Critique: Bright lights, bright colors.
This week we worked on a prototype for a magazine that the publishing capstone is creating and my worst fears came true: neon colors. But subdued. And minimalistic. And neon colors. Wait, what?
Yeah. The concept is a teen magazine, called Vive, thats mission is to promote healthy living and energy for young girls between 14-20. The concept is great, no doubt about it. If you have heard of Darling magazine (I’m obsessed) that is what it reminds me of, but aimed at teenagers. So I set to create a J. Law worthy cover, two department pages and a feature spread on vanity sizing to show to my fellow designers. Since there are two of us working on prototypes to pitch to the publishing class, I got to compare my work on the magazine to one other designer.
Hilariously enough, our designs were very similar. Same fonts, same colors and even the same department styling. While I am glad to know we are on the same page, which will make working together a breeze, it is difficult to know if we are on the right track. A lack of images that the editorial side wants to work with and really no direction on the stories they are writing creates some big design obstacles. I guess I inherently knew how much a design is connected to the content but because my previous work was me designing and producing content or working way in advance on content, it was never so apparent to me that editorial can really hold up everything if they have no idea what they are doing.
To me, the idea of such a teen magazine should be fun and whimsical, like a teenager could have created it but with more polish. I opted for a handwriting script and a san serif font for the two main typefaces. The body text is a simple, easy to read serif that compliments the other two nicely. Simple, clean and easy to manage: three fonts.
I wanted to make my cover stand out a little more so it looks a little different than your typical newsstand version. You can read the cover lines however I don’t have any big draw boxes or added numbers and signs. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing but to me it creates the simplicity and minimalism that the group wants without the boringness of it just being there.
I know that this work is going to evolve a ton – a lot of it even happening in the next few days – and I am excited to see where this goes. It is definitely a challenge and out of my comfortable design aesthetic but I am ready to tackle it. And the neon colors.