DARKLIGHT
Lifestyle Magazine
Lifestyle Magazine
In Lisa Rosowsky’s Typography III course, our final assignment was to produce a magazine in order to show our ability to handle text-heavy layouts. We were asked to supply all of our own material for the magazine, from articles to images. Excited by the opportunity to have full control of a project, I decided to make a magazine directed towards an audience I knew very well: young professionals, 20-35 years old, interested in all creative mediums such as fashion, photography, music, and film. I wanted the magazine to feel edgy, modern, and luxurious.
Choosing the content for this magazine was exciting for me because I had free reign to pull in inspiration outside of the design world that interests me on my own time. ‘Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All’ had just emerged onto the scene, and I jumped on the opportunity to include an interview with a member named Tyler the Creator. In this spread I started to play with the form of the black and white photographs being reflected in the columns of type while still keeping the page design crisp. I brought this concept into the ‘Living Color’ article about the new Pantone Hotel by reflecting the geometric shapes in the photographs of the hotel in the shapes of the text.
During this semester, I was also taking a course titled ‘Free Speech, Free Art, and Law’ in which we learned about legal cases revolving around working artists, copyright laws, and when artists have become victims and forced to forfeit their freedom of speech. For our final paper in this class, I wrote about an experience I had with Facebook where I was forced to remove images I had posted to a limitedaccess ability photo album of a good friend of mine just after he had his first trans-gender surgery. I was thrilled to be able to pull in outside work of both my writing and photography, as well as use the magazine as a vehicle to translate my political ideals.
During this semester, I was also taking a course titled ‘Free Speech, Free Art, and Law’ in which we learned about legal cases revolving around working artists, copyright laws, and when artists have become victims and forced to forfeit their freedom of speech. For our final paper in this class, I wrote about an experience I had with Facebook where I was forced to remove images I had posted to a limitedaccess ability photo album of a good friend of mine just after he had his first trans-gender surgery. I was thrilled to be able to pull in outside work of both my writing and photography, as well as use the magazine as a vehicle to translate my political ideals.
The most exciting part about this entire project was actually coming to the decision on the name of the periodical. I settled on Dark Light, which reflects the varying ideals in the creative community, and the gray area found in all work by creative people. This title, light/dark later became my personal catch-phrase for my design philosophy: my approach in taking heavy, controversial, and even dark topics, and making them beautiful and accessible to a wider audience by using subtle design. Finally, this magazine was a good exercise in choosing materials. While I wanted some aspects of the design to be traditional, structured periodical layout, such as the column format of the text and the regular running heads and headers, I wanted some part of the form to reflect the content. So, I chose to print the cover on a scrumptious canvas paper so that the featured photography would be printed richly and stand out among the other magazines on the rack.
