Critique This (Student) Magazine Spread

That thing about the smile was just an off-hand comment. LOL!

And maybe what you say is true about doing a quick read of the headers giving you a gist of the demographic, tone, content of a piece…but…

There are instances where actually reading the content is essential. All of the historical museums I work on, the design is so integral to the content that if there is any kind of disconnect, it brings the veracity of the whole thing into question.

That bee thing someone posted in a different thread, if someone who knew something about bees saw that error, they might question anything else the handout, or the entire organization, has to say.

On the subject of this mag spread,

I remember this assignment in design class. Even back then we were never given instruction in the various aspects of a page layout. No lecture on bleeds or safeties or gutters or spine creep or drop caps or margins or title/head/body/caption text or…etc. I’m not sure it ever came up in critique or grading either. The critique for that project is a missing memory actually. It was probably one of those where half the class wasn’t done so it got moved off a week and I lost interest.

Anyway, without some prior instruction, expecting students to “just do” a magazine spread is kinda crazy. And if some prior instruction went with this, either it was inadequate, or it was ignored. I’m not sure which is worse. But even still, it only takes a half ounce of common sense to actually go look at a magazine or six, and maybe another half ounce to wonder why the pages are set up the way they are and maybe try to figure out what that “why” may be.

Having a Pocket Pal Graphic Arts Production book does wonders too (you want the newest edition you can find, some are old and more outdated.)

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Sorry. I don’t get the point at all.

Indeed - maybe I’m just being too general in saying not reading it is not necessary.

Typically, you’re handed the copy and the images they want included and you don’t have to read or understand anything.

That and having brand guidelines to go by and a bank of images for a library help.

Going from scratch - I’d be more interested talking to the people who wrote the piece to understand the design they want and what’s important.

I’d never go blue background with white text… and certainly not serif fonts.

I think if the op switched to a Sans Serif medium font (to counter printing issues) and evened up columns and page margins - it would look a lot nicer.

And ditch the entire different shades of black. It looks wrong.

The different shades of black is probably due to not knowing the difference between K black and Registration black and how they should and shouldn’t be used (not to mention Rich black, RGB black and CMYK conversions of RGB black.)

I hate any text on a color background other than black text in magazines. I took a safety class recently where the handout book had all the important chapter points as pull quotes using white skinny-ass sans serif text on lemon yellow boxes. Half the class couldn’t read them, not just us old fogies either. I’m sure the designer thought it was “cool” though.

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Damn, reading this really drove home how different my work is, authoring technical materials. It’s different in my case fundamentally because I’m mostly writing it too, but the layout logic is entirely driven by the content and context. I simply couldn’t formulate and implement hierarchy and reading order effectively without fully understanding the content, it’s objectives, and how it’s intended to be received and utilized. Sometimes I’ll even call sidebar meetings with engineers just to discuss something in a conceptual sense to deepen my understanding of it so I (the document) can better impart same.

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Sure - there are exceptions. I wouldn’t know where to start on designing a technical manual, I’d be driven by the content supplied. Text - image - text text - diagram - charts etc.

Usually it’s all supplied - different if you’re writing it too though. You’d have to know the context for a technical manual.

I may have been too broad - and this is slightly out of context now - as I was only referring to the ability of the smile in regards to the layout - I only simply meant that you can derive a layout from the images and text supplied without understanding and reading them and understanding them.

I used to have to draw all my concept layouts first, from pictures supplied on printed photo paper, and text.

Cut and paste the text and generate a general layout that works for the content supplied.

There is more than one way obviously.

@Smurf2, we seemingly have different styles of working. Perhaps it’s because the work we do is so different from one another’s.

The majority of my career has been involved with magazine and newspaper design. All that work has been directed toward engaging the target audience on both visual and emotional levels in an effort to pull that audience into the written stories.

My role has always been to bring a visual life to the feature stories being told in ways that reach out to potential readers and engages them. It’s been my job to direct everything from the headlines to the pullout quotes to the colors used to most everything else on the pages in ways that provide the perfect setting and tone in which the story can be told.

