Typography: Magazine




ROLE

Magazine Designer 

CLIENT

Typography Class

YEAR

Winter, 2024

Magazine cover. Bug Capture is written over top, and an image of a damselfly takes the center. An arrow pointing at the damselfly says 'Not a dragonfly?'
Two inner pages of the magazine. This page talks about the differences between dragonflies and damselflies.
Two inner pages of the magazine. It features a review of a bee themed coloring book.

A Little About This Project

For this project, I needed to create a magazine based on any topic of my choice. I had to make a front cover and at least two inner pages. I ended up opting for a nature magazine that has a focus on insects. I liked the thought of having the issue be themed around dragonflies and damselflies, as when I was searching for stock images to use for this magazine, I had noticed that damselflies often appeared under the dragonfly tag. Then I ended up making additional pages because the pictures of bees were very inspiring for me and I knew exactly what I wanted to make.

This project utilizes a lot of hexagon shapes in reference to the compound eyes that insects like dragonflies have, and the honeycomb formed by bees. 

Roles

For this assignment, I was tasked with creating the layout for a magazine.             

Challenges

The biggest challenge for this project was simply getting the objects to align in the way that I wanted. The grid that Adobe InDesign has wasn't very happy with how I wanted to align the hexagons.    

Problems

The main problem was getting the shapes to align as I wanted.

I also has a problem where the image I wanted for my cover wasn't large enough to fill the whole space. Most pictures I found were too small to suitably fill the job.  

Solutions

Ultimately, getting the shapes to align was just a slow, tedious process. There are still some parts that aren't quite how I wanted. The shadows on the bee hexagons interact strangely with the hexagons in the back. And because the shapes have borders, the ones on the edges are thinner than the one inside.

The cover ended up being an easy fix of simply making the rest of the page match the color of the background from the damselfly picture. The background is already dark and solid, so it transitions smoothly from the image to the background.