Magazine Design | Mao

Design Strategy

I am a big fanatic of photography blogs. One of which I stumbled across over the last couple months is that of French photographer, Ruben Brulat. His pictures, which are all self-portraits display himself nude in a myriad of exotic environments. With intriguing interest, I decided to feature Brulat and his photography through his collection of works in addition to an exclusive interview. However, I wanted this magazine to be geared more toward arts and French culture rather than just photography; hence the name “Francophile” was born. My cell lines also reference other articles that touch of such some of the issues you might find if this were a real magazine.


Typefaces

Overall I used a total of four typefaces: Helvetica Neue LT Std, BorisBlackBloxx, Futura Std, and Trade Gothic. The cover’s nameplate as well as headline of first spread is in BorisBlackBloxx (Regular and Dirty). I believe this novelty font is used appropriately in context with the “wow spread” picture, and is also displayed consistently throughout my sidebar headers as well as folios. For the body font, I wanted a clean modern sans-serif typeface. For the sake of readability, I chose Helvetica at 55 Roman. To emphasize Ruben Brulat’s name, I chose to work with two variations of Futura (Book and Heavy). My deck head, byline, captions and side bar also incorporate this typeface. While my entire spread is in a sans serif font, there is still contrast between the three fonts used (Helvetica, BorisBlackBloxx, Futura). Lastly, I chose Trade Gothic for my magazine coverlines. I like the bold and condensed variation of this font a lot better than Helvetica, which I found had too large counters. Trade Gothic correlated well with my nameplate font (BorisBlackBloxx), offering very solid and sturdy headlines.


Color

Throughout my spreads I wanted a consistent color scheme with my type and background color. I chose a gold pantone for my headline type (Pantone 8385 C), which I used for my pull quote and background of my third spread. The red color (C= 35, M= 100, Y= 100, K=18) which I fond very appealing is used in my namplate, folio, and background of my side bar.


Images and Story


All of Brulat’s photos were gathered from his website: www.rubenbrulat.com
Story by Callie Rice also from website under “Read”.
Actual interview was gathered through email.


All original photo sizes: 1024px × 819px