Category: Magazine design.
Description: Self-created project for portfolio purpose that focused on a few spreads from a fictional children's magazine.
Challenge: I needed to understand their identity as a magazine and their audience.  I also needed to decide what colors, layout designs, type families, images, illustrations, and content would appeal most to their brand identity and that of their audience of a children's space magazine.
Solution: To understand their identity as a magazine and their audience, I researched current children magazines and current adult space-related magazines in circulation.  I also looked at science-themed children's nonfiction books.  I looked at their layouts, their color schemes, their typography, and their content to better understand the spreads I would be creating.  The magazine would be playful, fun, classy, a bit geeky, serious, and stimulating, catering to older elementary students that were thirsty for knowledge, interested in space, loved science, but also wanted to have fun.  It would also appeal to their families and caregivers who would want their children to the magazine to be entertaining so as to keep their interest but also full of knowledge and things they could learn.  With this in mind, I created the spreads.  For the layout, I created thumbnails and thought about how the content would flow from page to page.  I chose spacey colors or that of blues, blacks, and whites as the main color schemes.  For the type families, I chose fonts that were playful (for the headings) that complimented well with a more serious and easy to read font (for the body text).  As for content, I decided to design the cover, table of contents, one article, one advertisement, and a puzzles and games spread.  I also created the logo, and some of the spreads contain my own paintings combined with the digital content (ie. the crossword puzzle).  Citations of the images can be found below.