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Habitat Magazine

Habitat Magazine speaks to the urban city foodie. We live in these big cities and the hustle and bustle is always going causing it almost impossible to stop and sometimes indulge. Habitat brings us back. The pages of this magazine bring to life the love and need for a food culture even for the busy working person. The readers of our magazine are hard working adults between the ages of 23 to 50 who enjoy the gourmet food scene, adventurous eating, and current social trends going on in the world sustainability. The design on this magazine follows to offer information in a blog/info graphical sort of way, which is perfect for our readers who like to sometimes sit and read, but sometimes want their information in a quick glance. This audience cares. They care what they eat, they want to learn more about exotic foods of the world, from different places and what is the next big bite. They Love to eat, not Eat to Live and they like to be socially consciousness while they fill their bellies.

Design Process

The meat of the magazine. Content and concepts drive us to portray a clean-cut visual message to our readers every month. To achieve a high level of work, it took much research Creating, finding and adapting recipes, social buzzes, trends in the world, sustainable outcomes and solutions and that weird foodie trend that you just might get into. We want our readers to feel healthy, full, and when they close this magazine chapter, to feel as if they walked out of the hottest restaurant in town and ate the best thing ever. Blissful and Satisfied. The methodology behind the design for our magazine will evoke these emotions and will grab our target audience’s attention even before they open up to a single page.
For the color palette, which was a little complex and challenging to balance at times was formulated with color selection through a process from the images that were selected then finalized to be used. The primary colors were of course the red and yellow, but additionally green was selected since many of the secondary colors are a taupe and a nude, because those are the tones are found almost side-by-side in many of the natural, sustainable, Farm to table like food photographs.  This color palette had to be strong and striking but also it had to fit into the target audience, which is a social and sustainable group of people who like earthy tones balanced colors.
Image research is one of the most important parts of the visual design process. This is where you dive into a world of images coming at you and you have to find something that’s going to grab the attention of our reader which is finding something that showed a good variety of healthy foods as well as a nutritional and gourmet meals.  Finding strong images is a key part of any magazine layout because content is important but the images are what you see first and for my reader they are like I’ve said before sometimes into a quick glance and get a quick burst of information or they want to sit down cover to the whole magazine. The strategy I use for this, especially in my department was to create something that visually you could recognize somewhat before even reading the content. As an “food buzz,” you’re given a header for the paragraph or content but you see an image first that we’ll give you some sort of indication on what is this section going to be about would use my reader the option of glancing and choosing a section to read.  Another strong and hard decision made an image research is the cover photo. Finally something that is going to strike someone to stop, look, and say, ”hey I wonder what’s in this edition” is the end goal.  I chose for my cover a person caring as sustainable grocery bag with healthy foods coming out of it; this is the essence of this month’s edition. It reaches out to my audience to show that this person is not only sustainable by using a reusable grocery bag, it’s about healthy foods AKA “The Future of Food,” and gives insight to what is going on inside the magazine. Also, last thing I’m going to say about images is that there has to be consistency, we have to make sure that the message is going to show and reach our target audience but not compete with one another.
Typography is also a strong aspect of design that encourages or discourages people from reading or looking at a design.  For my target audience I chose clean tall balance typefaces. The modern city dweller loves to sea clean lines and is living in a much more into a world of what is going on now and san serif typefaces complete speak volumes to this target audience.  The choice that I made after much deliberation were Helvetica Neue light at a 10 point weight for my body copy which gives just enough size for reader at the end of my target audience to read and it’s small enough that it’s a pleasurable point size on a page. I stuck with many different typefaces from the Avenir Next Condensed family for my headings. Depending on the department or feature article there was some variation made to the point sizes and which weight I used or if there was a combination to create visual hierarchy in my design and a balance of flow for the reader.

Inside The Edition

Feature

Cover Story: How Our Eating Habits will Change

Departments

Editors Note

Our monthly letter from the editor to our readers to give them a little glimpse on what is trending in his world.

Health Corner

Update on food trends, what’s healthy, what’s the newest super food, diet crazes. This is the “Eat this not that corner,” the food is the next big thing.

This Month- Overused and Underlooked

 What’s Cooking?

Recipes, preparations, ingredients reuse- anything and everything you need to jumpstart or spice up weeknight meals

This Month- Salmon 3 Ways

Trending

The hottest section of the magazine. What are going on, every week new facts, ideas, goods and more? The hottest thing in the foodie scene

This Month- Food Buzz

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The Final Product