Cover Development

In my magazine, I want the feature cover piece to be an illustrative cover based on breeding racehorses. Race horses are bred by breeding past winners of the sport to try and get the genetics of the winning ways of horses to pass down through generations. Some horses can be related to up to 9 winners. Obviously this covers intention is to be a striking image that is to draw in spectators of the sport that normally wouldn't look twice.

Development of design:

The basic idea on paper

Montage of photographs compiled together of past winners in illustrator.

Ussing silhoette, applied color palette to horse in a seperate layer in photoshop

Blending of colours using opacity levels

Background applied to the image. This is just a phototrace in illustrator bought into photohop and placed behind the image.

Illustrator file behind the drawing, changed opacity to have horses seeping through.

Playing with brightness levels to get a good balance between the two images.

Another version of the same image with the illustrator images 'stitched together' as an experiment.

Put into context with the cover layout in Indesign.

Horse Racing Publications

The problem with most horse racing magazines at the moment, is the fact the target audience is of the older generation. This is very much evident in the design and layout of the magazine covers and the features that lie within them. There is no consideration of the font or the composition, other than a generic tabloid layout which doesn't really stand out.
This is why I am intending on creating a horse racing magazine with more emphasis on younger audiences. The focus on layout, composition, and type within the magazine can make a great amount of difference to the appeal to the audience. It would still probably appeal to the older audiences that already read them, but just make them a little more exciting than the format they currently stand in.

 Racing ahead is a monthly racing magazine.
It uses the same grid layout every month for the cover and insides alike. The fonts on the cover are overused throughout the magazine, and look dated.

An inner page feature from racing ahead.
Standardised tabloid layout. Nothing which really involves you within the magazine. Text flowed throughout columns. Layout is still in the past.
The images throughout are generally constrained to the same placement throughout. The images are also confined to square or rectangular frames.

The Racing Post is one of the more popular racing publications. It follows the frameworks of a newspaper for horse racing. The design of the racing post is better than Racing ahead, but still does not market the sport as it should be portrayed.
The fact that it is in newspaper format could be half the trouble. It faces similar layouts throughout due to the constrictions of the format.

Reappropriating magazines to new audiences

Intersection is a car magazine that is moving away from your standard car magazine. It comes from Dazed and Confused creators and is aimed at a different market to say top gear or Fast.
The intention of Intersection is to retarget the market of car magazines and essentially makes cars 'cool' again.

 

Intersection- Curb Your Enthusiasm

The imagery on the front cover shows the change of audience from your typical car magazine. The imagery is quirky, with the types of cars that they use for the feature cover page.

The hierarchy of the title is aligned with the curb within the image. as is the sub-headline.

Essentially, this is the aim of the magazine I intend to create, but rather than cars, I would like to market  horse racing to a younger audience.

I will need to find a design medium as effective as Intersection, that will target people between the age of 18-25.

Magazine Spread- Wired

Language as creation:

This is a couple of spreads from Wired magazine called language as creation.

The heirarchy of information is well planned out with the image diagonally moving into the text. The text has a role as an image as well as text within the top spread.

MUTE Online Magazine and Bi-annual magazine: Graphic Design

Mute magazine is a london based magazine that was created in the 90's. It exploresanalysis of art and technology in a modern society. Mute magazine is an online magazine, but also publishes bi-annual journals with collections of articles. Mute broke away from the standardised magazine of the 90's and was a lot more experimental in  the design and layout of the published journals.

http://www.metamute.org/

The following images are taken from Mute Magazine Graphic Design.

The layout of this page from Mute still conforms to a magazine layout. They are a lot more experimental in how they do this though. The shapes that are used throughout this page are leading you through the page. Your eye is drawn to the green shape. You then follow this down to the cut out countryside which goes up in to a cut out of an industrial image. This will then lead you to the start of the text with its larger text at the beginning.
This is a well thought out and composed image.

The layout of the page in question here incorporates the overlapping of graphic image with text. This involves the layout of the page with what you are reading. It is as much about the graphic imagery under the text as it is what you are reading.

The use of space also draws you through the page.