GRAP5060 | Project 1: The Fundamental Principles of Layout | Exercise 2

Contrast and Negative Space

Our second task involved exploiting the principles of contrast and negative space to create two double-page spread layouts (a 'splash' page and 'turn' page) for a magazine, using the assets we were given. We also had to employ the principles we learnt last week on alignment and hierarchy. 

I started by doing a little research online for inspiring magazine layouts. I then also went straight to the source and looked in some of my old magazines I had at home, paying close attention to how they used negative space to enhance the other areas of the design as well as how they incorporated the images.
​After this I went ahead a quickly laid out a few thumbnails to use as a reference for when I jumped onto the computer, thinking about how I could attract attention with splash pages and contain more content on the turn pages whilst considering white space.

I then began recreating some of my thumbnails onto a document in Indesign, using the grids we learnt to use in the previous task. To begin with I focused more on layout and alignment. After getting some feedback I then reworked this design, changing the colours so there weren't as harsh, changing some alignments, as well as adding pull quotes and a drop cap to make it more interesting. 

For my second design I find a few of my own images so that I could make the colour scheme more consistent. For the splash page I took it a step further making the image the most prominent element on the page, and tried to be a little more dynamic with the layout of body copy. For the turn page I regularly used the text wrap feature so that I could make the page flow more and be a little more interesting then just straight up and down columns.