DXB302 Magazine Project | Tada Jankovic

Skinned Magazine - The Process

Week 8

This week was very much an introduction to the magazine project and just involved finding general inspiration wherever possible. I was lucky enough to be placed in a group with Sia whom I had already worked with for assignment 1, as well as Vivian and Lilian who are both really talented designers. After being sorted into our groups, we started tossing up various ideas of what topic to focus on for our magazine, such as travel or fashion. We weren't 100% with these ideas though so after more discussion, a tattoo magazine was suggested which we all really liked the idea of so we decided to go for it. I spent the rest of the week curating a list of tattoo artists I follow on instagram and really like, as possible candidates to research in the magazine. I also gathered inspiration images of black letter, as I thought it might be cool to possibly include some hand-written titles in the magazine inspired by this style (but we decided against this as it wasn't the aesthetic that we were going for). I also created a Pinterest board where I pinned a bunch of minimal yet innovative design layouts that we could draw inspiration from for our own design approach.

Week 9

This week we locked down our tattoo magazine idea and our target audience, which was going to be 18-35 year old millennials with an interest in design and tattoo culture. Once we confirmed this information, we started researching into tattoo publications to see what was already out there and how we could make Skinned different. Since I had already known of TTTism magazine, I showed it to the rest of the group and we all really liked its design style (from what we could see online) and agreed that this was the kind of direction that we wanted to go in for Skinned. We also started researching into what kind of tattoo imagery to feature. Ed Taemets' work particularly stood out as most of his works are photographed against a black background which would have looked really nice in the mag. We unfortunately didn't end up featuring him though as we couldn't source any high quality images of his work. I suggested that we feature Grace Neutral in the magazine some how as she is already well known in the tattoo/body mod community and is a really interesting person, so I started searching for articles about her online. I also thought it would be a good idea to feature the Australian Tattoo Convention in the mag, seeing as the Sydney one had just passed and the Perth one was coming up in September.

Week 10

In week 10, we started compiling all of our inspiration and research pictures to discuss what kind of content we wanted to feature in the mag. We also established our flat plan this week and were assigned with the spreads that we were going to be working on. I was assigned a feature designer spread focusing on Grace Neutral, the events spread on the Australian Tattoo Expo (showcasing the Perth expo coming up in September) and a personal story. I decided that I wanted to photograph my friends tattoo and interview her about it for the personal story, although this didn't end up working out due to lack of time and planning. I eventually replaced the idea and decided to focus on Rick Genest (Zombie Boy) instead. I continued researching articles to use for the Grace Neutral spread and came across the one that I ended up using from sangblue.com (by Reba Maybury). We also started researching and finalising colours to use in our colour palette, including millennial pink and a chocolatey red shade that mimicked natural skin tones, as well as neutral, grey, off-white and black shades to complement the colours. In addition to this, we also looked into typefaces to use in our mag and finalised our header, sub-header and body typefaces. I suggested some old english typefaces to possibly use as an accent to our other more simplistic styles but again this wasn't the look we were going for. We ended up narrowing our selection down to lane narrow, clemente, aliens and cows and oswald, with clemente eventually being kicked out as we didn't like how its curly features looked with our other sans serif typefaces. Our 4 x 3 grid was also created this week, and we all sketched out some rough thumbnails to prep for the design phase.

Week 11

This week we began sourcing and saving images to feature in our spreads. I started looking at Grace's tumblr pages and saved a bunch of images onto my hard drive. When I went to to open these images in inDesign and photoshop, none of them were working which unfortunately hindered me from making progress on my spread design. I eventually figured out that I had to firstly export the desired images into pdf files, before opening them in photoshop and modifying them to CMYK mode and 300dpi so that they were ready for print. Once this was all sorted, I started experimenting with layout for my Grace Neutral spread. We also finalised our grid this week and had a discussion with Sarah about our gutters. She suggested that since they were so narrow, we could make an exemption to double them in size when needing to place bodies of text/images next to each other. We additionally started researching books to possibly feature in the product spread. I suggested possibly looking at some sangbleu publications but Lilian ended up going with some books from the Russian criminal tattoo encyclopaedia series for her spread.

Week 12

I finalised and edited my selection of images for the Grace Neutral spread in week 12, as featured in the collage below. I also continued working on the layout and started experimenting with columns of text to place below the image on the second page. I started off with 4 but that looked way too crowded, so I minimised it 2 two but that also looked wrong and unsuitable for a magazine layout. I later ended up changing it to 3 columns which finally looked good. We all continued working on our spreads this week, as well as finalising certain design elements as a group such as justifying our titles to the left/right depending what page they were on. With this, I started playing around with an alternate layout for the title page of the Grace Neutral spread. I tired keeping the background graphic that I started off with but I later decided to get rid of it as it just wasn't working with the overall design and look I was going for. I also made a start on a possible layout for the events spread, using images from the Australian Tattoo Expo website. Although these were later discarded and replaced with a different b&w image I had sourced elsewhere as the graphics from the website were too bright and bold to use and looked jarring against all the other imagery in our mag.

Week 13

This week was when I really started making proper progress on my spreads. Below are various screenshots taken throughout various stages of developing my spreads, where I was experimenting with images, layout, text wrapping, tracking, placement, etc. The text wrapping for the call out quotes on pages 5 and 6 of the Grace Neutral feature took some trial and error as I wasn't sure where or how to place them without the text over-flowing off the page. I eventually figured it out and solved the problem, making the decision to mirror the layout as to create a unique and compelling effect, enhancing the already powerful images used. I also sourced and finalised the information and image to include in the Australian Tattoo convention events page as well as the personal story spread on Zombie Boy and made a start on designing those spreads as well. Since I didn't want there to be much text on these spreads, I enlarged the images to take up most of the space and be the focal point of the spreads. I didn't end up following my thumbnail sketches, as I didn't know what type of images I would be using at the point that I sketched them out. I only really followed the sketches I did for page 2 and 4. Once I finalised the images and started making progress in inDesign, I could really gauge what kind of placement I wanted to use.

My Final Spreads - 12 Pages Total

Week 14 - June 5th

Despite asking various different places, we were unable to find any printing service providers that could fulfil our printing/binding request of a single A4 landscape magazine. After temporarily freaking out, we emailed Sarah for help and Sia discussed what we had options we had with her over the phone. From there, it was decided that we would be taking binding into our own hands. Sia volunteered to bind the magazine herself whilst Lilian, Vivian and I would help to cover the the printing and material costs. Sia went forward with researching d.i.y binding techniques, where she decided to go forward with doing a perfect bind for our magazine. She also printed out all our pages in black and white to gauge a rough idea of what the mag would look like as well as to arrange all our pages in order to ensure that everything was consistent.

June 6th

Today, Sia printed our magazine pages at Worldwide printing on 140gsm paper with a matte/satin coating for vivid, crisp details on the images. She also did some practise binds at home on scrap pieces of paper she had at home to practise and get a feel for the binding process.

June 7th

We met up as a group today to prepare for or final presentation and look over the printed pages. We noticed that some of the formatting didn't come out correctly, so Sia volunteered to reprint the pages at Worldwide. She also printed the cover at Officeworks on uncoated 160gsm stock to reflect the texture of skin and give an all round luxe feel to our magazine. Below are photos of her binding our final magazine.