Spreads

Here are my final spreads for my D.N.A, Discovering Nature's Answers, article for the magazine brief we were set.

Going more into detail about the magazine, it was group project set to create a whole magazine based  on topics that relate to the 21st century, with the deadline of just 4 weeks. Me and my team (composed of Jack Kingham, Tom Bishop, Chris Jellinek, Talveer Uppal & Ryan Vardy) called our magazine 'Century', relating to the topics & the state of time the magazine is in. It is aimed at males aged from 18-30, and is created in a factually true manner, with no unnecessary opinions or outputs. It is meant to be a magazine you will pick up and you will read, instead of one where you just pick up and glance and put down. It would be £10 in price, so the quality had to be to the highest standard.

Me & the team - minus T :P

We all chose a main article & a filler article. The main article was to take up at least 7 double-spreads. The filler was extra non-necessary work we put into the project to beef up the magazine and give good sequence breaks from the main articles. These fillers were no longer than the main, though could be handled completely differently if we wished.

We created a grid, folios & headers, a masthead & flourish at the end of each article, a baseline grid (which all the words sit on), a template that all the openings to the articles follow & the usage of well executed pull-out quotes. It was a 3 font magazine, with the allowance of any images we wished (within reason of course), and could use these images in a coherent manner (full bleed spreads may of worked with my article but not necessary with Tom's, or the pace of the magazine itself), so we could be playful but observant to the way in which we worked.

To me, the biggest success about this project wasn't even about the magazine's high quality completion. To me, the most successful part of the last month was our teamwork & comradeship. We all worked really well and poured all our time, energy, love & print credits (over £120 spent on all the spreads, mock ups and print outs!) into the final result. I'd be more than happy to work with them all again, and they they too think the same. Our tutor actually suggested we do it for another project at some point...bit of extra credit with a good group of designers and, more importantly, friends.

I chose DNA because it's a topic that has always fascinated me, but something I didn't know vast amounts about. It has become a massive part of our lives in the 21st century, from surgeries to even the thought of weaponry. Very frightening but very interesting. I learnt loads, even the chances of your existence (yes, you, reading this right now...the chances of you being a live I have discovered). I chose non-copyrighted images of a massively high quality to illustrate the article, and work as a typology of sorts, with captions that describe the images.

My filler article was different. I chose to do about tablet PCs & the effect they're having on the technological market today. I used a few images that worked in correlation with the images used and the facts chosen throughout the article.

The magazine came out exceptionally well, and our tutors gave excellent feedback, all positive. We have to change a few elements, like I have to rearrange to the position of a few of my images, but otherwise excellent. I'm looking forward to getting our magazine professionally printed so it can be added to the portfolio.