Contents page research development

 This is my contents page development.

These are some images of examples of contents page based on my genre (sports, basketball magazines)

REFLECTION:

This is the second worst thing that I have to deal with out of the whole 3 projects that I have to do, this is as usual, due to my bad sense of creativity and design, I always had to ask my friends or my teacher for help. Every time I present my friends with a new design, most likely they would dismiss it. Another thing that makes this an absolute pain is I already worked hard enough on one design just to find out its just not it. So I had to change to another picture and another inspiration last minute on deadline week in order to somehow try to boost my grades up. I have learned to read magazines more frequently next time and try to fit in atleast 30 minutes of time every day on the next media project (I hope there is no more).

These are some contents page ideas that i sketched manually 

Slam

Out of all the screenshots I took from the internet, I have took one thing, and that is the fact that contents pages in sports magazines, particularly basketball magazines, have a tendency to show more of the athlete in question in the magazine, with smaller words but still visible to point out the main points that are being shown.

Here, I started with a picture, and experimented a font called Shrikhand, it does not look good at all in my opinion as the words are not quite visible due to the backround.

So I decided to revert to a blue colour on the font, which was a very stupid idea, as it made everything darker and the background was pretty much dark as well. Making the words not visible.

I asked my teacher how he felt about the presentation of this contents page alongside its themes and topics, in order to make the words clear, he gave me a suggestion to cover a part of the page with a shape of any colour in order to make the words visible.

Here on this picture on top, I changed the heading's font, into a more casual nature, while making my shape yellow, and making my words white in order to just test out which type of colours.

On this picture on top, I have asked for opinions from my friends, they adviced me to change the opacity of the coloured shape that covers my words, I think it looks better as the bright colour of yellow does not outshine the words. I also made the font Racing Sans in order to match the sporty vibe.

On this picture on top, One of my friends also suggested for me to play around with the gradient of the coloured shape, here, it makes the magazine look way more casual. 

EMERGENCY ADJUSTMENT

I think it kind of looks better than the previous ones, but something was still off. In my research, the ESPN magazine (2nd picture) uses small words as a short description on the articles. I also wanted to follow the convention of the cover athlete in the middle of the contents page.

So I decided to revert to this photo:

I used this photo as I am in the middle of the frame, I also used my knowledge of adding shapes in the sides of the picture as spaces to add the contents.

So now I would make this picture on top the main inspiration of my contents page. I like the simple and minimalistic nature of this contents page as it looks modern in which the younger generation likes (target audience in terms of age). The colour scheme would also be neat and simple, easy to look at and not complicated at all.

SECOND ATTEMPT WITH DIFFERENT PICTURE

In this second attempt, I started to follow the conventions of the role magazine that I just embedded on top, I put a heading and subheading, with the number of pages not being bolded, instead, I bolded the subheading, this is in order to conform with my inspiration, this was all over the place though, As the borders was aligning with nothing and it was all over the place.

On the screenshot on top, I decided to change to racing sans, but no matter how much I play around with the distance of the lines, It always comes off border or its either looks pretty off to me.

So on this screenshot on top, I reverted back to the font TT autonomous in order to keep the modern look.

Here, I just made my second subheading, a bit bigger, now its all done.

******CHANGE OF PLANS****

Same like the double page spread, I did not really feel good about my contents page after declaring it done, after some hours of consideration, I have decided to change my design as a whole in order to make it look good. 

Here, I decided to move my picture to the side, and add a large yellow box in the left side of the magazine, so far, I am liking the idea on how this would look, it is going to look very simple, it would conform also to the standards of my target audience, it looks way more minimalistic and neater, which aligns with the taste of teenagers nowadays.

Here I am experimenting with some combinations of big numbers, subheadings and letters, I have decided to bold the typeface Aileron as my subheading and make the typeface Norwester as my big number font, also bolding it. Bolding is connotated with masculinity, which is ideal to use in a spirts magazine regardless if it is a cover page, contents page or double page spread.

Here, I am playing around with my word placement and how to arrange it, I am doing this in order to create some unique modern design on this sports magazine in order to attract the eyes of my young audience.

This would be the final product, it certainly looks more like a magazine, more neater and better than the last one, I feel very good about this. This is good to go.

Magazine front cover layout development

This is my front cover layout magazine development.

REFLECTION:

Even though this is the easiest out of all the three pages that I have to do for this magazine, it still took me a long time and a lot of experimenting before getting the right one for me. And due to all the other amounts of work I had to do, I could not really shift my focus mainly on the cover (which is the literal image of the magazine) and I do not like to say this over and over again but the fact that I have zero designing skills makes it worse, I am not looking forward to doing this kind of project anymore.

This is my first attempt on playing around with coverlines and masthead alongside with a picture on google draw.

These are my rough sketches for my magazine cover, I haven't really chose any of them as I am still thinking about new ideas to determine which rough design is the best one.

I tried using this photo, in my opinion it is not very good as there is another person in the photo, as I wanted this magazine to be focused on only one person as the head and the soul of the magazine. 

So I decided to use this photo, it has other people of course, but the ball is in my hands (the so called celebrity in this magazine), which emphasizes that all the attention is on me shooting the ball. Even though this is a very good picture, the only problem is that my teacher (who gave me feedback) told me it does not look like I am a celebrity athlete in my own club as I am wearing a Manchester City jersey.

So I decided to revert to this picture, its all just me and the ball, the background is also neutral making me able to experiment colours of words and fonts without worrying if it can't be seen by the people reading or not. I would keep the colours of the heading white and yellow 

After I did all that, I experimented with fonts and added my main articles as coverlines while keeping my masthead with the classic canva font, I added words on both sides  in order to make the magazine look eventful

After consulting with my teacher about the design, he talked me to reducing the amount of words and changing the fonts, so I decided to only put the shoe names (to support my main article that will be in the double page spread). And remove entirely whatever is in the right side of my magazine. After asking my friends for recommendations, they told me to add a hint of black gradient on the left side to make it visible, while making the celebrity name on the bottom go to the right side of my magazine (conforms to the genre)

So this screenshot on top is basically what happened after I lifted the words into 100, I also asked my friends and they asked me to change the font (which I did, I hope you can see the difference between the screenshot on top and the one on this). I added barcodes in order to see how it will look like.

Here, I also added the plus icon and the word more in order to conform with SLAM magazines designs as I also took it as an inspiration, my friends says it looks better as I really have totally conformed to basketball magazines in my own style of fonts and typefaces and my own articles.

After consulting with my teacher, we decided to remove the plus icon and add the editions and make the barcode smaller, this really looks neater, better and more minimalistic, which conforms to the designs of magazines directed at the younger generation.

Here, I have changed,"HoopHub Feb'24" into just Feb'24, this would conclude the last part and the final process of my cover page as a whole. I think it looks insane, it is minimallistic and the colour scheme conforms to the conventions of typical basketball magazines who allign their colours with the cover artists context/jersey.