Magazine Layout Tutorial

In this post, I will demonstrate some basic design skills that I learned in class. 

I started by sketching ideas for my front cover. I didn't like the result in this because I'm not good at drawing, but I discovered the drawings don't need to be in detailed, therefore I feel like my sketch results turned out pretty alright. 

Then my teacher told me to experiment with some default layouts he provided for the class. I started off very bad as this is the first time I've actually started making a front cover, even if it's just an experiment. 

Next, my teacher taught the class about the use of borders, hierarchy of type, type faces, and colors. He taught us that using border can help organize the contents in the front cover as I can structure all of them according to the border line, therefore they're all following the same ruler. This makes the layout look neater and gives the readers an impression of a professional magazine. Hierarchy of type in the case of bolding the masthead and making it a bigger size than the coverlines may help catch the reader's attention directly to know what the magazine's about or its main content. Typefaces and their colors may help in conveying the genre of the magazine as different colors connote different meanings such as yellow connotes summer and certain fonts may connote different vibes such as playfulness or minimalistic. This also gives a general idea towards what the magazine will convey in its contents. 

This is the result of my experiments after my teacher taught me about those 4 factors and after I made a few changes according to what he introduced to me: 

Reflection

I learned about the effects border, hierarchy of type, type faces, and colors have on readers. This helped me remember when my teacher told me that everything in media has to have meanings whether it'd be implicitly or explicitly. Because of this experiment, I'm introduced an easier way to structure the contents of my front cover neatly that I will use in my actual magazine and I will be more careful in choosing the type faces and colors I'll use as it also has to match with my genre conventions. At first, I thought using Google Draw is easy and I considered using it for my actual magazine, however I found limitations, one being that I can't add pages to it therefore I can't track my progress whenever I change things. Because of this, I'll use Canva as my software as I can use borders and rulers, duplicate my pages, and add pages as well.