This week’s session was focused on finalising our feature articles which included the content and the layout design. As I had already made corrections prior to this session I was able to just concentrate on improving my layout and design. I filtered through the photos that I had gathered and chose the best ones that coincided perfectly with my story whilst also sticking to the guidelines we had set out in our design brief. I decided to use some images from Unsplash such as the poppy fields as I was unable to gather any and I felt that they were extremely necessary for my article.

As it was a story about a war veteran, I decided to use images of poppy fields as I thought it would reinforce the idea of remembrance which is a message I wanted to promote through my story. As you can see, I had edited the cover photo to make it look darker than the original image as I wanted to ensure it fit in with the rest of the magazine designs. This gave it a minimalistic touch with a pop of colour which is something we outlined as a key factor in our design brief.

 

After researching some other magazines that are similar to ours in terms of aesthetics I decided to take inspiration from some. An example of this would be the enlarged quotation marks which opened and closed the tagline on the cover page. I believe this is effective as it is a useful way to catch a reader’s eye.

To add to this, we were given a 4-8 page spread to work with depending on how you wanted to set out your feature. I decided that all my story needed was 4 pages as I separated my text in to 3 columns spread across two pages with the cover page also taking a full 2-page spread. To keep consistent with the poppy theme I placed two sets branching out in symmetry at the bottom of the page. I think that this design looks effective as it makes it aesthetically pleasing for the audience and meets the demands of our magazine.