AICE MEDIA STUDIES : Magazine Research/ Inspiration

I drew inspiration from these magazines as Essence magazine has an excellent usage of colors and font types that create an appealing, but simple magazine cover.

Other than the eye popping hues of blues and bright colors, the font styles and text placements caught my eye. This issue made Zendaya the main focus of the page where as the masthead, taglines, etc, fall second to the eyes, which I found was an interesting change of pace. The bright yellow and pink color used for the taglines are n effective tools used to draw attention to the words on the side of the page, and mixture of basic, yet elegant font styles made the words easy to read.. This issue has a good balance of large and small texts with a nice mixture of bolded and thin fonts, which creates a formal, but elegant look that I like. The medium to large spacing between each text box prevents the texts from being overcrowded and increases readability. The blend of numbers, script, and icons (plus signs & exclamation mark) creates a rich display of information and adds a pop of variety to the page. I will keep these observations and conventions in minds as I formulate my taglines. Although the masthead is in an interesting and appropriate position and sizing on this cover I am not to fond of its placement and sizing for my own publication.

Since my model is wearing different shades of pink I had difficulty finding a background that would be complementing to her entire look instead of distracting or visually overwhelming. Upon further research I stumbled upon this issue with Halima Aden, whose pink appearance was similar to that of my model. I found the pink on pink background absolutely stunning and a brilliant use of monochromatic colors. This motivated me to play around with different shades of pink. As you can see below some were hits and others were misses, but in the end I decided to use the second color.