Process: Pigeon Hole Magazine Masthead

Hamlet & Story (c) 2012

It's been a while since I've actually updated any progress on what I've been up to with projects at uni - the purpose of this blog in the first place. Pigeon Hole was the name of our magazine for our project where we had to design a masthead, cover, grid, article layouts and style guide for our invented magazine. The first step was to obviously choose a name then design the masthead for it. 

First stage was to sketch out all our ideas and possibilities. I tried to explore and exhaust the possibilities of personality for the magazine's identity juggling between traditional and modern. In the end I compromised between the two and embracing the idea of merging boundaries between old and new.

Initially I went with this design as it was quirky and different in its stacked and varied letter width approach. The pigeon silhouette was actually done quite roughly which took 2 or 3 minutes basing it off a picture of a pigeon I found on google images (I thought pigeons were generic enough and it wasn't like I traced every edge of the bird). In the end I never changed it at all haha. 

Even though I got the okay from za tutor with the need of adjustments of the 'O' and 'P, something just wasn't working for me! For me it felt too quirky and I suppose you could say 'cute' and that wasn't really the personality I was hoping for. Because I really wanted to create something I would like by the end of the project I decided to go back a step and re-do the design. Looking back at my old sketches I decided to digitalise very quickly the other ideas I had. I thought going back to the serif could help create a more classic feel but something was missing from that too! So taking the initial font I designed I reworked it so that I took away the varied letter widths in order to strip back the quirk-attack and found that something nice was happening. In the adjusted version I decided to try out the different positions I had sketched out.

Hamlet & Story (c) 2012

With the finalised font idea came digitalisation, adjustments and refinement of type detailing to ensure balance and consistency: 

The letter P was seriously a killer! Quite possibly I was staring at the screen for too long... but there was something not right - it felt like the bowl of the P had a dent in it, despite it being straight... Trippy things optics does. I realise I always struggle when it comes to designing the P. I remember it was brain straining when it came to P when I designed the Vintage Tea Font. Remind me never to choose a word with P again...

Can you tell the difference?