There is nothing amusing about a velociraptor attack.

Magazine brief redux.

This will hopefully compile all the of the information I need for the magazine brief (and I was one of the unfortunate majority), I've also reread the brief and the unit because I was fairly sure I covered it all, but I've realised that I haven't.

I started by looking at existing magazines, unfortunately this consisted of the few that my family reads, first of all my Dad;

• Shooting Gazette.
• Classic Military Vehicles.- Whilst this is well laid out (done by a professional after all) it's still pretty ugly.
• That is it.

My mum reads very few magazines, though she occasionally picks up Woman's Weekly or Heat or some other godawful glossy aimed at middle aged women (no offense mum), so, using the magic of the Internet I looked up a few existing magazines for analysis;

• Twenty inspiring magazine layouts.

Analysis of magazines

1. Modern Design Magazine issue 13, July 2008

With the contents page, the hierarchy on the left hand page draws your eye to the large contents header, then towards the images down the right hand side of the page, then on to the text on the left hand side. With the right hand page the eye is drawn to the pictures first and then the text, with the black background creating a pleasant contrast and easing the eye slightly, although this would cost more to print.

Both pages on the Zero Carbon House use a two column grid on the left hand page and a three column grid on the right hand page, the left hand being used for the body copy, the right hand page uses its columns in a fairly unusual, with a little bit of information in the left hand column, and the middle and right hand columns being reserved for a large image.

2. Dwell Magazine

This is my favourite of all the magazines I looked at, it uses columns in an unconventional way; for example, it uses a three column grid for most of its pages, but uses two slightly out sized text columns and leaves small amounts of visually pleasing white space (I think perhaps that the designer was influenced by the Bauhaus, and whilst I would love to emulate this, I suspect that I wouldn't be able to pull off breaking the rule of thirds whilst still making my magazine look good)

It also makes use of the Golden Rectangle on its page titled "Clearly Canadian", and whilst it uses a large amount of colour, it really seems to blend them together well, sort of like a charming patchwork, rather than an overly busy distraction.

3. Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine

Of all the magazines I looked at, this was the most poorly laid out (which is strange seeing as they're all being designed by highly paid professionals). One thing that I have noticed with magazines (specifically gaming ones in my experience), when the artwork is important, but not central to an article, the designer never seems to know quite what to do with it.

The other thing I noticed about this magazine is the lack of positive space, they seemed determined to fill up as much of each page as they could, doing daft things like having unnecessary photos (everyone in PlayStation Magazine's target audience is going to know what a PlayStation controller looks like) and large splashes of eye jarring colour, combined with a poor use of hierarchy create difficult to read pages whilst upping print costs for no reason.

4. MM Magazine

This one doesn't seem to work oddly enough.

5. Modern Design Magazine issue 13, July 2008 (again?)

I think the link to this one is broken and going to the wrong place, but the pages displayed have some simplistic but very nice layouts, with the use of large images and large amounts of positive space.

6. MAP Magazine

This is a very rare thing, a magazine (or any kind of design work really) that manages to be busy in a good way, even though Dwell achieved this too, it doesn't go to anywhere near the the extent that MAP does.

It also makes wonderful use of block images and walls of text, but these seem to add to the charm, the designer consciously making it look like the type of magazine aimed at an older audience, with the content keeping it interesting for its target.

Information on printing costs and various things like that were hard to come across for a time, this is where moodle (the college database) and google come in, whilst I've linked to some of this before I shall now do it again comprehensively (and delete the old post);

• This is a link to the Gloucester College website. It has a lot of information on printing costs and the technical terms for printing, also their is a quiz, although you can only access it if you have a log in.
• An interesting article on starting a magazine on a shoestring budget.
• An enormous list of various publications that are doing something different with their layouts.
• The one thing I really listened to; a fantastic little article about laying out a magazine front page by Brad Hammerstron.

The next step is to compare methods for production and printing your magazine, then compare it to to PDF or POD (print on demand) magazines;

Now of course I didn't know very much about this, I've already looked at costs for printing but that's not too much help, it was clearly time for a quick google;

• Info on full colour magazine printing. For costing.
• Normal Printing
• The pros and cons of PDFs
• Print on demand Magazines.
• An online magazine that is either pdf or print on demand (saving massively on costs whilst limiting its audience).

Now the issue with normal printing is that most of the magazines won't be bought, as the last link says only about 40% of printed magazines leave the shelves, but the simple fact is that a magazine needs as much exposure as it can get if it wants to survive, hence why normal printing is the only viable option. Simply put; 40% of 1,000,000 magazines is much much better than 100% of 1000 (say for Pod or pdfs).

The Internet is massively popular, and this creates the problem of over saturation, if you simply see a magazine in Marks and Spencers that catches your eye, when you see its on your chosen study topic or how you make a living, you're more likely to pick it up than randomly searching for design magazines online (also who does that? No one, that's who).

After looking at all this I started sketching up my own ideas, which I have written about in the post below this, and once I'd gotten a fairly good idea of what I was doing I went on to create my magazine layouts.