Few projects have stuck around as long as this magazine cover, and for good reason. It's not the design itself that I have grown attached too but what the project represents and what was required to complete it. Aspects that stick around long after its removed from active viewing.
This cover was the final project for my first design course, as you could imagine I knew little beyond the basics, but I wanted to go all out with this project. So as I designed I also set about learning new tricks which became harder the more complex the design became, at the time only knowing basic Photoshop.
Eventually the design reached completion and I was able to sit back and retrospective the project. If I had access to programs like InDesign or Illustrator at the time I know it would have been easier but that wasn't the point. It required me to go beyond the current course material and do my own research on what was expected. I spent days at the magazine rack of my local bookstore researching covers and looking into color theory, something we wouldn't touch on for another course. The concepts of researching a project and the ways to make a design a reality, that is what's really important and can lift a project above its ascetics into something more, and for me this cover did just that.
What of the spread ? Part of another class project I decided it would be a perfect opportunity to bring back my magazine cover and again elevate it beyond its original purpose, focusing the spread after one of the topics I mentioned on the cover. At the time the Supreme Court Case on video games was a hot topic and I felt a story about the main organization fighting the battle, The ECA, would be perfect.
The spread itself was done in InDesign with assets made in either Photoshop or Illustrator with the article itself coming from the organizations web page or their Wikipedia article. By all accounts the copy wasn't the focus of the spread but still an important component so It was treated with as much care as any of the image elements I made, from kerning to grid alignment. Once completed I placed it in a mock up and combined it with the cover, making a more complete project.
