Process: Magazine Covers I

Looking back at what I had for interim, I realise now that woahhh I've come a long way - no way would I ever want to have the following as my final submission for my magazine covers project. As I mentioned previously in my masthead post the masthead was just not working for me in terms of personality and identity, I felt that the covers had strayed away from what I initially had in mind for the magazine. I thought they reminded of candy packaging or something of that sort (especially the colour issue). This however also goes to show how you absolutely cannot whip anything good up last minute (unless you are a genius).  Designing magazine covers was definitely harder than I thought it would be particularly when there needs to be a sense of series between the issues. I was super stuck at the beginning so these basically came out from needing to have something, anything for critique.

While I did have a good solid concept I think what got me so stumped was execution and finding the right visual language to express those ideas - the most important part of designing. One can have a good concept but if its executed poorly then it pretty much defeats its purpose. I knew I wanted to have a sense of the old with etchings, and old scientific drawings while still being modern but I think it came out too modern and graphical. Initially I thought that I could try something different by being super graphical but it just never felt right.

I was heavily inspired by Jonathan Barnbrook's BOS17 designs with the mix and match retro type actually. I was also quite obssessed with Neutra font at the time. Using newspaper grids as inspiration I worked out this composition for the cover but of course all you can see really are a bunch of blank boxes waiting to be filled. There were however other more pressing issues with it... like the fact that my masthead gets lost in the grid and you end up reading The Typography Issue as the magazine title. That image in the middle that's hard to read took about 100s of shots and sticky hands, which failed in the end anyways. The idea to add a reference to Beatrice Warde with the deep red colour scheme and wine glass was also pretty cliche even though I did try to add a new element by having the 'wine' escape out of the goblet to highlight the tension between Warde's Crystal Goblet and Ellen Lupton's Fluid Mechanics (Articles that were to be featured in the issue). Basically feedback for the typography issue was to strip back a little as too much was going on.

The Colour issue is actually a big joke - although I wanted to be quite minimal to reflect Kenya Hara's White and get a sense of energy/particles through the CMY(K) polka dots - it's quite obvious the colour issue was the most underdeveloped (afterall I made it in 1 minute).

Always the first stage to approach the design brief was a brainstorm and sketchstorm of all the possible ideas I had.

I didn't have my typography ideas drawn out in time for the interim covers but generally, sticking to the old style etching drawings I wanted to merge typography concepts with science/biology ideas e.g. anatomy. You can also see that this is where my diagonal and slicing imagery came in. The diagonal slicing of the barcode was however scrapped - tutor didn't like that idea so much.

Realising that time was running I decided to just start sketching actual images. I didn't plan to have anything refined I just told myself to just sketch even if it dodgy. The concept for technology was inspired by an image I saw once which had drawn twitter birds - I extended this idea by turning a manicule into the context of the facebook like hand. The twitter bird was meant to be in the style of etching and to represent 'tweets' I had strips of patterns which I wanted to be part of the magazine's visual language.

Here is the first version I threw together on the computer just to get a sense of what it would look like.