- Project Title: A&E Magazine Multi-Page Text Project
- Maker: Julia Kelley and Mike Lynn
- Genre: Magazine
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5800: Editing, Layout, and Design
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2022
Description
For the purposes of the multi-page text project, Mike and Julia designed an A&E style magazine, focusing on the arts at NSU and in the greater Fort Lauderdale community, created with a retro 1970s style layout fused together with some of the modern approaches to graphic design. The idea was inspired through Julia’s passion for the arts and Mike’s passion for history, and we combined both to create one unified project that communicated both of our interests into one cohesive design. We began the process by brainstorming the structure of the magazine, broken up into various pages with different concentrations of content. We also established the design’s style by selecting fonts and choosing a color palette that reflected an even split for Julia’s contributions to the arts (in blue) and Mike’s contributions to entertainment (in orange), represented with complementary colors. As it relates to software, we used the Illustrator design program to create the layout of our magazine, adding elements and content to the template throughout the project’s development.
Reflection
For this project, we faced some challenges with navigating the Illustrator program, as some of the tools that we wanted to utilize were difficult to find and difficult to navigate. Illustrator also crashed several times throughout the revision process, which proved to be a bit of a challenge. We utilized the readings discussed in class over the course of the semester and online resources to reference different design standards and learn the functions of Illustrator in order to develop the design and successfully execute the project’s vision. Particularly, the B&A articles on page design, color, and text and type, as well as the article “Writing as Design, Design as Writing” were helpful in the introductory and revision stages of developing the project, as they aided in our understanding of not only how design can initiate conversation through certain elements, but how these elements (color, type, white space, symmetry) can be transformed through specific visual choices.
The thought process towards the magazine was a balance of combined ideas from both Julia and Mike’s perspectives. For an arts and entertainment magazine, the binaries made up an even split – mainstream culture and counterculture, arts and entertainment, blue and orange colors, older conventions with newer graphic design strategies, so on and so forth. Creating this magazine from the ground up was a worthwhile process to showcase some of the best parts of the previously mentioned elements that represent both NSU and A&E at large. As opposed to a typical writing assignment, the means of challenging modern standards of graphic design allowed for some critical feedback towards the mainstream media / industry standard of composition with conventions from c. 1970s America. Personally, I feel that the most satisfying process was bringing older traditions back to breathe life into a new-age magazine. In terms of least satisfied aspects, Adobe Illustrator is a bit of a challenge to use and can sometimes be too complicated for its own good (in comparison to Inkscape), and I feel that potentially more allotted time would have allowed for even more ideas to fill up the magazine. Once again, remix culture has influenced the idea of taking older ideas and returning them in a modern context, providing a new meaning to older standards.
