What is the Objective?
The primary objective for this project was to develop a cohesive, captivating, and harmonious layout and brand, emphasizing readability and consistency across all platforms. The cover also needed to capture the topic and issue aesthetics as it is an entry point for viewers.
Luxe Brand Identity
The chosen colour palette mostly features neutral tones in brown, beige, yellow-gold, and green for one of the spreads, aiming to emphasize the page content through bold contrast. This visual style was also achieved through font pairings: Coco Sharp, Bodoni URW, and ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro. Coco Sharp and ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro were selected for headings due to their bold sans serif look, drawing attention and impact. Bodoni URW Light and Medium Oblique, a modern serif font, were used in heading titles for its stylized appearance, giving additional depth to the pages. Bodoni URW Regular was used for body text due to its excellent legibility.
Overall Look
The overall style of the magazine is meant to be elegant, trendy, and simplistic to match the style of the clothes being presented. Viewers are drawn in with an interest in minimalism and luxury fashion, or want to learn more about it. The ripped paper textures can be seen throughout all the pages to create a visual tone and are purposely designed being visual interest to the images. The selection of imagery, from the clothing to the model and their expressions, was meticulously curated to ensure harmony and coherence, effectively tying all elements together.
Responsive Design
Transforming the magazine spreads from a two-page layout to a single-page and continuous scroll format presented another challenge, as adjustments were required to accommodate sizing variations and consider how the viewer would engage with the page. With layout grid and margins, it made it easier to resize all the elements for each device.
What are the Main Issues?
The main difficulty with this project was finding a way to adjust the responsive design per device while still maintaining the concept and the design to show through. Specifically, I found that starting out on a bigger screen and sizing down was much harder since there was more information and elements needed to fit on a much smaller screen.
Overall, I learned the importance of establishing a grid early on and the impact of font pairings that can affect your concept and overall brand identity. I found that this was necessary to maintain because I needed to demonstrate the clean and modern look of the Luxe Magazine brand throughout the magazine.
What are the Key Takeaways?
01. Experimenting with different colour palettes
I would want to experiment more with a wider range of colour palettes. Initially, my idea was to incorporate an aspect of purple into the magazine because of the colour purple's association with luxury. Although, I would've used it as an accent colour, I also didn't want to take away from the content itself by using too much of such a contrasting colour.
02. Look into element choices with considerations for responsive design
In the future, I would look more into simplifying element choices in relation to responsive design for each device beforehand to help ease the process of making the design responsive.
03. Design choices are heavily influenced by the audience
I find that majority of the design decisions are heavily shaped by the target audience, ranging from their interests to personality. This influence extends across various aspects such as layout, colour schemes, imagery selection, and overall aesthetic appeal.