Some of you might have seen my previous post about a cover design for a magazine i'm designing for my final senior project.
Here's an inside page (dont pay attention to the text as of yet...we have the story but haven't input it all in). The article is on the guy in the picture, a leader for an elctronic underground music/production crew. Let me know what you guys think of the artwork..etc. etc.
thx.
http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a227/atijerina/AudiotekDJPro.jpg
I really like the color scheme of the page (I personally love using brown for magazine text) and the wide bars at the top and near the bottom of the page really work for me. I thought at first the word sitting on the bottom rule was just "MEN" not "OMEN" because the "O" kind of disappears into the photo. Is there some way you can make it stand out a bit more? Maybe just a half point outline in a darker shade.
It feels to me like there needs to be some sort of headline/quote/subhead at the top of the page. It's fine to have the primary head on the bottom like that, but without something at the top, it looks like it's the second page of the article or something and comes across very bottom heavy. You might try just setting your lead in a bolder, larger font the full width of the page. It'd only be about two or three lines and would allow for about the same amount of text to stay on the page.
The "W" in your lead seems a bit on the big side. To me, it creates trapped white space that doesn't really add much to the visual appeal of the page. Also, the text in the lead is left aligned instead of justified. Is that intentional? (I know you said the text is dummy text, but don't know if this was intended or not.) It would probably be just as eye-catching and maybe a little more appealing at about 2/3 or 1/2 of the current X-height. That would also keep you from having the word "Without" by itself on the line (think about the widows & orphans rule).
Justified text can be really tricky. If you end up with a lot of lines where the words look really spaced out or compressed, then try either using a smaller font (probably not in this case) or increase the column width. Have you tried it with a three-column layout? If you absolutely can't change column width or text size, you can use hyphenation to even things out in places.
Something that always makes me give up reading a magazine article is huge uninterupted blocks of text. Even if it's a well-written story, people can lose interest easily (most people don't sit down to read a mag cover to cover; you're by the pool, waiting for the metro, etc. so there are lots of distractions). A great way to keep the readers going is pull quotes. Pull out two or three of the best lines of prose or best quotes from the subject and break up those big blocks. Not only will they help grab readers' eyes as they thumb through the mag, they give little previews of the content as an additional incentive to read the story. (Also a good way to stretch a skimpy story to fill the space.) Another way to break up those big text blocks is to divide the story into sections and give them catchy one-line section subheads. (Better for when you're tight on space).
My comments are coming from a primarily newspaper feature background rather than much magazine experience, so I'm used to a reader with a somewhat shorter attention span, but a lot of the same principles apply. Keep up the good work and good luck on your final.
-pd