Project 4: Magazine Article

Of all the projects, this one was my favorite. I based it on my favorite K-pop group (ATEEZ) because I like their aesthetic and album covers, and I took inspiration from the color scheme of their first album.

My final layout was two articles that spanned one spread each, both from the ATEEZ Wikipedia pages. I used photos from Flickr, most of which were CC BY-SA 4.0 and published by the same user (the majority of the photos on Flickr of this group are uploaded from this user). For this project, I began by deciding on a unifying color scheme (orange and black), shapes (triangles and other slanted shapes), and fonts (Franklin Gothic family for headlines, captions, bylines, and other specialized text, and Sylfaen for body text). I created a vague template idea, which changed considerably, and found five photos to use on the spreads and cover page. I then created the infographic in Photoshop, using information about the group members and formatting it to match the rest of the magazine. I did find it difficult to create triangles that framed the members’ faces, so I chose to use circles instead — something I likely would not do if I ever redid this project.

For the articles, I chose photos that fit the themes of the article headlines (“ATEEZ” and “Performers”). The first article has photos of the members and their most recent tour, with a cutout photo of one of the members that I wrapped the article text around. The second page of the first spread has text sandwiched between two photos, creating a waterfall effect between the photos. The second article has a photo from a performance, and the infographic about member information. It has a pull-out quote-style caption (“No. 1”) to unify the two pages. If I had to redo this spread, I would have switched the infographic and text to flow better visually. Between the two spreads, I varied the amount of columns to have a total of four text columns on each spread (two on each page on spread one, and three and one on spread two). The cover page has a slanted nameplate to unify with other slanted elements. This was originally to reflect the photo, since the member depicted is leaning at an angle in the performance, but the photo I chose was not as angled as I thought it was. For most photos except the cutout on page 1, I added a gradient effect for readability and also to hide any awkward cropping. All of the pages have triangles and slanted shapes, with triangle folios in orange and black with Franklin Gothic Heavy Italic for the page numbers. The pages with the headlines have longer triangles in the corners to designate the start of the page. I used drop caps for the text to indicate the start of each article. Captions had either dark boxes behind them or were on more solid blocks of black/orange for readability, but were a smaller font than other Franklin Gothic text boxes to indicate a difference. Generally this assignment was very fun and I enjoyed it. Uploading the magazine to Issuu was difficult, I had to make some changes to the slanted text so it would be aligned properly (so in the original PDF it’s slanted weirdly and not at all aligned, but on Issuu it looks fine). Another difficulty I ran into was creating the slanted shapes — the pen tool is my enemy. Otherwise, I had a fairly easy time with this assignment and it was my favorite.

You can see the magazine on Issuu at the link below.