Magazine Competition Design

Last year I entered a magazine competition hosted by "Yes I'm a Designer". The brief was to Design a series of magazine article spreads for a chosen celebrity, aimed towards a target audience aged 21+. Details to include were: * Minimum 2 pages (spread) * Optional length: 2-3 spreads * Use of text wrap * Include fun creative Typography * Use decorative drop cap - (optional) * Use a mixture of Photos or Illustrations/icons * Include Header - Artist Name * Include sub-copy - this can be quote etc * The body copy can be in any language (English is preferred for review purposes) or optionally it can also be Lorem Ipsum placeholder text.

The challenge with this project was creating layouts with no context from any copy. I decided to use ChatGPT to help me draft some article ideas that I thought would suit my chosen subject. This helped tremendously. I always think you get far better designs when you have challenges to solve from copy. For instance, the numbered points on my second spread and where they came in the text. I was kind to myself too though, using Chat GPT to help me reduce pull quote sizes to better suit the layout etc, which I'm not always able to do in my day job.

I chose David Attenborough as my subject because I was itching to try out something where I could use organic nature elements in an editorial design. I then used AI tools like generative fill and expand to extend images (on spreads 1, 2 and 4) to better fit the pages and to improve the quality of the images I borrowed from Google of Sir Attenborough. AI tools like Adobe Firefly were useful for generating the tree roots image and soil texture (spread 3) and to create a very large tree image for spread 2. I then added David Attenborough in from a separate image and used neural filters in Photoshop to help him match the space around him.

2024

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