FANFARE Magazine (July 2015 Issue)

One of the first projects I took part in at University, was for the course 'Design For Print'. This was the very first time I had properly used InDesign as a software to produce a piece of work that was going to be published. I had learnt the basics of the Adobe software packages when I studied A-Level media, however over the course of the module, I gained a real insight as to what elements were appropriate for each form of print.

Using Adobe's InDesign, I initially created a newsletter for the local community - a task that was very simple, but tested design rules and formalities. I learnt about colour schemes and contrasting colours. Additionally, I gained knowledge about connotations and denotations of individual colours. From this, it gave me a great understanding of how colour can portray and change a reader's emotions or views towards a piece of work.

I also learnt about the importance of the target audience, be that demographics, socioeconomic factors or even the age of the receiver. All of these individual factors have such a large impact on the overall read and layout of the designed piece and this helped immensely when starting my final project of the module.

The 'Magazine Design' project was my first published piece of work - even if it was only published in the University magazine! Our brief was to design three double page spreads, a cover and a contents page for a full-colour, printed, monthly magazine. The magazine covers topics including contemporary culture, art, drama, music and twenty-first century life.

As I was only designing and creating the layouts for the magazine, the literature was given to us in advance. Not only did I have to source and find appropriate images to support the text, but I had to ensure that what was written fitted into the layout I had created. This did become hard at times, as making sentences flow around images without breaking the flow of text, was extremely hard.

I decided to focus on the double spread on movie reviews. As a movie lover, I thought it would be important to focus and work on something I am enthusiastic about. Below, is a photograph of my finished work that was published in the University Of Buckingham's Fanfare magazine.  

Front cover of Fanfare magazine.

My design for a double page spread for movie reviews. 

Accreditation of design editors and writers (below contents). 

Using Adobe's InDesign and Photoshop enabled me to produce work of publishable standards. Additionally, it gave me an opportunity to play around with the software and test new ways of creating the vision that I had in my head. I wanted the pages to look clean and crips. Using a simple colour scheme of red, black and white enabled me to let the reviews and images stand out. I then placed page dividers to clearly define each review, and then a simple star system for rating the movies.


ECP.