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.