There’s no way I can do that without reading the story. This involves more than just skimming through it. Often it requires really familiarizing myself with the subject beyond the story itself. More often than not, it also means discussing the story with the writer to make sure that my interpretation of the story’s mood and sense of place matches up with and complements her own.

You mentioned a veterinary product as an example. I suspect most of what I wrote above is irrelevant when the primary concern is how best to convey technical information to a consumer on how to use the product to treat a flea and tick problem. Similarly, when laying out the news and interior pages of a newspaper, the main objective is to just make everything fit in compliance with the overall style guidelines and to get it done on deadline.

Each kind of design problem is different and, I think, requires an approach that’s appropriate for the problem at hand.

However, in the situation of designing a consumer magazine layout focused on telling a fascinating story about our prehistoric human relatives, the very first thing I would do is read the story and study the subject matter.

As I said many times, there’s more than one way obviously.

I still think this has been taken way out of context.

I think you’re right. It’s veered off onto a tangent that’s just sort of thought-provoking and interesting to explore. I’m glad you brought it up.

I think both you and I agree on how these kinds of things lie at the root of a big problem with many formal design programs.

When I was in design school, we had similar design assignments. None of those problems focused on practical considerations or production issues. It was almost always about designing the coolest layouts that met with the approval of the instructor who, as often as not, had little practical experience designing the very things he was instructing his students on how to design.

I have mixed feelings on how big of a problem this is. I think schools should concentrate more on practical matters, but I’m unsure how far they should move in this direction and whether or not it can and should be done concurrently with learning the principles of design and getting a good grip on more aesthetic matters.

Perhaps learning about safeties, dot gain, spine creep, and other professional essentials are things that should come after the student has some experience in designing layouts where those technical issues have more immediate relevance and meaning.

Even so, I’m pretty sure that much has to do with the instructors often not being entirely familiar with these issues themselves. But maybe this is similar to high school science teachers not really being professional scientists. Instead, they’re professional educators with enough knowledge about science to teach secondary-level education students the basics. In other words, their primary skill is teaching, not science.

In university design programs, perhaps these more practical matters are mostly left to be learned on the job, through experience in working with more experienced professionals instead of professional teachers.

In research universities, it’s the graduate programs in STEM fields, where students are expected to work directly with professional scientists, engineer and researchers to gain this kind of professional knowledge. Nothing like this approach exists in graphic design graduate programs. Instead, it’s typically more of the same — academic detachment from the real world and focusing more on aesthetic and artistic coolness.

If I were designing a design graduate program, I think I’d staff the faculty almost entirely with skilled, experienced professional designers coming from various backgrounds. I don’t see that happening, though. For that matter, I pessimistically see the field increasingly being dumbed down even further by the proliferation of self-directed online classes churning out students who are largely unprepared for much of anything.

Now I’ve really veered off-topic — sorry, Dr.Dude.

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We could rock the GDF school of design!
LOL

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Ack, we all knew what you meant, and you weren’t wrong. I’m sorry if my post came off as disagreement. It was really just an observation.

Ah it’s cool no worries. My fault for being too broad.

I’m saying that I have many physical copies of books but maybe one magazines at home right now. It’s kind of hard to find an actual print copy magazine that I own.

Can you get to a shop and take a look through the magazine racks?

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If you are somewhat restricted in mobility, then I apologize for my insensitivity. If not, @Smurf2 offered a great solution.

I come from medical publishing, I never read the books!

Get yourself to the library!! You can look at magazines there and even borrow books about magazine layout. Further to that, our library here offers free access to LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) too.

What type of course is this that you’re taking that doesn’t give you any rules or guidelines for designing magazine spreads?

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A lot of libraries are closed right now. Heck, even the doctor’s office doesn’t have magazines right now either. But even online magazines have grids and rules you can see.
Here I’ll give you one. It’s not the best design on the planet. Not even close. But you can find your own. Click the Read Online button.
https://graphics-pro.com/magazine/