Below is the final design for my magazine cover redesign project. The assignment spanned the entire duration of the semester, where we collected content and explored various uses of a grid. One interesting fact I learned during the course of the semester as far as magazine grids are concerned, almost all magazine titles live within the top fourth of the page. The reason for this is, when several different magazines are stacked in a rack, the consumer would not be able to identify the publication if the title were placed otherwise. Grids are vitally important to create consistency across spreads within large publications. My grid consisted of a standard 4 column x 4 row grid. I found the greatest challenge in this project to be visual consistency across spreads, as well as creating an A-B-A rhythm across the grid.
For the sake of not being overwhelmed with trying to create content, the assignment essentially allowed us to redesign an existing publication and pull articles from said publication to base our design and graphics around. I chose a quarterly scholarly publication titled "Studies in Art Education", which consists of articles written by art educators around the United States. In my opinion, my final magazine design exhibits minor conflicting tones that struggle with finding the balance between an artistic audience and a scholarly audience. While some spreads are artistic and dynamic, other elements within the magazine are generic and could be massaged further. Also, as a final note, the info graphic on the last spread, although visually engaging, has some trouble communicating the actual statistical content. I hope to explore the infographic more at a later time and spend some time researching successful infographics.
And finally, my grid that lays underneath every page of the spreads:
