You are going to see a significant difference in these designs. Reworking "Exercise 1," yielded a more professional set of productions, at lease from my perspective. I'm interested to hear what you think. For readability, my target audience would most likely be attracted to the first of the three designs. Additionally the color scheme of the third design offers the most attractive earth tones that would draw the eye of my readers.
Michael – I’m giving you feedback on this before a few other students below you who have posted their Exercise 2, because one of these is due, printed, tomorrow. To begin, please review the text for these articles, and see that “The Future of Farms” is indeed content meant for a department, but “The New Face of Hunger” is really meant for a feature. It would be worth your time going forward to get clear about what text is for what section in the mag. Your audience appears to be 30-50 year old adults, and possibly male – is that right? In that case I think all these layouts speak to your audience. Departments often contain multiple short articles (you are allowed, and encouraged, to cut the type to fit your needs), multiple smaller photos to accompany the chunked sections of type, and an icon or line of small type identifying the department (like “Trends”, or “News”, etc). We have spent some time in class comparing/contrasting features and departments – make sure you are clear about this too. Don’t be afraid to include additional smaller photos on these pages.
ReplyDeleteBoth Layouts 1 and 2 look quite professional. I notice that both designs would benefit from allowing, and controlling, hyphenation so your lines fill out more fully. I wonder if the leading in Layout 1 is too tight, and the pt size too large? Consider starting the page with this large size which will create an “intro” paragraph, but after the first paragraph reduce the pt size for the rest of the page. This will give you some room to start another article on the page. Don’t forget to create a department title with its little icon/type.
Layout 2 has a few awkward “left over” neg spaces (bottom middle column, below photo) which need to hold something. What kind of element would work in these spaces? Photo caption (your audience might really want photo captions). Column Quote? Additional image?
Layout 3 could be the basis for a facing pages Feature spread – something you can move forward with for Exercise 2. It does have a great color palette (I agree), and strong editorial photo. Nice concept… and the design will benefit from having more pages to inhabit.
Lastly – I’ve mentioned to the class that although the manuscript has come to you with whole returns between paragraphs, you need to think about whether they work for you or not. The space can be reduced and/or eliminated if you find other ways to show us where your paragraphs begin - something to consider, especially on the department layouts.