Magazine Project.

{Pictures came out in opposite order, supposed to be from bottom up!}

I chose my article because I wanted to be a little out there, I also knew I wanted to art direct something about the human body. But I didn’t want it to be vulgar. In fact, I wanted to show how something like pole dance could boost self-esteem and make women more confident in today’s world. I am not feminist, but I do think these factors are some of the most important- especially since many of today’s women’s magazines seem to do the exact opposite. I contacted one of my good friends/trainers back home (she holds a pole/exotic dance workshop in her studio) asking if I could borrow some of the work she published on Ezine. However, she also ended up finding a lot of interesting articles on exactly what I was looking for and some images as well. She (Amy Bomar) was a great help during this entire process! Also, the woman who wrote the article (she goes by Yannori- no last name (like Madonna)), was easy to contact and sent me many articles and pictures to draw inspiration from/use.

I chose the name of my magazine after I told my friends about my project. A few of them (male and female) said that the topic was “intriguing” or “interesting” but unfortunately I don’t think that the word “interesting” is, well… interesting. I wrote the caption for the article (the attention-getter) after a class I was in- when we were discussing how the role of women has changed. The title for my article came to me after I was toying around with the saying “she’s got ____” insert a word to mean “courage.” My roommate let me know that I should use the world “pole” so that readers know what the article is about and there you have it!

One of the critiques I have been getting in my projects is that my typefaces are a bit boring. However, since I seem to always be in a time crunch, I decided to search the Internet for fonts rather than sitting in the lab and searching through Suitcase. I found a great website which gave me the typefaces for my magazine name, the headline for my article and the headline for my sidebar (Blackjack, The King and Queen and Little Lord Fontleroy). I find these typefaces interesting, a bit quirky and elegant at the same time. I thought they fit well with my article and images. For the body text, I used a simple Adobe Garamond and kept the size to an 11pt.

I kept the colors minimal. For the cover, I simply desaturated my image and then brought the lips and cherries back to their original color (making the face stand out more). Black got lost in the cherries, so I changed the type to white with a little bit of effect on the main title. For the first spread, I also desaturated the image and brought the original color of the socks and shirt back. Then I drew the pink color for the deck head- from the girl’s shirt. I like this image and how it leads the eye toward the title of the article. In the second spread (article) I drew out the red from the boot in the sidebar and added it throughout as an accent on a pretty grayscale page. My topic is more sensual than it is loud, therefore I did not want overwhelming color and feel that grayscale reminds us (or is just me?) of old romance/photographs.