CDF Project 5: Magazine Spread
11/18/2020:
Introduction:
In this project, I am being asked to employ the design principles I’ve learned thus far to create 3 digital 11"x17" spreads for a digital magazine. The spreads should fit within the ethos of the publication I have chosen.
I can tell already that this is going to be a problem. I don’t read magazines unless they’re for fiction, creative nonfiction, or comics. In other words, I only read 2 articles a month from The New York Times and I used to subscribe to Weekly Shounen Jump when I was little. I have been enjoying another class called Survey of Forms: Fiction immensely, although my term story was admittedly eviscerated in class yesterday. Well, I’ll give it my best shot.
Exercise:
I was given some magazine spreads and asked to trace them to identify their underlying grid pattern. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all of them seem like column grids to me.
This makes sense to me, given that column grids are among the most flexible options. The constant horizontal width of the body text within each column provides an underlying structure, but you can vary the height and width of the individual body text columns to accommodate figures, graphics, titles, and emphasized quotes, which may or may not span multiple columns. (In other words, some columns may be wider than others, but they are never tapered.) The slight irregularities and the accompanying negative spaces add visual interest and allow the designer the flexibility to emphasize certain elements as they see fit.
It depends on the spread, but for most of these, the majority of the column widths remain constant. Exceptions arise for columns containing information disparate from the body text (see: the Computer Science Awards column on the right). On that note, you can see that the grid largely holds up across pages for the lower left and upper left spreads, and does not for the upper right and lower right spreads, which have “special” columns: one dedicated to computer science awards that is narrower and set apart, and one containing enlarged body text underneath the oversized title, respectively.
Gathering Materials/Brainstorming
When I was younger, I really wanted to be a children’s book illustrator. Now I’m older, and I want to illustrate any book, regardless of demographic. I read a short work of fiction for my writing class called “A Sheltered Woman” by Yiyun Li, published in The New Yorker in 2014. The static-y PDF I read it from is peppered with unrelated cartoons and advertisements. I think it’s a beautiful story, and I want to reformat it without the superfluous content and with the addition of a few illustrations I would create myself. (*There is already a beautiful title illustration, but only one.) Given that the original story is 8 pages and I only have 6, I’m not going to fixate on trying to fit it all, and just focus on the parts with the strongest imagery for me.
While The New Yorker used column grids even in that PDF I read, it seems that most digital magazines I can find nowadays, even those publishing in PDFs, tend to lean towards manuscript style grids. This makes sense, given that we usually read on screens — I’m wondering if I can get away with doing it as a manuscript style grid, or if I’m pushing my luck.
I was especially taken with 3Elements, but they’re the worst offenders. It’s essentially a book with some pretty cover spreads in between, so I don’t think there’s enough room for creativity there.
Many of the others I found were already intended for web format, such as AADOREE or A-Minor; both featured Table of Contents in the form of hyperlinks leading to works formatted for web scrolling, which makes a lot of sense but isn’t logical for this project.
11/23/2020
2 things:
- The New Yorker publishes its fiction in a very consistent format. It seems to be column grid or bust. To be honest, I don’t care for it; it strikes me as overly restrictive. On the other hand, limitations give rise to ingenuity?
- Anna seemed to imply that if I had something that would fit the 6 page limit better, I should lean towards that, so I’ll use a story I wrote. It’s not very good, but it’s not bad either. It’s about the right length, and it’s already written, but I’d like to revise it one more time before I really begin to put the spreads together.
Here are a few spreads from stories in The New Yorker:
I got distracted reading the above piece. My grandma was born before the split in the northern region, but moved to and sided with the south before she immigrated to the US, so when people ask whether I’m North or South Korean I’m not totally clear on the correct answer. Anyway, stories like this are why I like The New Yorker.
Note the unrelated illustrations and comics scattered throughout. As you can see, they’re very consistent in format (3 columns of uniform width), but the opportunity for creativity arises from the placement of illustrations as well as the illustrations themselves.
While it’s true that The New Yorker has a really distinctive layout that it conforms to rather strictly, I’m not sure I want to match it 100%. I want to try getting away with something a little more adventurous without breaking that mold so far as to become unrecognizable. There’s a sense of symmetry that appeals to me about 1-third from top and 2-middle. I’ll ask my instructors about their opinions tomorrow.
11/24/2020:
Anna gave me the following feedback from our talk; due to limited Internet connection, we weren’t able to have an extended conversation, but she said she thought the ones highlighted in green held the greatest potential.
Seems like she wasn’t wild about any of the middle spread ideas, which is okay.
Thanksgiving break week:
I’m going to be very honest here and admit that Thanksgiving break brain got to me and I actually completely forgot to fill out the homework and ended up throwing together a draft on Tuesday 12/1/2020. That said, I have now retroactively completed the assigned homework on 12/11/2020 based on the sketches Anna liked. I recognize and accept full responsibility that the only reason my very first concept ended up working out was because the New Yorker has such a consistent format, and I could have maybe even come up with a better result if I hadn’t been irresponsible. But what’s done is done!
Option 1:
You’ll notice that these are somewhat reminiscent of the lower-left and right-middle sketches, with something entirely new for the last page. While I was laying these out, I found myself frustrated with the huge blocks of text. It just didn’t feel fun enough to me. That’s why there’s that huge image on the 3rd spread. I also moved things around in the second spread from where I started with the sketch because I already had the kitchen illustration done. It matches the scene on the left page, but I felt it summarized the feeling of the story well enough that it needed to take up a large space.
