Month: March 2021

FMP WEEK 16 (WC: 15/03/2021)

I spent this week creating the other flat plans for the article pages, once again was very time consuming and further proved to me to limit the content that I create for the magazine in this style. For efficiency and time management it is important to alter the content of my magazine frequently to avoid becoming over ambitious considering I am attempting to make a magazine for the first time in a global pandemic with limited resources, limited Wi-Fi and several distractions with a lack of library/ studio space. I have committed to making 12 double pages for each theme, one for the twelve laws of the universe and one for the twelve laws of karma. Which would be 48 pages of articles in total, this feels like a large amount, but I want to ensure that the text is limited and it contains bug design pages of quotes, something that could be ripped out the magazine due to its style yet also educational, mixing the two most important factors I found out when creating my customer profiles at the beginning of my sketchbook.

In my tutorial, it was stated that these pages were not working as effectively as they could be, looked quite amateur and were sadly not as effective as I had hoped. However, I loved these pages, and they suited the philosophical side of the magazine with a lot of refinement and research to back it up. My art style has developed considerable by creating these flat plans due to the technical abilities I have strengthened by creating innovative layouts and harmonising the choice of fonts with he position of the text and adding in images to create a coherent layout that appropriately reflects the content I am producing.

FMP WEEK 15 (WC: 08/03/2021)

My plan was to finish my magazine by the end of March, which means that I needed to work on my flat plans. I had previously struggled with the flat plans I had been producing as I had little experience in this. The magazine project in second year taught me how to do this briefly, but I was always unsure on layout and the impact it can have on a piece of work. This led me to using a software called ‘Krita’ which I have used to create drawings using a graphics tablet in the past. Because I had used the graphics tablet before, I felt like I could used these to sketch out some flat plans however these were increasingly difficult to create and they became quite sloppy and messy looking, and consequently quite hard to understand. This guided me towards drawing them by hand in my physical sketchbook, but this became quite tedious as I soon realised I would have over 100 pages of my magazine flat plan to draw by hand and refine. So, for efficiency, I decided on just creating the content which I want to feature on the magazine with filler text placed, images finalised, and titles finalised, so I can print them out, annotate and see how they work together to then refine again to ensure the flat plans look as accurate as possible.

The finished draft of flat plans for the twelve laws of the universe were inspired heavily by the designs I had explored last week which had influenced a new style for me inspired by the philosophical content of my work. These took a very long time for me to make which has made me thin further about getting my work done as soon as possible. I’m extremely happy with these designs as they seem to flow together and complement each other nicely. I have attempted to create a harmony between the designs by using the same colour palette, mainly black, grey, white, purple and dark blue as well as different variations of the same font ‘Haike’. As stated before, I wanted the font and type in general to look very experimental and diverse which is why using the font ‘Haike’ was perfect for this section of the magazine. The font has so many variations which ensure that when placed together, such as one as a subtext and one as the title, they compliment each other extremely well. Pairing a very bold and thick font with and italic, thinner version would complement each other nicely as they are complete opposites yet share the similarities of being the same typeface technically. The imagery of butterflies and hands etc. are inspired by the content of the articles, such as the butterfly effect and the impact of your actions on the mood of another person. I have placed filler text of the body and used the pen tool which allowed me to experiment with the placement of text on a page by making unusual shapes and creating more dynamic layouts. I had no previous experience in making a flat plan this way which is why it took me so long, this has made me realise that I might not be able to make a large amount of content in this format due to me needing to finish the magazine by the end of March. In order to combat this realistically I feel as if it is appropriate to stick to these sections as my articles and have no more written content, this would allow my readers to see a lot of inspiring visual content as well, which I had concluded was very important for my magazine through my market research, as this was an important factor amongst ny friends in regards to their opinions surrounding which magazines they buy and why.

FMP WEEK 14 (WC: 01/03/2021)

I have slightly altered the aesthetic of my content to reflect my developing style as well as what is on the Instagram. My older work for this module was slightly more all over the place and experimental, which is true to my own style however, for a magazine, especially one that will be delivering educational content, I aim to make the design slightly easier to read and create so I can ensure consistency throughout the magazine and social media platforms. These are some examples of the work that I have been inspired by, the difference between them is that these are slightly more feminine and soft which is similar to my style anyway. I find that this would suit the philosophical articles I have written for the magazine by complimenting the content with the visuals. The graphics tend to use as lot of the blur tool, which I had just been experimenting with more lately anyway, therefore I thought it would be suitable to find some innovative ways that the blur tool is being used which I could gain some inspiration from.

