Lilian's Magazine Project: Splash!

Rationale

Name: Lilian Chan
Project: Magazine project
Date: 11/19/2009

Magazine identity & readership
My magazine is catered to the female audience particularly female teenagers and young adults. The content of my magazine will include stories about love and relationships, fashion, health, hobbies and personal interests. However, my magazine intends to take a different spin on all the subjects covered to set it apart from other magazines. Therefore, the stories covered for my magazine will be told from an unconventional point of view to give the magazine a fresh twist.

Magazine visual identity
As the content of my magazine is rather unconventional, I wanted the visual identity of my magazine to adopt the same concept. To create a fresh look, my magazine will be using a lot of bold and bright colors. My magazine will also be using a lot of bold and stark imagery. For my cover, I used a black and white picture of Megan Fox to complement the black and white theme of the feature spread of my magazine. To add a dash of funkiness into it, I used bright neon colors for my typography. The visual identity of my magazine hopes to attract female teenagers and young adults who are confident with themselves but are searching for that little extra ‘something’. Hence, my magazine is called ‘Splash!’ to imply that little ‘splash’ of something extraordinary. I also wanted the title of my magazine to convey an image of a person diving into a pool and creating a ‘splash’ in order to symbolize that my magazine is carrying a fresh new perspective.

Article design strategy
My feature spread is an article about Megan Fox. As Megan Fox is always portrayed by other magazines as sexy and sultry, I aimed for a different approach for my spread. My feature spread has a dominant black and white theme to portray a classier side of Megan Fox. I chose that particular image of Megan Fox as her vulnerability and softness shown from the picture complements well with the overall theme of the feature spread. I added the film strip to indicate her profession and also as a background to fit the headline of the spread. I used two fonts as the headline to add contrast; for her name, I used Flood Std as it looks like it could be used as a movie title and for the remaining text, I used Giovanni Std in order to keep the headline neat. For the deckhead, I used the stagger effect to create suspense as the last line eventually reveals what the article is about. I continued this theme to my jump spread by using the same font for my headline (Flood Std) for the drop cap and pull quotes. I also had another black and white image of Megan Fox which again, showed her classiness and elegance. I included the film strip as my sidebar and placed the images of the movies she has starred in into the sidebar. The main colors of the spread which are black, white and red were used in both the feature spread as well as the jump spread.

Style Sheet
Cover -
Cover masthead: Flood Std, 120/19, optical kerning
Cover teaser: Gill Sans Ultra Bold, Gill Sans MT (various sizes)
Cover issue date: Gill Sans MT Bold, 10/19, metrics
Feature
Feature headline: Flood Std, 90/19 and ITC Giovanni Std Black Italic, 60/19
Feature deckhead: ITC Flora Bold (various sizes)
Byline: ITC Flora Std Bold 12/19, metrics
Jump spread
Photo caption: Helvetica Neue LT Std, 11/19
Folio: ITC Flora Std Bold, 12/14.4
Pull Quote: (i) Flood Std, 16/19, (ii) Flood Std, 18/19
Body text: Janson Text Ld Std 55 Roman, 9/16
Sidebar headline: Flood Std, 24/19
Sidebar body text: Helvetica Neue LT Std 75 Bold, 11/19

Document grid
I used the multicolumn grid with three columns because three columns gave my magazine ample space to put in text and large and clear images while maintaining the structure and cleanliness of the spread. My margins were not very wide (4pc6 for top and bottom) for all corners of the page as I wanted the page to include more text and pictures than white space. As my magazine is designed to cater for teenage girls and working adults, I wanted to make sure that my magazine will be as informative as possible to make the audience’s money worth.

Sources
Cover: http://stardustandsequins.wordpress.com/page/33
Feature: http://www.wallpaperez.info/celebrities/download/Megan-Fox-photos-757.html
Jump Spread: http://www.dailyslick.com/content/megan-fox-159.html
http://mayorofconcord.com/2009/the-concord-movie-is-more-important-than-transformers-2
http://www.impawards.com/2009/jennifers_body_ver2.html
http://www.fantastiksports.wordpress.com/page7

Extras
As mentioned, I wanted the main colors of my feature and jump spread to be in black and white as I wanted to portray a different side to Megan Fox. However, I decided to add a dash of color to make the pages more striking hence I used red as it is a very dominant and eye-catching color.