For this assignment we were asked to pick and redesign a magazine. I chose Artra for the rebranding because as an artist I believed I could understand the nature and audience to come up with the best solution.
I started off with an analysis of the current magazine. Majority of the Artra covers had excessive white space that could be used to feature art and this gave me the idea for the theme and overall concept of the new magazine. It would be a spotlight magazine, promoting artists whenever possible within the boundaries of the publication.
For inspiration and benchmarking I looked at magazines such as Juxtapoz.
With that in mind I wanted to fix the mistakes that I noticed rather than create a whole new magazine from scratch. I made changes to the masthead by making the type bolder to stand out albeit using Futura. This would still appeal to Artra’s audience without changing too much. The magazines current size was a limitation to what it could have in terms of content so I decided to change it to the standard 11 x 8 size. Other changes were the body typeface. Futura for body copy was unreadable over lengthy text heavy paragraphs because all its simple characters looked similar. I changed it to a much more readable Calluna.
For content, the magazine would work around the spotlight theme. It would credit every artist where ever possible with a simple caption and a link to their portfolio. This way it would promote multiple artists in one article. The layout was a standard 3 column grid, large images and comparatively less text as opposed to Artra’s current use of small images.
I started off with an analysis of the current magazine. Majority of the Artra covers had excessive white space that could be used to feature art and this gave me the idea for the theme and overall concept of the new magazine. It would be a spotlight magazine, promoting artists whenever possible within the boundaries of the publication.
For inspiration and benchmarking I looked at magazines such as Juxtapoz.
With that in mind I wanted to fix the mistakes that I noticed rather than create a whole new magazine from scratch. I made changes to the masthead by making the type bolder to stand out albeit using Futura. This would still appeal to Artra’s audience without changing too much. The magazines current size was a limitation to what it could have in terms of content so I decided to change it to the standard 11 x 8 size. Other changes were the body typeface. Futura for body copy was unreadable over lengthy text heavy paragraphs because all its simple characters looked similar. I changed it to a much more readable Calluna.
For content, the magazine would work around the spotlight theme. It would credit every artist where ever possible with a simple caption and a link to their portfolio. This way it would promote multiple artists in one article. The layout was a standard 3 column grid, large images and comparatively less text as opposed to Artra’s current use of small images.
Current Cover layout design of the Artra Magazine.
Overall this was a very educational assignment and I learnt a lot on the importance of usage of grids in a publication, how to fully use Adobe InDesign to best suit publication design needs, use of type in copy and understanding target audience. I hope to use this knowledge in future assignments.
