Design Strategy
This was by far the most challenging yet the most fun project to complete. There were so many topics that I wanted to cover for this project and I ended up driving myself crazy with the prospect of creating several different drafts. I eventually decided to create a women’s fashion and entertainment magazine, with a feature spread about the Academy-Award winning actress Kate Winslet. I named my magazine because it is the one adjective I thought characterized not only the subject of my feature spread, but of the women who would be reading my magazine as well. I chose to use Kate Winslet as my subject because she is an actress that I admire. She is very strong in her beliefs about self-image and how Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general have created unrealistic ideals concerning what is beautiful. In the article I chose, in which she was interviewed by Vanity Fair magazine, Winslet discusses just that, in addition to touching upon her growing success as an actress.
My magazine is designed for a chic, sophisticated 18-35 year-old female who is looking for an outlet to read about the latest fashions, Hollywood’s newest leading ladies and all things entertainment.
The hardest thing about creating the spread was finding visuals that went along with the color scheme I wanted to work with. Originally, I found that it would be easier to go with simple black and white photos, but I later decided on using greens, whites, beiges, and general warm colors in my spread. As with most of my designs, I wanted my spread to be clean, succinct, and sophisticated.
Many of my visuals were quite large and I wanted to bleed them off the page, so my margins were increased dramatically. On the top, inside, and outside, my document margins were set at 1p6. On the bottom, my margin was set at 3p0 (however, on the last spread, the bottom margin is set at 4p9 and the bottom margin is set at 3p6). This allowed me to add more visuals, play with text placing and bleed photos off the margins.
Choice of Typefaces
I chose to use Didot and Bodoni Svty ITC TT for my cover because they are considered two quintessential fashion industry fonts. For the headline of the jump spread, I used the Papyrus font. I chose to use this font because it had a very organic feel to it, and I believed it complemented the visual of Kate Winslet. The typeface for the deck head is Garamond 3 LT STD, which I chose because it complemented the Papyrus typeface and added a certain boldness to the spread. The typeface I used for the body text was ITC Berkeley because it is a very delicate and feminine serif. My sidebar is in the sans serif font Futura and the title of the side bar is in Garamond. I chose Futura because it set the sidebar off from the rest of the serif type in the spread. The captions are in Franklin Gothic, while the titles of the captions are in Lucida Sans. I chose these two different types because I did not want to use Futura for all other text in the spread. I wanted the visuals with captions to stand out from each other. The pull quote is in Lucida sans, which again stands out from the serif text.
Colors
I chose a color scheme that included very warm colors. The colors I used in both jump spreads were pulled from the dominant visuals in the spread. I continued the green from the title of the spread into the following jump spread in the drop caps and in the coloring of the box for the sidebar. I wanted to create a very strong visual gestalt, and color is the best way to do that.
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