Production Planning
I had previous yet different thoughts for this project. I even had an idea to illustrate everything- But this time, I'll plan ahead to do something much simpler than drawing out everything : Which is why I chose the family genre specifically.
So..Something Like This
THE CONVENTIONS OF FAMILY MAGAZINE : They usually talk about school, education, family activities and health advice. I will use these conventions throughout my magazine cover and possibly content! Getting creative with the cover, contents page and double page spread, with the right colours as well. (Adding some entertainment!)
Sketch Of Magazine Cover
MASTHEAD :
I have gotten "Loved Home" in mind. It's based on the phrase "Home Sweet Home", but shorter! I feel like it can match with what my genre is.
COVER LINES:
They must be as positive as the Masthead! Which includes quotes to give yourself determination running a family. They're not about drama, but all about fun and seriousness of being cheerful for the reader.
SELLING LINE :
I don't think we need a whole lot of these,
especially seeing the format.
COVER LINE BUT ADVICE :
To boost up/help the reader's knowledge related to something!.
POSITIVE QUOTE :
Once again, it is to make the reader feel some sort of determination. (Well..more like a mood booster.)
MODELS :
I will add my mother and baby brother as the two models!
This is a sketch created on my phone (So as the rest of the sketches I will be showing.), and the colour scheme for this is the use of blues and greens with a white background. Some specific parts like that towards the models' outfits, and texts should compliment the colour of the background and the palette of neutral and cool colours!
Sketch of contents Page
BIG PICTURE :
This may be a photo of one of my family members. Encouraging a topic which could be important for the magazine itself.
PAGE NUMBERS :
This part tells the section of normal family things (Activities, news about families, and others...)
DIFFERENT SECTIONS :
Also page numbers BUT they're separated into specific areas.
I'm thinking about making this page a warmer tone to it. Maybe some orange and yellows. Possibly reds, but let's just see! I have decided to take this section as simple as possible.
Sketch of Double Page Spread
TOPIC :
I will bring up something about education (probably with entertainment) based on the person being "interviewed".
NAME OF PERSON :
The name of the interviewee
BOOSTED QUESTIONS ;
Inspired by the double page spread that I found, these are useful to spark up the interview and reading!
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ABOUT TOPIC ;
It is the interview itself. What was answered, explained and something inspirational.
ABOUT TOPIC ;
It is the interview itself. What was answered, explained and something inspirational.
This part may be the most complex. I may have to reflect on what education is and from the knowledge about teachers, and that can be interesting!
"Oh Shoot..The Plan!"
25th February 2022
(Shooting magazine cover)
I wanted to do this a few days earlier and I really needed to feel more comfortable into asking my parents if they wanted to help out with my magazine.
Though in this time they were not able to throughout school days as they had other things to do (including going somewhere outside home even after 2pm) thia month.
On this day I ended up asking my mum first about it since there was no school at the time. She said she does not mind doing it with me and my baby brother got excited for the photo. The location for this session is downstairs indoors.
We took these photos in the afternoon, plus my baby brother may get hyper around the time so ti was easier to take photos with him in it.
I did not really specify what she should wear but traditional clothes (Baju Kurung) plus my baby brother matching with a simple blue raya shirt too (his Baju Cara Melayu).
Actually, my idea was red themed because red is usually associated with love and is a strong colour, but knowing it does not fully matter as long as they both matched...I wanted to them to try out a different colour so we went for blue! My mum is really good with colour combos so I was a little surprised when she wore a dark pinked shawl to get along with her teal with pink and purple flowered themed clothing.
Related to their positioning,
my mum suggested me to sit on a part of the sofa to feel much more ease when lifting my baby brother for the shooting of the cover. Afterwards, we ended up testing different poses while taking different photos in the same place.
There are adjustments I might explain this a bit in more detail in my critical reflection
26th february 2022
(...About the Content page uh-)
While doing my art folio, I had another plan in mind for my content page. (This may be a little short writing since there was not really much shooting for this section, but I will say that I have ideas relating to the "content" and texts for this section of the magazine- I will talk about it during the editing session).
This is mainly focused on the reference I drew last time above this section of the website!
It does not sound like a bad idea; however, I might reuse an old photo of mine from when I was a kid for the page. The reason why I described this plan with "however" is because on this day I wasn't sure if this will be as aesthetically pleasing, even though it's just the page full of content for the entire magazine. Once again, checked my draft/sketch for what this page is supposed to look like, I did expect to make it simple but nice at the same time!! I did have other ideas for this
With the loss of time that I have thanks to juggling it with the first art folio I have been working on, but I digressed related to the thoughts of timing and just went on with the plan.
