Cover
This is the final draft of the cover for my magazine. Although I finished this part of the magazine the quickest, I continued to return to it and make changes.
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I ended up using one of the first photos I took as my main image. I thought it fit well and could look good as a cover photo. I did go back and forth a lot, at first I thought it would look bad then I started to mess with it. It was difficult to find colors that wouldn't make the text unreadable, and it always looked a little too busy. I ended up putting a black/dark gray frame around the edge and sectioned off the bottom left corner. It eliminated some extra stuff in the background and made the picture easier to work with. It also let me put the date and volume number where it could be seen.
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I wanted a thin font for the Mast Head, I didn't want anything too bold, so I used the font Secret Code. I thought it would take away from the vibe I wanted the magazine to give off. I used the same font for the date and issue in the bottom corner. For the coverlines I used Champagne & Limousine. It was similar to Secret Code, just a bit bolder. I wanted these kind of fonts because it looks clean. A clean, sort of fancy looking font would older women, likely moms, probably in the higher middle to high class. I changed my intended audience a lot. I had originally wanted to market towards working class/regular people. Then I realized that the style of magazine I was basing my own magazine after was a bit on the expensive side. So, I changed gears. There was a lot of debate before I officially decided to do this. Of course going with this style while still being a relatively cheap magazine, maybe found in a grocery store, could be appealing to a lot of older women.
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Regarding the mast head itself, I wanted the magazine to based more on in the technical part of gardening. I so I ended up going with '-ology' because it sounded like what I was going for. For the first part of the name I had to do a lot of Google searching to find the name I wanted. I settled on 'botany' because its definition, again, matched what I going for the best.
I made the circles holding the coverlines pink, to match with the color of the flowers. At first I had them opaque but it looked to harsh so I lowered the opacity and blurred the edges a little bit. I messed around a lot with the font, size and color of the main coverline, too. I had an issue making sure it was seen against the background. I couldn't go with a dark color or one that was too light. It's actually the same off-white color as the the mast head. The font I settled on is called Palatino Linotype.
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Table of Contents
For the Table of Contents I wanted to go with the minimalist look that I saw on the pages I did my research on. I chose an off-white for the background color and used the font Champagne and Limousine. The actual table of contents used Secret Code. I used similar fonts for all my page designs to keep the magazine cohesive.
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I had two ideas for this page. The version you see now and a version which used white Vincas. The design was similar to the one I used in the final design. I didn't like the way the flowers look, though, it made the page look tropical so I used the yellow flowers instead.
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The flowers I used are called Mexican marigolds. I found them while walking around my school one day and took some photos of them. I knew they wouldn't be as a whole picture and decided cutting them out and using them for a possible table of contents page design. At first I just had one flower, then I put flowers in two of the corners. I wanted to have the leaves in but the pictures weren't good enough quality for me to properly cut the leaves out. I went back to get better photos, specifically of the leaves. I then cut them out separately and add them to the page.
Two-Page Spread
The spread was the hardest project for me. There was a lot of back and forth with my ideas. The bigget issue was deciding what I was going to write about. I ended up on something to do with flowers and different seasons. My final decision was to do winter flowers that grew well in Florida weather, mostly because it was December. The article started as a couple choppy ideas and gradually came together to be something cohesive. I had to do a lot of research on different kinds of flowers in order to decide what I wanted to use. I knew poinsettias were going to be one of flowers I included, especially since I knew I could get pictures of them at the Home Depot Garden Center.
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I started with designing the left page. I used Champagne & Limousine for the section title. The subheading is Secret Code and the text is Palatino Linotype. I hadn't wanted to leave the background blank and thought that maybe putting a low-opacity picture would make the page seem more interesting. I used a picture of lavender flowers (lavender grows well in Florida during the cold season) I found on a stock image website--Pixabay. I used that photo to test out my idea and decided that if I found a photo that would work, I would follow through with the idea. I was also hesitant to write an entire article without being sure of what photos I had, but I went ahead and did so anyway.
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It took me a while to actually get the photos I needed. I ended up going to Lowes. Unfortunalely the flowers I wrote about in the article were not available, however there were plenty of other flowers that were. I decided that I would keep the article as it was and just use the new flowers to be able to add extra information to the page. I had managed to get my own picture of lavender flowers and went with my original idea of using them as a background image (I was determined to use lavender. I tried other flowers, too, but they didn't look as good).
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When I was trying to design the right page, at first I was going to do circles with square text boxes. I really didn't like how it was looking, however, so I scrapped it and tried the bars. I decided to make them alternate touching the top and bottom of the page. This left space for text above or below the pictures. I did a quick edit to each of the photos, to make them brighter. I placed black rectangles where the pictures would go, then used a clipping mask. After that, I decided to use the same background picture I used on the left page on the right. Without, it seemed too empty and it wouldn't match if I used a different photo.
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