Hooray for Carbuncle

By provided brief I was required to design a cover and and two double page spreads for an architecture focused magazine - Arkitek.
I explored a range of ideas using hand generated visuals. The text was supplied and must have been use all. Images was left to my choice in terms of content, and "treatment", but must have been art directed and created by myself.
I could choose any format for my magazine solution although each individual page must have been larger in both directions than a standard A4.

I started off by exploring and gathering ideas form variety of magazines. Do not really remember the titles of all the magazines on library shelf that I looked at but some that inspired were "GQ UK", "GQ France", "GQ Australia", 'GQ Russia", "GQ Italy", "GQ Germany" "GQ India", "Esquire UK" and "Esquire Czech republic". Issues are available online in PDF format. GQ issued in different countries are completely different layouts, designs and solutions from each other, what was quite interesting to compare. I would say my favorite ones are UK, Russia, Australia and Italy.

My first attempts to design a news pages!
Found it the most difficult and complicated to design. Here are some rough thumbnails for individual articles that will be put and organized together to build a nice layout.
Base and inspiration sources were:
Variety of magazines;
Books:
Typography Now, Next Wave by Ricky Poynor, Edward Booth-Clibborn.
Frost (Sorry Trees) by Lakshmi Bhaskaran
The Art Director's Handbook of Professional Magazine Design
The Best Of Newspaper Design (Edition 28,29,30)

And here I have got some of my rough thumbnails for double page spreads for the introduction article.
It was much easier to design because there was much less text provided than for the news double page spread.