goes and I’ll have to be spontaneous with the change of plans based on location.

Wish me luck! I need it!

-Tini

The Price is Right!

Welcome back! Today I don’t have that much new information, however, I already have an idea of the price for my magazine. I will obviously discuss it with my group members once they come back from their trip, but this is not the biggest decision to be made to the cover since a number can be erased and replaced. I did research based on the Cosmopolitan magazine since it is the most similar to ours in terms of their target audience. Most beauty magazines have a target audience of middle to high-class women ages 18-54. We decided to focus mainly on the younger realm of that audience, and so does Cosmo!!! They focus mainly on 18-34 years, so I figured basing it off of this would help out.

I went on to different websites to try and come up with a good price that is the same or similar to Cosmo’s.

This website sells cosmo for $13 a year for print and digital or $12 a year for just print and $12 a year for just digital. I thought this deal was more than a steal because you are paying $1 per issue!! I thought this was too good so I decided to go on to a couple of other websites more specific store websites that do not just focus on magazines. Amazon.com offers a one year supply of Cosmo for $16 or $1.33 per issue. This does seem reasonable since it is close to the one that Hearst offers, but I still decided to go to Barnes and Noble’s website which offered it for $19.99 per year or $1.67 per issue. If you would like to purchase the current issue only, it is $4.99.

My final conclusion is that for our online subscriptions or deliveries, we should stick with the first option I mentioned since, in my opinion, it is the most reliable since it is from Hearst, which is in charge for Cosmopolitan. As for the cover barcode for “in-store” magazines, $4.99 would be reasonable as well, although by looking at google images, some say “4.29” so that is definitely something my group and I have to discuss.

I hope you stick around for my next post!

-Tini

Picture Time!!

Hi everyone!! I am back with some updates about the pictures I took yesterday. So, on Wednesday night my ring light arrived and I decided to try it out and play around with it before taking pictures just so I can get the hang of it. Thursday afternoon/night I decided to begin taking some pictures that I would use for my ads and for my 2-page spread. The pictures I took were only of the products. I really want to start taking pictures of my friends, but they are not going to be here this weekend so that will have to wait until next week. I made my own white backdrop using white paper; originally I was going to use my walls, but they are not white so it wouldn’t have worked. Midway through the process, I realized that for the big eyeshadow palette I was going to need a bigger space to photograph it, so I used my shoe shelves, yes I said my shoe shelves. They are painted white so it worked perfectly as a backdrop. Unfortunately, I was home alone, or anyone in my house would be busy so I couldn’t ask anyone to take behind the scenes pictures of me. But luckily the ring light came with a phone tripod so I set it up and took videos, of which I took some screenshots to have as BTS pictures. The videos were about 3-5 minutes long, which is why I won’t insert them, but I took screenshots of it so that works too! I still haven’t narrowed down the pictures I will actually use and how I will edit them, but I looked through them and at least I know I got some good ones that could work. As for the rest of my weekend, I think I will focus on writing the story for my spread and already laying out the text for my cover and table of contents. Next week I will take the time to take pictures of my models!

Here are some BTS shots:

See you on my next post

-Tini

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

Updates!!

Hi!! So today’s blog post is going to be all over the place, are you surprised? I have gathered small details that I would want to add to my magazine such as new clothes I’d like to incorporate, new photo inspirations, and even a new location.

If you recall, on one of my previous posts I had posted examples of spring fashion trends for the upcoming 2019 spring season. One trend that I did not touch upon was polka dots, mainly because I am not completely convinced that polka dots are a pretty pattern. But, after doing some digging around in my closet, I found my homecoming dress from last year and let’s just say I got inspired. As you can see (from the pictures below), the dress is a two piece. The skirt portion is the only part that has polka dots, which will make it much easier to style with different colored tops. I mentioned I wanted to have some bigger images in my table of contents that focus on one model, sort of like a story about the model. I figured using that skirt would aid the glamorous aspects of the image, but still contribute to the spring trends.

Homecoming polka dot dress:

Another dress that could also work on highlighting the spring attributes of the magazine, is my long blue dress with a very delicate and dainty floral design. Floral is certainly common around springtime, it is one of those trends that acts as the “face” of the season. This dress, I imagine, can also be used for the fancier photos, or if I am feeling like doing an extra fashion ad, this would also be a great option. Like I mentioned in one of my posts, blue is making an appearance as one of the trendy colors for spring, and if you mix the floral in there, that just screams for a feature in a magazine.

Blue floral dress:

As I was checking my Instagram stories, I stumbled upon a picture someone had posted of JB&C Juice Bar and Cafe in Miami. I instantly fell in love with it because it was decorated with plants and neutral colored furniture. The plants allow for a touch of nature in an indoor space, and the neutral color palette would allow for the colors of the clothes to speak for themselves since there would be no distractions in the background. Another great aspect of this Cafe is that if I decide to go take pictures in the Miami Botanical Garden, which I probably will, I can shoot in both locations in just one day since they are both in Miami! My biggest concern was having to drive to various places that aren’t necessarily close to my house, but I will definitely take advantage of the locations I found in Miami.

JB&C Juice Bar and Cafe:

As for this upcoming week, this is what I have planned:

-Write my story for my 2-page spread

-Have my table of contents done (minus some pictures)

-Already have the pictures of the products done by the end of the week.

-Shoot the close-ups of the makeup this weekend.

-Start preparing an outline for my CCR.

For anything that involves pictures, I will just leave those spaces blank and then edit the pictures in whenever I have them done. Yesterday, I was helping my friend with his film opening, and my friend’s sister was there helping with the makeup. I proceeded to ask her if she would help me and she agreed. The benefit of this is that I won’t take ages doing various makeup looks myself, and I would just have her to do some of the girls' makeup as I take some pictures. I definitely plan to give her credit since she does have a makeup account on Instagram which is @parra_beauty.

Hopefully, throughout the week you will get to read about my progress and not me struggling even more!

-Tini