Legato Magazine
Pratt Institute / Fall 2011
Project: Create a new magazine. I went for a classical music magazine, because 1) I really love classical music, 2) there aren’t as many magazines in this category as others, and 3) I wanted to make classical music look more exciting. The existing classical music magazines all had a similar feel, an expected one—elegant, classic, yet not as refined or stylish as the top-selling fashion/entertainment magazines. I wanted to maintain the classic quality, but with a dynamic flair.
“Legato” is the name I came up with, literally meaniing “tied together.” In musical notation, it means that the notes are played smoothly and connected. I designed the masthead in a way that the letters were all indirectly connected, with a style both modern and classic. The tagline is “Classical Music That Rocks!”
original sketch
For the cover, I chose an interesting article I found in an existing magazine, Listen: Life with Classical Music, Fall 2011, with the title, American Orchestras: State of the Union. It was about orchestras coming up with creative solutions to disseminate music to new audiences and go beyond the concert hall. One of their major projects was to actually travel to places where classical music performances were scarce, in order to (quote Bob Anderson from the article) “bring music to people rather than expect them to come to you.” Taking that concept, I titled the head article Orchestras Hit the Road: Bringing Music to the People, and designed an image of an orchestra on a road trip, playing music inside a bus! As I was not able to hire a real orchestra or a charter bus to photograph, I had to photoshop many different images together in order to carry out the idea. It was challenging, but turned out fairly well—after all, it’s not everyday you see a rumbling orchestra on a bus.