I have developed my style for this magazine from tactile collage and photo manipulation techniques into digital graphic design work made using the Adobe Creative Suite. This development came from the beginnings of my research into the articles that I am creating; these will be based on the 12 universal laws of the universe, such as the law of attraction. This came due to my interest in Philosophy and reading books such as “The Power of Now” which details the importance of these twelve universal laws but adapts them into a universal perspective which allows you to relate and connect to the book. This is my aim for the magazine, it would be such a nice feeling to improve someone’s day by talking about these topics. I have watched “The Secret” On Netflix to gain a different perspective on the law of attraction, as this is presented in a film formant when mainly I had been looking at articles online. This film was very impactful in terms of changing the way your think about things and process information. This has solidified my idea to write about the twelve laws of the universe. ‘The Secret’ also has input from several different sources through interviews, which is a very authentic way of gaining information for research purposes and these are people’s mostly unfiltered and natural thoughts which they say on camera.

The two elements, design and philosophy had to come together more fittingly in terms of the art direction of the magazine, which is why the graphics became more impactful, such as creating a design and placing a sentence or word on top, or integrating with the design, as the focal point. The use of text within my designs was to create more eye-catching educational graphics, such as ones which have a message behind them. Using text lead me to using dafont and 1001fonts to source some more diverse typefaces to use. The use of typography is extremely important in magazine design, consequently I wanted a large range of different fonts to mix and match my magazine with. I did not want to stick to three or four fonts as the style of my magazine was not as hectic anymore, I wanted to express that experimental side of my work through the position, size and quality of the fonts used. To push my designs further, I took my experimentations and used some YouTube Tutorials on Adobe Illustrator to change the fonts using the blend tool with specific steps to create gradients. Or alter the tool further to make a pattern with the text around a focal point. I also used these to make the fonts placed around a shape or design. The idea was to push my graphic design skills further as the main body of work I am producing is graphic design on Photoshop, and so I wanted each section to be very unique.

FMP WEEK 13 (WC: 22/02/2021)

As I start to create the visual content for my magazine, I can see my approach to work is beginning to develop further which has been leading to a refinement in the type of art I am presenting for Sentient Magazine. The work I have been producing previously had been all very busy and chaotic, however I wanted the Instagram content to be slightly different. First of all, I aimed to differentiate the content between the social media content and the actual contents of the magazine, this is due to the fact that I did not want to repeat the content too much, have too much of the same being repeated or to spoil too much of the magazine before it gets released to the public as they would have seen most of it on Instagram anyway. Therefore, this has led me to create smaller square dimensional graphics which fit as Instagram posts nicely and complement the content in the magazine, as opposed to screenshotting pages and uploading. I have made sure to keep a colour palette which is consistent throughout the Instagram pages so all the content flows well together in the feed, as this is essential to building a brand. I have utilised the classes we have had in fashion communication previously on creating a strong brand identity for ourselves but translating it into the magazine’s string brand identity, which is really helping me. I have been scheduling content on apps such as Later, Hootsuite, which is good for Pinterest and ContentCal which is good to use on the desktop or laptop, as some are only for iOS or Andriod as opposed to a website page. This has led me to become more effective at planning my time, as creating a post for Instagram for the same time everyday which includes everything essential such as hashtags, a long and exciting caption, geotagging locations as well as interacting with other content creators to gain exposure, will be incredibly time consuming and tedious. I learned these techniques in a LinkedIn Learning video about building a new brand, and this has proven to be successful as I have gained some interaction and followers from these techniques; all transferable skills useful for any job within the creative sector.

I have been using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator as well as tutorials on TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn Learning to enhance my technical abilities. An example of this is the graphic I made titled “You Are in Charge of Your Own Body” which was inspired by a liquefy tutorial I had seen on TikTok. I found that this tool on Photoshop was very useful in making content that suited the style of my work as it was very abstract and when blurred became quite intriguing to look at. Being able to utilise social media to my own advantage for creative purposes is one of the most useful things I have done for this project. As social media is used by the majority of people, it is a catalyst for reaching a larger audience, putting yourself or your content out there for the world to see as well as an opportunity to grow the people that you interact with on a daily basis. This is why the content on the Sentient Instagram page is very reflective and philosophical, in order to let me audience really reflect on their lives and to think deeper as this is the main point of me creating the magazine in the first place.