Here is the old photo I am going to use, as you can tell it's too dark, so maybe an increase in exposure / brightness will do the trick after shooting the next :
27th february 2022
(Shooting double page spread)
Since this was on a Sunday,
I have decided to feel comfortable enough to ask my dad to take some shots for my double page spread.
As I mentioned before, my parents were not available at the time so I had to look for other alternative ideas doing this...but at this time I felt like I should at least try to ask. I have decided to take a medium long shot for his part to focus more on the surrounding he is in.
Relating to the detail of my dad's posture, he suggested me to let him just hold the books simply without being overly focused on doing exactly like the draft. The reason is to make him look more formal! I have decided to take a medium long shot for his part to focus more on the surrounding he is in too.
About the surroundings,
we took this downstairs (bottom floored) indoors. The prop behind my dad is this giant patterned wall we have, and since then I found it useful aesthetically.
The reason why they're taken at the same place with same posture is because he had to teach other students at the time (we took these photos before his students came).
The only different is the orientation while photo-shooting. The light my dad set behind me did not seem as effective but there's supposedly a fronted light source.
It was also silly that we both did not notice the books he held were upside down until after two screenshots.
So here are the photos :
The two shots before we noticed the books were upside down
Two other shots after noticing the books were upside down
Vertically taken
Horizontally taken
"Editing Days"
27th february 2022
(Editing magazine cover)
I got myself thinking..."Well, would it be more interesting if I tried Photoshop on the laptop at least once for the project??". So indeed I did, but oh boy the lag was so terrible. For this bit I tried using a sample photo of my two bird plushies. Here is some information about it though:
Looking up the ratio related to how big a magazine...well, I looked up "Magazine cover size"-- It appears to be about the size from the screenshot, which I can assume, seem slightly wider and taller than a normal sized A4 paper. I managed to screenshot the specific numbers though..I've put the screenshot large in size in case if it's hard to read.
Honestly, it was odd to do this on the phone I thought- Because at first I did not actually believe that I had the potential to do this again just as similar as my pulmonary exercise.
I did not regret my decision.
However...I had to edit all of them in the same device since it may lag doing it on my laptop again. I may have limited tools to create a properly nice design for a magazine, but at the same time I believed in myself. For this section it will be shown how I updated the cover on the phone.
Starting off with the change of device:
INSERTING THE IMAGE :
With some of the family covers I have Googled and used as inspiration, I went for the simple background route for it!
I had other ideas which may take more effort to go for...taking pics outside the house at noon, in the living room...etc.- But I knew I could not top notch do it since there would be objects conflict the perspective which may lead to more shots being awkward.
Anyways,
I coverted the canvas on the phone, referred to the other screenshot from Photoshop saying it is WIDTH 213 mm x HEIGHT 276 mm to 2935 x 3180.
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This is how I ended up doing it.
Honestly I kept on thinking about it all day how this should be done, then when I finally came up with an idea to use my phone...it seems difficult, but worth doing it again.
As usual, I started of by viewing the entire photo.
I chose this one specific photo because both of their happy calming expressions looking at the camera (which is mostly my target) are adoring and formal at the same time!
Once the choice of which photo is settled, I decided to insert the texts first instead of editing the photo of the cover..
Here are what the texts look like for the day.
I have not adjusted the rest of the text at this time, but I did choose to do the Masthead first.
I was not really comfortable seeing all of the words overlapping and unedited in this stage, but I was determined to do so, plus what I have in mind for the day.
Since the Masthead was overlapping with my mother's head, I have decided to edit the words of the Masthead out by slightly erasing it to make the subject matters / models of the cover pop up better, and here is what font the Masthead is and the process of editing it out :
Section : Masthead
Font name : Futura Bold
Colour used : Dark grey for text, black for outline.
Additional comment : Size 420 on the canvas. I am not actually sure what the specific measurements are but it does require how big or small the texts is.
I believe having a bold text suit the masthead to get the reader's attention, and it looks more bubbly with the rounder font. The dark colours compliment the white background.
Once it was confirmed that this is the font of the Masthead I am going for with the finished product, I felt relieved that it does because it was actually how I wanted it to be.
Proceeding the process, I duplicated the text layer to fixate with the editing for the Masthead. I deleted the purple texts on the duplicated layer, left with the Masthead text itself. Afterwards, I went on with transforming the text to Rasterise it. (Converting a vector image (a mathematically defined image of points and curves) to a raster image (a picture composed of discrete pixels...which in this case, texts)
After some erasing on my mum's head, we get this as a result!
28th february 2022
(Editing magazine cover)
I may have to show less detail (screenshots) for this section due to how simple I want for this to be..and so I don't have to explain too much about everything I do for now.
