Why We Travel Magazine Design Process

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 For the research part of the project, I went to Barnes & Noble to look at different types of magazine articles. Each magazine had their own specific style and it helped my decide what I did or didn't want for my spread design. In some of the articles, there was a lot of different typefaces used or page set-ups that I didn't find visually appealing. I want my article to have, at most, two typefaces and everything look the same on each page. 

 For my sketches, I came up with three different designs that I could use for my magazine spread. My first idea was placing postcards throughout the article as the images that correlated with the story. I drew possible layouts of how I would place the postcards with the text to see if it would look good together or not. My second idea was using polaroids as the images. I didn't want to copy the same layout from my first idea so I tried different arrangements of the text and images. Since polaroids are smaller than postcards, there would be a lot more room for text boxes across the page. With this, I tried to incorporate a group of polaroids or making one polaroid larger and make it seem like it is an up-close picture. My third idea didn't have a theme like my other ideas. For this sketch, I placed random boxes of where I would like images to go if I wanted a simple design. I had already made my decision of what I wanted to go with so my last round of sketches was a basic magazine design if my favored design was too much to produce. 

 For my first design build, I went with the postcard theme. I didn't get far in it but I made enough progess to tell something was off with the design. My original goal for this design was for it to look like someone was collecting notes from the person sending the postcards. However, it caused too much breakage and everything blended together in a way that made it hard to read the article. 

 For my second design build, I took out the cork-board background on the second page. This made the words more legible. I finished my postcard designs of each location that was mentioned and created my handwritten text on the back of the postcard design. I added more stamps to fill up space within the article and color matched the stamps to their locations. When creating the postcard and stamp images, I put a tint over them to give them similar elements in color. For the text boxes, I adjusted them to around the postcards and stamps. I looked for widows and hyphens throughout the text and got rid of them when they were found.

 For my third design build, I added callouts to my spread to help break up the text. I tried to place them in different spots throughout the piece so it didn't look repetitive. With my cover design, I added more postcards to make it look more busy and added stamps since the stamps are consisted throughout my entire magazine spread. This helped with the negative space and it looks better than the original design. With the callouts, I had to create space within the article so the callouts could fit between the text. This made the text shift down and I had to design a fifth page. Using the same elements from the cover page, I added postcards and stamps to fill in the huge amount of space on the last page. I searched for new widows and hyphens which I fixed.

 For my final article build, I looked at my design one more time to see if I needed to fix or add anything. At least one warp text had to be in the magazine spread so I added one next to the Paris postcard. I placed the warp text there because the placement of the Paris postcard and the one next to it was space in a way that didn't allow three columns. Once I had all my images placed, I adjusted each postcard and stamp to have a drop shadow. The spreads looked too flat. However, adding the drops shadows gave it a 3D effect that made it look more lively. After adding all these elements and was content with the design, I put my spreads into the mock-up magazine and I was done with my article design.