Graphic Design I | The Shape of Design

Phashion Magazine Cover and Spread

Student Erin Ramsdale's cover is a striking, pro-quality design.

In this lecture, you learned some of the basic principles of grid layout required for magazine design. Now you're ready to apply what you've learned by designing a cover and spread for Phashion magazine, incorporating the logo you designed in Lecture Two.

You will start this lecture's exercise with some research for good images and story ideas. Then you will carefully place your final logo design from the last exercise onto the cover. You'll use an image from your collection and some type to highlight the articles found inside. Finally, you'll create a story spread based on the feature article of the magazine.

 

With a successful logo design under your belt, the folks at Phashion would like you to take on the cover of their next issue, as well as one of the main article spreads. In the magazine industry, text and images will generally be provided by the editorial department.

Not at Phashion magazine, though! To "nail" this magazine cover, it's time to go back to the nearest newsstand or surf the Internet for images and possible titles/topics that are relevant to this magazine. You can either scan these images or download them from the Web.

1. Collect Images

You should come up with at least 15 small and large images for the project. Collect the scanned or downloaded images in a folder and give them names that you can easily recognize. Here are some examples of images to look for:

	fashion catwalks fashion photo shoots pictures of famous designers screen shots of fashion-related Web sites geographic locations where a fashion event is taking place (such as Paris, New York, Milan) fashion designers' working drafts any other fashion-related images

If you're not sure of the style and quality of images typically found in classy fashion magazines, spend some additional research time on this before choosing your own images. Also, try to grab groups of photos that all have the same theme since they may be used in a spread for the same article later.

To keep yourself on track, describe in short sentences the visual content of the images you have collected.

Image 1= Black and white image of Calvin Klein sitting in his office in L.A. City views in background.

Image 2= Color screen shot of Chanel's Web site which contains some drawings of their Spring collection.

and so on...

2. Collect Topics and Story Ideas

Describe at least five topics, articles, or stories that could accompany the images. Here are a couple of examples:

1 = Article about the Global Garment Association's attempt in standardizing the clothing and shoe sizes around the world
Headline: Size 9 or 43?

2 = Guide to the Internet's fashion malls, covering prices, shipping, and competition.
Headline: Internet Fashion Guide

3 = Article on how to find the hottest skirts from Tokyo online
Headline: Skirting Tokyo

and so on...

You may wonder why you, as the designer and not a writer, have to come up with stories and ideas for a magazine cover. For draft purposes, you'll often have to give a client a polished sample that incorporates some believable "dummy text." Also, inventing the stories and searching for the images helps you to understand the best way to convey the magazine's themes.

Part II: Cover Design
Planning Your Cover

Where does one begin when it comes to creating a cover? After identifying your source images and story ideas, and narrowing them down, let's go over some notes on creating an effective cover:

1. Do your research. If you're not familiar with fashion magazines by now, go back to the newsstand again! Especially if you are not a member of the magazine's target audience, you'll need to look long and hard at comparable cover designs. Ask yourself questions such as:

	What do the photos used on the covers have in common? How many photos are generally found on a single cover? How much room does the logo take up on the cover? Does anything cover the logo or sit underneath it? How is negative space utilized? How is typography handled in terms of color, spacing, size, and placement?

2. Be compelling. The cover will need to compete with hundreds of magazines screaming hundreds of messages. The combination of text and image will need to intrigue. Speaking of images, please be tasteful when making your image selections.

3. Express what the magazine is about. The audience will be scanning the rack, looking for magazines. Since this is a fashion magazine (with a tech twist), the cover needs to scream "fashion magazine."

4. Stick to one message. If you take a closer look at most (good) magazines you will find that they feature one main message on the cover. Even if the cover hints at several storylines, one image and tag line will generally be linked to create an effective message.

The I.D. magazine cover below is an excellent example. I.D. picked a story about Aimee Mullins, an athlete who casts a completely different light on people with disabilities. Her story is powerful and you want to read more about it.

Notice that the composition of the photo and headline lead the eye down the page.

As the main message on this cover, it is so powerful that the audience is likely to pick it off the shelf to take a closer look. As they search the cover for more information about the Aimee story they read the other highlights of the magazine "disguised" as a caption to the feature story: the light and dark blue text above Aimee's shoulder. That portion of the design is very important: The other highlights only stand out when you take a closer look—they don't interfere with that first punch of the main message.

Layout Software

The cover and spread could be created in Adobe InDesign—the ideal tool for page layout. But for this exercise, Illustrator will do just fine, or a combination of InDesign and Illustrator if you prefer.

As you know, InDesign is an assembly tool. With it, you take images and text created in other software programs and lay them out in one document. InDesign is best used for organizing long documents such as books, newspapers, and magazines.