Anyway, I ended up not putting in more lines and just went for simpler solutions due to the limited of time I have. My mood is just not bugging well today, and I don't know if it will from this moment on. Heartbreak and all of that. But yeah--
Talking about what I have adjusted to make the cover look this way,
I did not really add anymore lines, I tweaked the colours and all of that- Pink overlay because it gives a more flowery vibe to the cover.
I think I've explained enough.
Thanks to my phone not being able to screenshot the progress of my content page due to storage problems... I can only show the finished product of it. I'll briefly explain what I did though.
So after I finished my magazine cover,
I straight away did my contents page, which is probably the least creative one in this project because I only have the idea of the arrangements of the texts, but not really the tone of the page, and how the designing overall would look.
As I said before, I did want to go for the simplistic style for this page. Thinking about it now, my intention to do it simply too is to make the page for an informational purpose, and not fully make it as aesthetic as the other two sections of the magazine.
Palette of the content page includes purple, yellow, and red-- But they're all pastel. I used a Chalked font for this (looks like Comic Sans but I guess it is slightly different). I want it to look round as well, and some font that is easy enough to read.
I've inserted what a family is, separated sections of education and entertainment for the rest- I could not really go further with the time I have but this is my attempt on making it look simple but cute and informational to see.
1st March 2022
(Editing Double Page Spread)
After a few days of focusing on my Art subject, I have grown demotivated doing this magazine component, yet at the same time I have ended up pushing myself and update the progress of editing.
The content of this section is needed by my dad.
Basically, the interview needed my dad to answer school related questions.
About these screenshots at the bottom of this text, here are the questions I jotted about the (I copy-pasted the questions to my dad through messaging
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These questions are most open ended, which is for a more specific and personal answer.
Before rearranging the answers from my dad, I decided to go straight onto my phone and do the layout of the double page spread.
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So first of all,
I chose the one shot where my dad's legs are slightly showing. Personally, I found that pic the best one because his stance was more noticeable than without his legs slightly showing.
I duplicated the canvas of the Magazine Cover into another file and turned it around 90 degrees to make it seem landscape.
As expected, he is supposed to fill half of the canvas like this!
Afterwards,
I gave the left line of the photo a blurry fade by deleting a bit of it with the eraser airbrush plus the ruler tool in Ibis!
I know this may go against the references, but this made up idea seems cool, and it looks nice in a way.
Now that inserting the photo is done and set,
I thought about the texts to insert in the canvas,
of course there is a lot of info about it. The questions from above were all answered by my dad truthfully!
Close-up Of The Tool
2nd March 2022
(Editing Double Page Spread part two)
With further detail of the texts,
I simply set a specific font called "Copperplate Bold". I have gotten mixed feels that I may change or add another type of font for the text, but this was a temporary style used since my dad had not answered the interviewed questions.
Close-up Of The Font + What It Looks Like
An hour after,
I have copy pasted the texts of questions from my notes app on my phone to Ibis in the canvas itself.
It took about a few minutes to sort these out arranged.
Me and my dad sent texts to each other through WhatsApp because it was a way to provide the texts for the double page spread straight away. It was an effective method honestly, and his words are actually inspiring to read.
Moving on, I wasn't really sure what fonts should I go for with most of the texts here (The paragraphs of the interview especially) until a random thought sparked.
I was thinking of a more "textbook" type of feel to it. (They usually have this "Times New Roman" type of font...if that makes sense-) so I chose the fonts that have that vibe of course. Here are the different sections purely with it :
Section : The Answers for the boosted questions.
Font name : Cochin Bold
Colour of words : Black
Additional comment : The text is about 40 in size for the canvas. Each paragraph has one different question about the interviewee.
Section : The Whole interview.
Font name : Cochin
Colour used : Black
Additional comment : The text is about 40-41 in size for the canvas. These paragraphs are rewritten from my notes app and into the editing app. It took some time to paste everything, and it seem like one story of an interview. It was fun though!
Section : The headlines and subject matters about the interview
Font name : Copperplate Bold
Colour used : Red
Additional comment : There are various sizes used here. They were simply put on top, and I had to carefully arranging them and then draw out the lines to separate each part of the section. The reason why I chose red is because it catches the attention of the reader to know where the content on that page starts.
Section : The headlines and subject matters about the interview
Font name : Copperplate Bold
Colour used : White with Black Outline
Additional comment : This text is 52 in size. I do not really have a lot to say about the quote of his, but I enjoy knowing that loving something does feel more whole doing it (my understanding of the quote).
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Section : The headlines and subject matters about the page.
Font name : DIN Alternate Bold
Colour used : White for one text, Red with Blue outlines for the other.
Additional comment : They are more to informational texts about this specific page. I gave these two parts of the text a completely different font because I tried to convey that these two are not as important as the rest, but still for attentiveness of where the spot in the magazine is.
Once all of that is done, plus additional lines to make it seem neater, the finished product looks like this! :
