Contents Page and Exemplar Double Page Spread.

I decided to design an example of a contents page for the magazine because I felt that it would be a good way to create a strong identity for it. The contents page sets up a solid base for the use of type and the fonts that I chose, as well as the icons that I created for the front cover. It meant that my project wasn't purely limited to magazine cover design, giving me a chance to look at text layouts.

Final Designs.

Final Designs for magazine covers, front and back

Spring Summer Autumn Winter

Each magazine has a photograph on the front, repeated on the back, and a tab with magazine information on it. The barcode is colour coordinated and is rotated sideways to make it more subtle.

Spring and Winter have white logos, Summer and Autumn have black logos.

Magazine Layouts.

Whilst looking for inspiration on 'the Behance Network', I found a magazine by Nicola Riva called 'Note'. Instead of putting words and branding on the front cover, it utilises a small tab in the bottom left corner that carries all of the text. This leaves an uninterrupted photo on the front cover so that no detail is obscured. 

I then took this idea into my own design and came up with a few ideas for how I could set the magazine out. I used photos that I had sourced from other magazines so that they would be high resolution and high quality.

Putting the W logo together.

Once I had made a lino print, I sketched out some ways in which the 'W' could be turned into a logo and into a full identity for the magazine. I took the idea of four seasons and four corners, and added the four L shapes as shown above. This helped to hold the logo together, and to turn it into a more refined design.

Carrying on with the theme of four corners, I created 3 icons - a tree a mountain and a bike - and arranged them around the W. The fourth corner is taken up with the issue number.

Lino Printing.

Now that I had an idea for the identity of the magazine, I tried out a few ways to achieve the style that I wanted. I cut the leaf shape out of a background that I painted, and arranged them into a positive and negative (above). I really like how clean the lines are, and how the paint gives the shapes texture.

At the start of my project, I said that I would like to use practical techniques to produce work, such as stencilling or printing. To help make the leaf design look a bit more edgy, I decided to make a lino print of it. The rougher edges and home-made feel would help it fit the style of outdoor pursuits a bit more. 

Below are the prints I made.

Developing the 'W' logo.

I now began to try to apply the W logo into a magazine situation, and I found that to be effective, it needed a coloured background. Without one, the detail of the photo beneath interfered with it, and it became unreadable. I tried a few ideas out and soon realised that I could make a background that was the same shape as a leaf.

Developing sketches into digital ideas.

Using a serif font, I created some versions of the 3D words I had sketched out. The first had decreasing sizes of shadow, and the second went in alphabetical order. I used a more random order to make it look like a mountain range. The colours that I chose were greens as I had used these colours throughout the rest of my project. The 3D idea roots back to the tasks that I completed during the first four weeks of experimentation.

When I tried to apply this into a magazine context, I found that It was the wrong shape to sit well, as magazine titles are usually uniform size. After looking at a few options of how I could apply the word, I found that a more effective idea was to use the letter 'W' instead. This made it more of an icon, allowing me to create a stronger identity for the magazine.

This made the cover less cluttered and easier to read and recognise.