Designing Your Cover

Most magazine covers are around 8"x11" or larger and created in CMYK color mode in a very high resolution for printing.

To begin, click and download the Illustrator or InDesign template file from the following links.

	Illustrator cover template InDesign cover template

1. Once downloaded, open your chosen document. You will notice a series of guidelines to assist you in creating your magazine cover design. The green guideline represents your safe area, meaning any important design elements are safe from being trimmed when the document is cut to size during printing.

The black guideline represents where the document will be trimmed. This guideline is aligned with the crop marks outside of the bleed area. These are used by the printer to trim, or crop, the document. (Crop marks would remain with the design when it goes to print, but for now they are there for educational purposes. They will be deleted when you delete the "template" layer before you submit your assignment).

The red guideline represents your document's bleed. Bleed is the part of your cover's design that will be trimmed off when the cover is cut to it's final size during printing. Make sure that no elements key to your design is in this area.

2. Make sure you have the "template" layer selected and place the EPS file of your final magazine logo. When positioning the logo, recall the magazine examples you've seen in the lecture and the ones you found in your research.

Student Erin Ramsdale did a nice job matching the black and white logo to the color scheme of her design. At this stage, you may want to change the color of your logo to fit your planned design.

3. Select the most intriguing of your stories and choose one image as the main eye-catcher. Keep in mind what you learned from the story of I.D.'s cover and your other research.

Bring your image onto your template file and position as needed. You may also want to do some tweaking to the image in Photoshop, such as retouching, cropping, or modifying the background.

Take close notice of the negative space around the image and how the image interacts with the logo at the top. Make any changes you feel are best accordingly.

4. Use the Type tool to place the dominant headline for this topic/image as well as any subheading that accompanies it. Make sure that it, along with the image dominates the cover. Consider placement of the headline (around the image? Over the image?), font, and color.

5. If you choose to present other, secondary stories on the cover, make sure that they are given minimal visual attention while still handled tastefully. You may also like to add other standard magazine elements to the cover like the month or price.

6a. Delete the "template" layer and go to File > Save As... and name your document "cover_design". If you are using Illustrator, go to Export > Export As... and when the Export window comes up select JPEG for the format and make sure that Use Artboards is checked. Now you have a JPEG version for submission to the course (don't submit till you have the spread done as well).

6b. Delete the "template" layer and go to File > Save As... and name your document "cover_design". If you are using InDesign, go to File > Export... or Command "e" and when the Export window comes up select JPEG. Now you have a JPEG version for submission to the course (don't submit till you have the spread done as well).

Part III: Story Spread
Planning Your Spread

With the cover finished, you'll create a two-page introductory spread for your cover story. So let's look at a few spreads to get you started. Also, take some time to review the spreads in the lecture and the various successful approaches you can take at presenting an article.

In the opening spread of the I.D. story, the designer has chosen to use very little article copy in order to create good contrast and impact before entering the text-dense area on the following pages.

The introductory spread for the I.D. article is very sparse and dramatic, with just the article title, images, and some supporting text.

In the Phashion spread shown below, by student Lauren Bzdak, the article begins right away. With the loose leading and use of just a small portion of the page, she does not overwhelm the reader with text. The text is nicely balanced with the large image on the right and the small image taking up the bottom of a column.

In Lauren's spread, some geometric accents (a circle at the beginning of the body copy and two lines along the title) add interest, and there is plenty of white space.

Additionally, check out the following Review Kit to recap the essentials of creating a layout with a grid:

Designing Your Spread

Like the cover, you'll begin with a template, this time of a two-page spread. Click the links below to download the full-sized template of your chosen application.

	Illustrator spread template InDesign spread template

1. Open the file and once again you'll see the guidelines creating a template on your background layer.

Though your text and image placement will certainly be different than the Brody example from the lecture (the gray areas above), the grid may be similar.

2. Measure and place some grid lines (three columns per page) on your template layer to help you position your content.

3. Choose your images for the spread—the number is up to you, but typically one main image and a smaller image or two are best. Don't reuse the image on your cover, but related images are great. Size and position your images considering the grid and negative space.

4. Add at least the headline and a subheading, but it is up to you how much text you want to put in addition to this such as body text, pullquotes, or captions.

5. Use the process creating JPEGs that you did when you created your cover design for submitting your spread design.

Part IV: Looking Back

Thinking about your research, your logo, your cover, and your spread, answer the following questions:

1. What magazines did you research before beginning your designs? If possible, provide links to the magazines' Web sites so your instructor can check them out. How do you feel this research affected your designs, and what magazine do you think had the most impact on your own design decisions?

2. When someone sees your cover on the newsstand, what do you feel will be communicated to him/her immediately? Why?

3. What is communicated by your use of images, text, and layout in your spread? What will make the reader want to continue reading the article?

4. What was the biggest challenge when you created your cover? Your spread?