Just a quick reminder: my magazine is targeted towards high school students grades 11–12.
I decided to edit my department spreads because I felt they were a little too busy and not keeping with the clean consistency of white–space in the rest of the spreads. I still need to download a few photos from Thinkstock so there might be a few pixelated/burry ones in the drafts.
Are the Feature articles too similar?
Tonia - the negative space on your pages is very successful when it is used to counter-balance large images (especially when they are silhouetted). This is a good approach for this age... although it is very important that you create enough "interest" on the pages to hold the student's attention. Some thoughts:
ReplyDeleteCover - the back cover actually holds more elements in great relationship with each other than the cover does. This is the most important page in the mag... so I encourage you to return to it and design a more involved, exciting and provocative cover. Add bolder color? Texture? Larger masthead? Taglines to entice the reader into the mag?
Department article on 4/5 needs to appear like it's 1 article, and not 2 small features. Do you need a department icon? "Fun Facts" could easily serve as the department title, it just needs to be developed a bit more. The blue jagged shape at top of page 4 seems to end abruptly at the gutter. Why not allow this shape to extend onto the right page, helping to unify the 2 pages.
Colors of the type in the ad on page 9 need to revisited. The 2 blues on the spread are in opposition to each other. Make sure the target audience for this ad is your high school students. This seems a bit calm for them... humor, cleverness, irony are all approaches that might be more successful. Typography could help this... since the word "Killer" is here... how can you be more expressive with it?
The color palette is pretty limited for your high school students... it's beautiful, but is the lack of color contrast removing all excitement from the pages? You have managed to design a magazine that encourages students to EAT BUGS, and yet you've done it in a very very soft voice - a whisper almost. This audience responds to a bit louder voice, in my opinion (and all the market research done to date).
I suggest you add to your palette, so that each article is a bit different from the last... and we don't see that one shade of blue quite so often. I'm not asking you to pull in the whole color wheel... but it's important that the pages speak to your audience in a bit more active way. Especially the cover.
Very buggy jaja but I would work on the cover a little more keep in mind this is what will drive your audience to pick up the magazine
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