Charlotte Macgregor

_{Typeradio.org is a radio station that presents interviews with designers working in the typographic industry; our aim was to make a designed magazine to supplement the web site. We were given a number of different artists, and told to listen to their interviews. We then had to use the interviews as inspiration for our designs. This made the project more interesting as everyone was attracted to different points of different interviews. We had to create these magazines on In Design to help build our professional knowledge of how magazine or book designers work. The artist who most caught my attention was Marian Bantjes, this is because I found her to be more bubbly and energetic than the other designers. I was also interested in some of the phases that she said, such as, ‘ a boat that won’t float,’ and ‘doodley kinda drawings.’ I was specifically intrigued into the phase, ‘ beautiful but masculine,’ as I saw myself being able to use contrast and opposites for a concept.}

_{I started off by thinking of type and how some typefaces are more masculine than others, but I didn’t want my magazine to be a typographical based magazine I wanted to use illustrations. This led me to look into animal prints and how some animals, such as tigers, are very masculine yet have a very beautiful print on their fur. However, after much discussion I had to drag myself away from this idea as I found that it might have become cliché. This made me think of more subtle creatures such as a peacock, and I decided to use that as my theme. The peacock feather is something that perfectly describes a beautiful but masculine being. I also liked the idea of using those colors for a magazine. Firstly, I decided to start experimenting with how I could illustrate the feathers, I started off by simply taking pictures of the feathers in all types of positions. I found that this was quit boring and didn’t really have as much depth as I would have liked it to have. I then tried to use ink ad water to create something slightly more detailed and interesting for a reader. I found that the water pictures were too harsh and didn’t show the natural beauty of the feather as much as the ink ones. I think that this is because whilst the feathers were dripping wet they lost their softness.}

 _{Then I decided to scan in pictures of feathers and use Photoshop to blend ink drawings and the real thing together. Using the exposure and the cloning tool I created ink and feather illustrations without getting the feather wet and oily. This meant that the feather was still soft and still as beautiful as what it should be, without too much distortion. Overall, I feel that if I had experimented more I would have probably found more interesting and effective ways to help convey this concept.  However, I decided to make a mock up book of the plain photography pictures just incase it worked better with my concept.}  

_{My final outcome had ink and feather illustrations, The first page is a simple picture of a feather with font that has extra tracking, I decided to do this purely because I thought it worked well with the size of the document and the illustration it’s self. I decided to go with the ink and feather illustrations because they were much more interesting than the normal photographs. My basic layout was a three-column spread with 6mm gutters. I found that the slightly bigger the gutter, the easier and more comfortable it was to read. I started my body text by making it align to the left and right, this messed up the ledding between short sentences compared to long sentences, this made it nearly impossible to read. In the end I simply aligned it all to the left. This kept it simple and consistent. As I looked into further depth of the text and the layout, it accrued to me that there were many annoying patterns within my body text. For example, there were many, ‘I’s,’ all aligned to the left in a row. This was catching my eye and pulled my attention away from the illustrations. I learnt that you are unable to use the return key to sort these problems out as they create new paragraphs with inconsistent spacing, it does not follow the baseline grid so I had to find a solution. I then found out that when you press shift and return this simply moves the text down the next line. This was the method I used to sort out widows and other patterns that should not have been in my document.}

_{In this case overlaying my images on top of text made it incredibly hard to read, so I simply played around with the size and location of the pictures, so that they had their own space and could be appreciated as much as possible. I found this process hard because there was a lot of body text to handle, and sometimes it becomes overpowering and uneasy to read. A way that helped to break up my text was to show a clear distinction between the interviewer and Marian Bantjes. At first I changed the color of the two people and left it at that. Looking into further depth of my work it hit my attention that not only is there I difference between the interviewer and interviewee, but each answer and question should somehow be linked together as well. This is where I used the Space after tool in paragraph styles. Originally I had just three paragraph styles, the interviewer, the title and the answers. I then created a new paragraph style for the, ‘end of,’ answers and made the space after bigger. To make sure that this did not affect my baseline grid I converted the ledding of the font into the space after section. This made sure that when I made a space after before the next question, it was bigger than normal paragraph breaks but still consistent.} 

This is my typographical specification for a double page spread of my design. I think that this is a really good and consistent way of showing a client or designer a brief because it means that everything will be done according to how the person want’s it. It also means that if there are mistakes you are able to refer back to the brief and see weather or not the brief was wrong or weather the designer didn’t follow it properly.