Editorial Design: Ideas pt i.

After looking through my research and experiments I decided to start looking into my initial ideas and producing them on a computer to see how they look and come out on screen.

I wanted to mimic the background image, so I created circles of different sizes and colours and changed the opacity, to create the effect of Bokeh. I also experimented with the typography choices I looked at earlier, using Significa which adds to the ethereal, whimsical feel of the spread. Significa is quite a lovely handwritten, italic and cursive font.

In contrast I created a very minimal spread using a black and white image of the eye, alongside a huge number ten. I felt black and white lacked something, though it did look effective: I thought adding content or quotes about London to the image and playing with the curning and tracking of the text would add more dynamic, but after experimenting I felt it looked quite messy.




Similar to the above with bokeh, I decided to look into different shapes. I have seen this style, an opaque shape with text inside (drawing attention to the text from the page) quite often used in blogging and magazines, and it is quite a trend, though usually with a blurred background. It reminded me of snowflakes and christmas, and I felt using a time or season would leave the article looking outdated when viewed later in the year etc, and didn't want it to lose it's touch so quickly.

Another of my ideas was a front cover in which the image spans three quarters across the spread, with the addition of a simple headline and furniture decorating the introduction to the article. I searched around on google images for aerial images of London and found the photographer Jason Hawkes' work, which was stunning, and wanted to use these images in my spread. I like the way the furniture decorated the article and made it stand out, though I also felt something was missing.

Expanding on this, I added a column of black rather than the furniture, and changed the headline to match this: with certain letters in black and others in white, to match the contrast of the background. Again I felt like something was missing, and found that the difference of background colours and columns complicated the page too much. 

Despite this, I decided to add a layer of geometrics on top of the image to experiment with current trends amongst Editorial. I didn't really like the way this looked as I felt it took away a lot of the nice colours of the image and was distracting from the article, making the page look too busy.

Scrapping that idea completely, I kept the image of London, expanding it across the whole page this time, and revisited the earlier idea of opaque shapes to draw focus to the text. As my article is very content based, I felt it would be a nice touch to take the actual article away from the front cover, and focus mainly on the headline. I kept the shape and the title in white.

I didn't really like the title being white as I felt it needed something to connect with the photograph, so I then decided to add the number 10 quite bold and big (similar to the black and white spread I created earlier) in blue. I thought this looked quite a nice touch especially as it actually overlapped the circle, but wanted to experiment further with shapes and lines, though I feel this was one of my strongest ideas. 

Experimenting further, I deleted the circle and added a black line spanning diagonally across the two spreads. I felt the black looked more striking than the white, and the sharpness of the line contrasted the circular shapes of the text. I thought it looked quite nice opaque as you could still see the iconic London skyline, especially the tower bridge through the shape.

Finally, I decided a full black line spanning horizontally across the page was much more effective at creating a focal point for the headline. I left the "10" opaque, and though I lost some of the London skyline, I felt it was still recognisable. I wanted something compelling and unusual, and feel I accomplished this.