2. The initial experiment I decided to undertake was an example of an insert page for
the fanzine. Having already spent countless hours on experimenting with front covers
for magazines, I felt I was pretty confident on that front, and wanted to target an
inside page of a fanzine/magazine. In this instance, I made a fan reaction-style page
for a Manchester United fanzine – dubbing the page as United Twitter. The process
was fairly straight forward, create a logo, generate multiple custom tweets, and
produce the page as such. The idea for the logo stemmed from using the “t” from the
twitter logo, changing the colour of the logo, and somewhat implementing it into the
logo. As a result of that idea, my decision was to use the “t” and add them to the
logo, replacing all of the letter Ts that were in the font I used for the logo, in this case
the font was Lemon Milk, a sans serif font. I feel that the attempt at the logo was
simple, but it didn’t necessarily need to be complex, just something clear, decisive,
and something the reader would understand within 5 seconds of flicking onto the
page.
Moving on from that, I wanted to try and add some sort of design to the page to give an
extra indicator, as well as giving the page a bit of colour to it. As a result, I decided to
take a clipart picture of a phone, which is a modern day indicator of social media, and
change the design up. The changes are of the red phone protector, which was initially
blue, and the addition of the Man United crest onto the phone screen. The protector
was a little bit finicky to get right, I had to ensure that every available pixel was selected
by the magic wand tool, and from there, changing the colour was pretty straight
forward. However, instead of using a generic colour overlay, decided to use the gradient
overlay, in an attempt to create a bit of perspective and gather in which direction the
sunlight would be. On the topic of perspective, adding the Man United crest was
possibly the most tricky aspect of the experiment, as I need to ensure that it looked like
it was on the phone screen itself. This was done using the “perspective” and “warp”
tools, which lie under the “transform” section of the “edit” option, ensuring it was at a
flat, diagonal perspective. Though I still feel there could be some improvement made to
it, particularly on the right hand side, I don’t think that it looks too terrible.
3. Once the logo design and the phone were finished, I then made a start on the
double page spread. Regarding the measurements, I made the page an A4 landscape
perspective – or in other words, two A5 portrait pages, hence the decision of the
page spread and its size. In addition to that, I made sure that the ruler option was
switched on and made sure that I knew where the halfway mark precisely was on
the page spread.
From this point, I then had to decide on the colour scheme and the layout of the
page. I chose to use a grey-ish red background to identify with the subject of
Manchester United, and the layout of the page would turn out to be randomly
assorted between tweets and copy, again using the Lemon Milk font. This was
mostly done to simply get myself used to the approach of producing an inside
double page spread of a fanzine.
By now, the last pieces needed to complete the pages were a multitude of custom
generated tweets. To do this, I did delve onto the twitter web app and search for a
number of Man United fans on there, downloaded their profile photos and made a
note of their usernames and @s. Then I used a website called "Tweetgen" to type up
something that each account would generally tweet, put their information in place,
download each tweet as an image, and then put them in place on the page on
photoshop.
It was a simple process, however I only got half a page spread's worth of
content completed for this particular experiment before deciding to move onto a
different one, as I felt the process would be very similar for the second half of the
page spread.
4. The second experiment I wanted to undertake was creating some form of cel-shaded
or artistically produced version of a realistic photograph. Having looked at numerous
pre-existing fanzines, they seem to follow a formula of using artistic drawings of an
existing image, done through photoshop or by hand, and I wanted to get a little bit of
an experience with that type of convention in case I wanted to implement it into
my fanzine. The photo used in this experiment was an image of Cristiano Ronaldo in
a 2021/22 Man United shirt, keeping with the theme of the Man United fanzine.
In taking this experiment on, I wanted to look up some form of tutorial for how to
create a cel-shaded art style based on a real-life image through manually using
photoshop. One such method suggested creating an outline of the figure within a
new layer, as well as outlining where the crease lines lie within the shirt segment.
After the outline was created, I was tasked with creating a reasonable looking
shadow for the shirt, which was done using the burn and dodge tool. Whilst I do
think progress was being made with this experiment, the result was unfinished due
to time constraint, with the finished product expecting to have the skin colours and
hair added onto the art style.
