awdawd

1. Production Reflection
Benjamin Wincup

2. Process
Over the course of my project, I had
planned many different magazines. My
original thought was that of an aviation
magazine as that’s one of my many
interests. Instead, I decided to challenge
myself by making a men’s fashion
magazine. At the start, I had no idea what
a fashion magazine looked like, let alone
what it read like, but I’m happy with the
results of this project.
To start the project, I actually
worked on my double page
spread, but that’s a different
slide. With my front cover, I had
to start a bit later as my second
model wasn’t in on the planned
day. He was, however, in on the
next day so I set up the studio
with the help of my tutor and
took photos. The lighting
arrangement was confusing, but I
understood it eventually. I took
plenty of pictures of both models
and you can see this in my work.
I then went onto Google Chrome
to find some fonts. I ended up
finding the right one called
Thailandesa on the website
”dafont.com”. I used that as my
masthead and the date and issue
number. The decision to make it
bold and have a stroke through it
was a later addition as I was just
messing around with what I
could do and liked how it looked.
I used the selection tool to cut
out my model so that the title could go
behind him. I used a simple sans serif font
for the cover lines and the original idea
was to make the main one bright and
white to contrast with the dark title and
the rest of the cover lines, but it made the
smaller over lines harder to read. I then
changed the colours around so that the
main cover line was in black, but had a
white drop shadow and the other way
round for the smaller ones. I think it made
the larger one a bit harder to read, but the
font is large enough so that you can still
read it. Whilst writing this, I realised that I
hadn’t put a price on the front cover so if I
could go and change that, I would. It
would be next to the numbers on the
barcode that I copied and pasted from the
internet so that it’s neat and out of the
way.

3. Process
My double page spread was the first thing I
did as I managed to get the pictures of my
second model first. As you can see, the
thought process behind the design is a
contrast of colour. The white is supposed to
represent youth whereas the black is
supposed to represent age. I tried to find
some appropriate quotes for the articles I
had written, such as the one by Orson Wells.
The layout of the articles was quite finicky
and punctilious. I had to set them to follow
the spine using the paragraph menu on
Adobe InDesign. I also used that menu to
turn of the hyphenation of each article as it
did that and was very rather annoying. The
same process went into the photos as the
front cover where there was minimal
editing, mostly just a sharpen on each image
and turning the saturation up ever so
slightly just so that the colour pops out a bit
more. I didn’t however like the effect on
either image so I ended up removing it and
changing it back to normal. I did however
make the model on the right ever so slightly
taller than the model on the left as when
their eyes were at the same height it looked
quite strange. I moved him up by a fraction
and it looked much better. Originally, I had
the page number set to 9, but after looking
at an actual fashion magazine, I realised that
most, if not all, magazines had the even
number on the right, not the odd.
So I changed it to 42 after seeing
that there was a lot of empty,
advertising space in magazines
such as mine. I also didn’t know
much about InDesign so this first
attempt was very basic, however
I’m very happy with how it turned
out. This is huge improvement
from my double page spread from
last year which was a horrible
jumble of colour and was hard to
look at, this however is much
easier on the eyes. I find the black
text on the white background and
the white text on the black
background aesthetically pleasing
as both colours contrast heavily.

4. Process
I found my second double page spread quite
difficult as it wasn’t planned. It was a
spontaneous decision to make the interview. I
made the character of Jregory Krisk up in my
FMP last year so that I could have an author for
my book. I decided to have a continuity and use
him again. I found an image of famous funny
man Jeff Goldblum and made a cartoon version
of him using the paint tool and put him on the
original draft of the the interview. It went
through various tweaks and edits, such as
removing the Victorian suit, flipping him in
Photoshop and making a book and moving that
around. I used guidelines to make sure that the
pictures were all in a fraction of the page. I
changed the colours of the main title to match
his jumper and I made the questions in the
interview bold so that they stood out. Again, I
like it, although the layout could definitely be
improved. However, I’m not too sure how I
could improve it as it isn’t quite my area of
expertise. I think perhaps I could put in more
text as there is an abundance of negative space
just waiting to be filled.

5. Process
The contents page was the final part of
my production that I did as it was done
in spare time I had. I looked to a physical
copy of Vogue that we had and also a
picture of an ESQUIRE magazine contents
page. The Esquire one was what inspired
the overall look and the Vogue one
inspired the actual text. The process for
this was rather simple, I used a black and
white filter, changed font sizes and fonts
themselves. I rotated the model so it
looked as if he were leaning on the wall. I
did most of the work in Photoshop so
when I moved it into InDesign to put the
page number on, I realised that
everything was too large. I took the
measurements of the InDesign
guidelines and rearranged the text so
that it fit. I then moved it back into
InDesign and put the page number in,
exported and then I was done.