Project 05 - Magazine Article
Mark Villondo
ART 230 - Typography
Cover Page
Back Cover
Inside Cover
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Pages 5 & 6
Pages 7 & 8
Page 9
Mockups
I started out with this project by looking at general conference talks and decided to go with one that had a nice name: Come and Belong. It was a talk by Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, who's actually a favorite of my mother's. I decided to go ahead with it and began looking for a place to start. As I started to think up compositions for the cover, I also began contemplating the color scheme. I took the title of the talk, "Come and Belong," and decided that I should with with a home and hearth kind of tone. From there, I started experimenting with warmer colors to emulate the feelings of a warm home, somewhere snug where you know you belong. Eventually, it lead to a different variants of orange, yellow, and brown. Inevitably, however, I also ended up throwing in white and black. Designing 3 different covers, I ended up choosing the second one. The end result isn't too different from the draft with some spacing tweaks and additions. Organizing the final composition took far longer than I thought it would. I began just forming elements that would make a decent cover, but then I started to compress the elements on the page and realized that I could make something with a grid, and so the cover became what it looks like now.
Going through the pages, I struggled at first with how I wanted to present the talk itself. Eventually, I got an idea from examples I saw. I found that generous spacing and simple composition, used with Avenir for the typeface, allowed me to create compositions that were visually pleasant and easy to read. To get this, I had to adjust the line spacing and set about kerning where appropriate, such as when words are made to stand out. The warm colors I'd picked out really worked well with these techniques as well, or at least I believe. It is precisely the spacing and colors that really let me grasp the look I wanted to go for, so that the end result would create a comfortable, easy to read piece that was visually inviting but not overbearing.
As you can see, I often switched between having one or two columns of text present on a page. Depending on how many I had and how I wanted to control the spacing, I would adjust the text boxes to be either wider or thinner. The column lines weren't adjustable themselves, but they acted as guidelines, such as on a grid, that let me take up as much or as little space as I wanted. Section headers were tricky to deal with. I didn't want to repeat the same old header style. I wanted to keep the audience visually interested, so I mixed up how differently I did each head.
The two fonts I used were variants of Avenir and Egyptian Slate. Avenir was used for both head and body text, whereas Egyptian slate was used in tandem with Avenir in the header text while also seeing use in floating quotes. I would sometimes change the colors of certain words in these quotes for contrast or use a different variant of the same or some other font. This was done to highlight the importance of those words within their passages.
The composition itself was made to stay simple with changes made to differentiate certain pieces of text, which I believe was successful in it's implementation.
Together with scaling, color contrast, size contrast, space control, and composition in general, the visual hierarchy came together to make the header texts look notably different from the rest of the body text so that the audience understands that there is an important distinction to be had.
I know my mock-ups can look a bit wonky at parts, but it's a learning process and I'm trying to get there.
Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the final product and hope that it's enough to get me to pass the class!
Thanks for a good (though challenging in many aspects) semester!
