Project 3 Magazine Selection

For this project, I chose Seventeen Magazine. According to the demographics of their readers, most of their readers are close to 16 years old and they typically access the content of the magazine in print. However, I think that re-designing their application could allow for more digital subscriptions to be more interactive with social media. Currently, the application does allow for social media interaction, to a point. I think just increasing the amount of interactivity between the elements of the article with the user's social media is something that is crucial for their target demographic. Right now, their app does not flip orientations. Also their layout doesn't really seem to target the actual demographic. It seems very old-school and not visually pleasing overall. I do like how large their image elements are and how they relate to the articles. However,  everything seems very flat. I really want to have a different way that the user can access the different editions. Their application also lacks any type of visual hierarchy until you get to an article. Changing that could really add some dimension to the overall design.

Project 2 Final

For this project, space was really a constraint for me. Trying to fit everything within the required page numbers really challenged me. I eventually had to increase my page height from 9 inches to close to 11 inches in order to accommodate the content. While I was admittedly very hesitant to do so, I think increasing the page size gave me a lot more freedom to allow the page to open up and the images to vary more in size. The images themselves were a struggle for me as well. It irritated me to no end that the images weren't the same size and couldn't fit in the grid. However, once I let go of the idea that they had to fall in a certain spot and just allowed them to simply break the grid, I think that the spreads began to flow a lot better.
The grid system that I used is the only part of the layout that really didn't change a whole lot. Other than increasing the columns between my text columns, the grid stayed the same. I really like how constrained the text was on the page. I think that that allowed for the images to really speak for themselves and interact with the text in a way that is different from what I normally do. Having those objects simply fall where they did forced me to back away from my typical structured way of thinking and made me just let things be as they are.

Project 2 Critique

For my critique, we discussed the possibility of increasing the page size to allow for the photo elements to increase. Overall, my project needed to 'air out.' There needed to be an increase in space in the gutters. There also needed to be an increase in the point size. My initial layout had a lot of text that was tightly packed together that made the catalog have a text-heavy feel to it. By allowing the text to have more room and allow the images to break the grid a little more, it would help to break up the page. I also need to add in some horizontal correlation in the spreads in order to create a flow from page to page.

Current Layouts

Here are some of the current layouts of my catalog. I haven't officially worked out how my titles are going to work yet and I don't currently have page numbers or captions. Right now, I was just trying to drop in the content to see what was working and I think I may make a few modifications to the overall interaction with the text and image. I really like how some of the images break out over the grid, but I think I need to vary the image sizes more. In order for that to happen, I will probably have to increase the height of my catalog since I am already at 24 pages. My other option is to utilize all of those pages and create a separate cover, which I may do anyway because f how I am thinking of utilizing images on the cover.

Layout ideas

Reading Responses

Based off of the readings, I think that I would like to explore a few different grid systems. One of the options is a modular grid system. Overall, this system would allow for a lot of flexibility with the placement of the elements. I am leaning more towards a grid that has three columns and a currently undetermined number of rows. The text and images will be able to span the columns in different ways, however I would like to keep the text of each essay in the same area of the page to create a sense of continuity in the piece. I am currently debating if I want to repeat the images that are mentioned in each essay, or if I just want to reference the images in the essays.

Exhibition Catalogue Examples

These are some examples that I chose based on their grid system or their image and text treatments