Magazine Design

The purpose of this project is to redesign a graphic design magazine, in this case it is in the style of Slanted. Three graphic designers are chosen to base the content of the magazine. In my case, the three designers are Milton Glaser, Stefan Sagmeister and Paul Rand.

Project Overview

This project effectively designs a magazine layout taking into consideration the reader’s ability to orientate between the large amount of content and magazine elements.

Important details to pay attention is for the readability, if the audience is able to easily read the text. Take into consideration the size, font, and colors.

◼ Balance is also crucial for a magazine layout. Do not make it too overwhelming or overpower the white space.

◼ Think about the hierarchy of the elements and what is important for the viewer to see first.

Final Design Solution

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Research

To come up with my solutions, I had to first look up articles pertaining about my chosen designers, then look at their work to see what layout I can come up with.

◼ I also had to look up a large amount of different Slanted magazines to see what I had to work off on. This includes looking at a variety of cover and spreads to get a sense/feel of the Slanted style.

◼ By doing research for both my designers and the style of Slanted, I was able to curate a magazine layout filled with informative content while inputting the style of three different designers to showcase my ability as a student graphic designer.

Sketches

A few of the potential featured and cover articles were sketched out. Ultimately, one featured article and two cover articles were chosen. The featured article is based on Milton Glaser while the cover articles were based on Stefan Sagmeister and Paul Rand.

Thumbnail (Featured Article)

Digital Processes

Second digital draft consists of a changed cover page's featured title and the title for the Slanted magazine.

Third digital draft adds in placeholder texts with more content. There is also more handwriting into Stefan's page to show his artstyle. Some contents were edited for more writing.

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Research

• During the sketches, I would have to research my designers to see what I was basing my work off, and while doing that, I had also kept some tabs to save for my later research once I hop onto my digital work.

• I first had to look at the way Slanted magazines work so that I can then incorporate my designers’ style into one and then mix it into the Slanted style.
• Once I hopped on the thumbnail, I would do further research on the designer’sbiography to know what content to write into the magazine
• Much of my sketches and thumbnail made it onto the final digital design with someminor changes.

Cover Page

• For the cover page, I decided to mix in the art style of my three designers. The contrasting vivid colors coming out of the chicken’s head was an inspiration from Milton Glaser. The headless chicken that represents spontaneous and extraordinary art was taken from one of Stefan Sagmeister’s work. Then, the shapes and color in the background is a constant theme seen in Paul Rand’s work.

• I had to also incorporate Slanted into the cover page of course. I added the title and magazine issues, and tried to be minimalistic (slanted style) but still show the contents of magazine layouts while representing my designers.

Milton Glaser Featured Article

• For Milton Glaser’s article, I wanted it to show more of his popular yet distinct work. I added in three of his different works that showcase his design style. If people were to read the magazine, they would know what type of style he did. The vivid and contrasting colors were seen from his silhouette and festival poster. The I love NY logo was on the sign yet partially shown to represent how iconic the logo really was. You do not need to see the full logo to know what the design was showing how Glaser really left his mark before passing away.
• The number 125– was just an additional feature that I saw many Slanted magazines add on, so I decided that it would be a nice touch to the article header just to have a feel for the Slanted style.
• The fonts are intentionally touching the image or other fonts to showcase a sort of stacking style.

Stefan Sagmeister Cover Article

• For Stefan Sagmeister, the first thing I knew I wanted to do was to add the Babylon’s album that he designed as the main image. The reason why was because he designed it for the Rolling Stones, marking a musical achievement in Sagmeister’s design career. Then, during my research, I saw that Sagmeister’s play on typography is written a lot on human bodies, so I used one picture of his work to show his play on design with humans and typography
• For Sagmeister’s article spread, I had noticed during my research that he tends to use the impact font a lot as well as mixing it in with his own handwriting. For example, he did an exhibition called “The Happy Show” which had a lot of bold fonts and his handwriting on the majority of the showcase. I took inspiration from that to come up with the different treatment of fonts.
• I had also wanted to make his page special to show Sagmeister’s random and quirky work which challenged the norm in graphic design. I put his watermark Style=FART everywhere and also handwritten the head title and pull quote.

Paul Rand's Cover Article

• For Paul Rand, I had immediately thought of a spread for him as soon as I saw his work. The whole magazine has a white and red background. The red ultimately came from Paul Rand. Much of his work utilizes a red color background. I mixed in Rand’s self portrait logo and Sagmeister’s lion to show that the spreads are connected since both are talented designers yet different in their own ways.
• Other than the red background, Rand was often known to play around with shapes and color a lot. I had taken a lot of inspiration of his work and added it into the spread to show his style.
• The colorful name came from Paul Rand and ‘P’ and ‘R’ are both black on purpose to show start and end which Rand does use. He also had artwork with the colorful squares so I played around with it and incorporated it into the background.
• Paul Rand also has a popular egg poster which has been mass-produced many times as poster copies to sell hence the work on the corner of the background.