Now, to develop spreads based on the other ideas Anna liked.
Option 2: [currently unavailable because my home wi-fi went out and I cannot access virtual andrew while using my mobile device as a hotspot, so I’m unable to retrieve my work for this part. If you see this, I accept the L, but I intend to get up tomorrow at like 6 AM to try again and see if my home wi fi is working again.]
(Yes, I recognize that the text has a lot of hyphenation and spacing issues; I’m mostly examining the shapes it forms.)
Honestly, this is much more in keeping with the style of The New Yorker, but it’s significantly less practical. I’m not trying to dunk on the designers there, because they’ve cultivated a specific aesthetic that works very well for their publication, but the large unbroken blocks of text in their articles can strike the reader as intimidating, which goes against the concepts emphasized in this class. Hence, I leaned towards Option 1: it’s more consistently broken up, which makes it seem easier to read. That said, I can’t say I’m not tempted by the sheer visual impact any illustrations in this layout would make. It looks very clean and bold. But honestly, something more playful just suits me as a person better.
12/1/2020:
Here is the draft I submitted to the interim critique board; I didn’t have the time to finish all my illustrations before the critique, which annoyed me, but the overall composition was more important in the first place.
The response from my classmates was…kind of nonexistent? It has a very consistent grid, but that’s about all there is to be said about it, good or bad. To that end, most of the critique from my peers asked for more liveliness. They liked the illustrations, and suggested bringing more of their elements into the text via colors or small versions used as spacers.
12/3/2020:
Based on group critique, here is the updated version:
I don’t know what’s up with those borders. I have them set to No Stroke.
My classmates and instructor suggested including little bits of illustrations as spacers to help break up the text, and I ran with that.
You’ll notice that I have the illustrations done! A few notes on that process: I chose the scenes I felt stood out in my mind most clearly, starting with the little kitchen. The skyline and the bar came easily to me, but I struggled with the end image.
I really didn’t like the first image. I liked the vibe of the second one — it seemed congruous with the story and the other illustrations: soft, warm, and a little lonely. But it struck me that the other 3 drawings had been steadily “zooming in” and I realized I wanted to keep with that theme. I gave the “hands on face” concept another shot, but this time I decided to keep the theme of anonymity by cutting off their eyes. But this time it felt less depersonalizing, and more private. I liked that.
And the final illustration:
12/4/2020:
I received feedback from my instructors pointing out the extra white space at the end of the last spread was distracting. There were also a few kerning issues that I needed to resolve by including some *very occasional* hyphenation.
I was still getting those weird boxes around the illustrations, but I have been informed that I not only need to set stroke width to 0, but also set Fill to transparent, so that will be fixed on the next iteration. Anna and Jiyoung said they could really start to see it coming together, which honestly made me really excited. I haven’t spent as much time on the actual design part as I did on the silly illustrations for this, but that follows naturally from my choice to “publish” in The New Yorker, which has such a strict grid format.
12/8/2020:
Things fixed:
- Anna and Jiyoung found a lot of widows and orphans, which I resolved this time.
- They suggested widening the space between columns in the grid; we’ll see if they ask me to widen them further.
- Finally got rid of those damn outlines.
- The page numbers were a little too close to the body text, vertically.
- There were a few places where the illustrations were not flush with the start of the text columns.
- Instructors also suggested pull quotes to break up the text a little more. To be honest, I really hate pull quotes; I always get confused and try to figure out why they’ve been slapped in the middle of unrelated paragraphs, but I guess it’s to lure in someone who’s just skimming.
I’m actually concerned as to whether spread 2 gets too busy with the pull quote, given all the paragraph spacers (the olives, the beads). I’ll ask about that.
Update with critique from Jiyoung:
- Last pull quote is unnecessary; eliminate and fill space with extended image
- Increase the spacing around pull quotes
- Subheading would be better as only one line
- Subheading line divider should reach to edges of text, like the line dividers around the pull quotes.
- Yes, the pull quote on the second spread is too cluttered/busy and would be better off on the left page, right side. (Unfortunately, that’s near where I pulled the quote, so I have to pick a new quote.)
- There’s “gapping” at the tops of some columns. This needs to be resolved.
12/11/2020:
2 main bits of criticism, although mostly people said they liked my illustrations. :)
- Anna pointed out I was having some exporting issues. Some images, especially small ones, were of lower quality. I fixed it; see below.
- Someone (I think Yuran? Or Phoebe? I don’t remember) pointed out that there wasn’t much visual cohesion among the different illustrations, which is an excellent point.
Reflections:
- This project was deeply personally satisfying to me, because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I’m very glad I chose it, even though I don’t think it was my strongest work by any means.
- I learned a lot of small tips and tricks to get text formatted neatly (avoiding those widows and orphans!)
- As a final project, it really helped me see the culmination of everyone’s work and how the skillsets we’ve built have honed in on these beautiful final pieces. Looking around at my classmates’ work, I saw it everywhere — here’s what he learned from the typography assignment, here’s what she did when she learned to illustrate from the poster series, et cetera. It gave me a lot of closure on the class.
- I had fun with it. I felt like I was pulling bits of thread from my drawings and weaving them into the text. It was an act of joy, but once again I ended up slipping into “feeling” over “thinking” territory. Oops! But that’s all right with me.
The final product (in high quality!) can be found at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IpHvImxzE_fOHpZyEND2FVkTQTKeat6/view?usp=sharing