Horizon cover

My complete design of 'Horizon' magazine cover...

This siluete of a man on a horse is a statue of Prince Albert located in Wolverhampton and so I thought that it would nicely fit on the cover to represent the city.

My main idea was to use a flat image on the cover, so when I started to manipulate the image I could not get desired effect, it was too flat and boring. Then I thought that I should try to turn the image upside down which made it look not as horse and rider, and I think it worked out quite well. And by adding some bleeding ink effect made it look energetic and interesting.

Also the main heading was meant to rise of the base of the image and the bottom of 'horizon' was sort of fading out but when I printed my first copy out it did not work out whatsoever, maybe that's because of not good enough knowledge of In-design software, so I decided to leave it as it is.

Experience W'hampton

By the given brief had to write an article about Wolverhampton and the Black Country of minimum of 250 words and to design page layout related to the subject.
It took me ages to figure the subject what I would like to deliver and at the beginning was struggling with that and made a mistake by starting to design layout without the title.
Eventually I decided to write body of text about  general stuff of Wolverhampton which was symbolically called "Experience Wolverhampton"

After I've done some research for inspiration I have come with this layout design. In this work I decided to use an image to complete my intended design and make it even more relevant to the subject. The idea was to have silhouette of Wolverhampton's skyline.

Based on my thumbnail produced this digital version, which did not turn out to be very successful and had to be improved. Got here a salad of typefaces, no aliments and bad composition.

After taking everything on board I started to work on design and composition and came up with some interesting ideas. I completely redesign main body text replacing randomly positioned columns around a quote with two nicely balance little columns, moving the quote away and aligning it with 'hampton'.
Also positioning 'p' and 'h' so that the are joining the big 'W'

Horizon II

Have been working and improving one of my double page spreads. In the previous post I posted a rough test piece of it, which must have been improved.

Particularly had some issues with choosing relevant type face for the article and the most difficult part for me was to decide where to position the introduction copy :D
For the main body text I selected light Helvetica type face and in the first draft for the sub-headings was used another typeface which now is forgotten because was advised to use not more that two different typefaces, otherwise it would be just a salad :D  So for the main heading as well as for sub-headings it was decided to use Didot type face which became one of my favorites.

In terms of layout design I did not want to use any images so instead I tried to use type as image, think these massive 'hello', ampersand and 'welcome' look quite balanced. I arranged them more to the left hand side so that the main body text would not be all over the place.
In this design I tried, with some difficulties, to align everything as much as possible. Such us introduction is aligning with the top of the 'L' and first two columns of body text with the top of 'W' and 'l' and so on...

Horizon

Working within supplied design guidelines I have to design and introductory section and cover to complete my zine.

Here is on of those less unsuccessful thumbnails that I decided t take further and produce a digital version of it.

Here I tried to manipulate with heading 'Hello and Welcome'

The idea was to position the ampersand behind 'welcome' in a way so that the top curve would align with 'hello' and the curve would replace 'O'. However when I started to do that in In-design it did not look as good as on the thumbnail. It turned out to be 'hell and welcome'.

 

So I added that poor 'O' but it still didn't look balanced so I decided to put it in an angle so that it matches the angle of that curve and doesn't really stand out of the overall composition.

(cover is still to come)

Clever Typography

Researching about typography have come across some very interesting pieces for some might be design inspiration. There are gathered 40 Creative Typography Logos created by talented designers. Those logos include wordmark and lettermark logo designs as well as some pictorial logos that have used typography innovatively.

It shows how the clever use of typography and characters can be when used in conjunction with white, negative, positive spacing, colors and accents to create a logo that effectively communicates to the world your business’ personality, identity, essence and individuality.

http://speckyboy.com/2011/05/11/40-creative-logos-with-clever-typography/

Some of my favorites:

ANT

3EE

 BLANK

 DOWNTOWN

SEVEN SPARROWS

 LOOK

 UP